Dark Skies
On another note, it would have been nice if Stewart could have come up with some of his own ideas for his film. A lot of his images seem to have been lifted whole from other thrillers, past or recent. I don't expect every movie I see to be wholly original. But, when the movie starts turning into a game of "spot which movie the film is currently imitating", it becomes distracting. Off the top of my head, I note that Stewart has drawn "inspiration" from films such as Poltergeist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, in particular, seems to be a big influence here), Paranormal Activity, Signs, and even Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. That's not to say he doesn't have some of his own good ideas thrown in here and there. I liked his use of overhead shots, which seem to suggest someone or something ominous is watching the action from above. But on the whole, he fails to bring his own unique vision to his own story, and instead cobbles together a bunch of images and ideas from movies he's seen over the years.
Like a lot of the films he's trying to emulate, the action is set in a seemingly-normal suburb. Here, we meet the Barrett family. Dad Daniel (Josh Hamilton) is an unemployed architect, desperately trying to get back in the game after being laid off months ago. Mom Lacy (Keri Russell) now has a lot of pressure, being the only one working. Things aren't going so great for her at work, either. She's a realtor, struggling to unload an outdated old house she's been stuck with selling. They have two kids - alienated 13-year-old Jesse (Dakota Goyo) and youngest son Sam (Kadan Rockett), who likes to listen to the scary stories his brother tells him over their walkie-talkies late at night. The trouble for the family begins when it appears that someone is sneaking into their home late at night, and pulling pranks, such as emptying all the food from the fridge, or stealing all the pictures from photo frames in the living room.
The police chalk it up to one of the kids playing a trick. When Lacy asks little Sam if he knows anything, he keeps on talking about someone called the "Sandman" who visits his room every night and talks to him. Somehow, despite their established cash problems, Daniel is able to rig up an elaborate home video security system that allows him to monitor every room in the house while they're asleep. That's when the ominous signs start building up. The cameras seem to go all wonky at certain times of the night. Sam starts sleepwalking, with no memory of what happened. Daniel and Lacy start suffering blackouts, and exhibiting strange behavior that they can't explain. Their house is the target of three different flocks of birds, who seemingly all go crashing into the house at once. Strange marks and bruises begin to appear on both of the childrens' bodies, leading the neighbors to suspect that Daniel and Lacy are abusing them.
All of this certainly sounds interesting, but its all paced so poorly, it never generates the tension that it should. There is also a frustrating lack of answers, at least until the third act, when a walking plot exposition device enters the movie, in the form of an alien expert played by J.K. Simmons. Seeing him appear, my interest immediately shot up. Simmons is a wonderful actor who can liven up just about any film he's in, but he's not given a character to play here. He simply shows up to explain the plot to Daniel and Lacy, and to us, then disappears. You don't put an actor as valuable as Simmons in your movie, and basically use him as the Narrator. Once he exits, we get a very confusing climax, and the movie ends with one of those scenes that's supposed to make us realize how clever it was for fooling us, but by that point, we just don't care.
Dark Skies has been competently made, despite its obvious meager budget. Even the performances are better than this material deserves, especially Keri Russell, who makes a convincing mother trying to protect her family from invisible forces that she doesn't quite understand. It just never seems to build to anything in particular. Stewart's script and direction piles on the atmosphere and potentially creepy moments, but most of them have no pay off. As the odd occurrences build up within the Barrett home, we keep on waiting for the pace to pick up, but it strangely never does. It's cautious, laid back, and kind of tedious. We don't become invested with the characters or the strange things happening around them. And since things never seem to build, we start to expect a disappointing payoff when the film starts to lead up to something, which the movie sadly obliges.
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This "inspired by a true story" film centers on Jon Matthews (Johnson), an everyman who owns a successful trucking company. His ordinary life comes to a sudden halt when his teenage son from his first marriage (Rafi Gavron) is arrested in a sting set up by the Drug Enforcement Administration. It turns out the kid reluctantly agreed to hold onto a package of Ecstasy for a friend. What he did not realize is that the friend had set him up as part of his own plea bargain. Jon's son is being threatened with a 10 year minimum jail sentence, unless he himself can make a similar bargain, and point out some drug dealers. The problem is Jon's son was only a casual user, and doesn't know anyone else in the drug game, except for the friend who used him. If he refuses to cooperate, his sentence could be pushed up to 30.
At first, Jon is angered at what his son did, and feels that he should serve the time. But when he begins to visit the kid at prison, and sees that he is being abused by the other prisoners, he realizes that he has to take matters into his own hands in order to get his son a shorter sentence. He goes to the local U.S. Attorney, Joanne Keeghan (Susan Sarandon) in order to set up some kind of deal. He offers to go undercover and help catch some of the local drug dealers if it will mean his son gets a reduced prison sentence. Joanne is against the idea, but Jon goes against her wishes, and hooks up with one of his employees (Jon Bernthal) with a criminal history to get him introduced to a local drug dealer (Michael Kenneth Williams). When it turns out that the dealer may have ties to one of the biggest drug kingpins in Mexico, Joanne suddenly becomes interested in Jon's plan. If he cooperates with police to bring down the kingpin, she will give his son an early release.
Snitch largely works as a dramatic thriller, where both Jon and his son are being used by the U.S. Attorney, who is planning a run for Congress in the near future, and is really only concerned with catching the drug kingpin in order to advance her career. She knows that Jon will do anything to get his son free, and so she manipulates him into going deep into dangerous situations. The movie probably would have worked better if it had just focused on that angle, but instead, the movie introduces a lot of side characters - probably way too many more than a film like this needs. We have Jon's ex-wife, his current wife, and his young daughter from his current marriage. Not only that, but the employee that he teams up with to bring down the drug cartel has a wife and son of his own, as well as his own backstory. Everybody seems to be vying for our attention, pulling us away from the central father and son story, which works well enough on its own.
And it is Dwayne Johnson who largely makes this movie works. He comes across as being very sympathetic and actually somewhat fearful the deeper he gets into this mess. The first time he tries to go up against some drug dealers completely on his own and without the cooperation of law enforcement, he gets beaten up quite severely, and left for dead. For an action star, this is like a cold dose of reality. It's nice to see that Johnson tries to make his character as human as possible. It's always a bit of a stretch when we see an actor we're used to seeing in action films playing a father and a general "everyman" role, but he pulls it off quite well here. He's largely taking a chance with this role, and it manages to pay off.
The plot starts out on the distant alien planet of Baab, home to creatures who kind of look like Smurfs if they were taller, and had been hitting the gym. We're introduced to two brothers, who naturally, are as different as can be. One is Scorch Supernova (voiced by Brendan Fraser), the planet's resident superhero who goes on a lot of exciting adventures, and saves other worlds in peril. The other brother is Gary (Rob Corddry), who is a family man, and is not very fond of adventures, preferring to help his brother out from the safety of mission control. The action kicks in when Scorch is forced to answer a distress call on the "dark planet". It is called this, because no alien who has ever visited the planet has ever returned. This planet is better known as Earth. Scorch heads for our world, only to discover that the distress call was actually a trick engineered by the evil human, General Shanker (William Shatner), who is kidnapping aliens and sending them to Area 51 to fulfill his own purposes.
When Gary learns of his brother's capture, he has to go against his own nature, and fly off to Earth in order to rescue him. It does not take long for Gary to get captured by Shanker also, where he finds out that the villain has been kidnapping aliens for decades in order to steal their advanced technology, and then selling it to Earth corporations. According to this movie, things like smartphones, mp3 players, and even computer animated movies are all alien technologies that have been stolen over the years. It's a clever little bit of satire, and it's a shame that the movie doesn't follow further with this idea after it introduces it. It's eventually revealed that Shanker has even more diabolical plans in store, as he is forcing the aliens in captivity to create a massive super weapon that can destroy entire worlds. 
Escape from Planet Earth is strictly for kids, except for a handful of clever moments that seem to have been tossed in there to keep accompanying adults from getting too bored. These include a short 1950s-style film that Shanker shows to recently captured aliens to introduce them to Earthlings, and a different short film that Gary watches at one point which chronicles the history of intelligent life on Earth. Very young kids under 10 will get the most out of this. It's energetic, and the jokes aimed at them fly pretty fast. And while it isn't the best looking animated feature out there, it does have a very nice and colorful look to it. There's simply nothing all that special about it. Despite the efforts of the large and spirited voice cast (which also includes the likes of Ricky Gervais, Jessica Alba and Jane Lynch), the movie delivers very few dialogue-driven laughs. But don't worry. There's enough toilet and fart humor to keeps the kids rolling in their seats.
The filmmakers behind this one, the fifth entry in the series, have carefully removed the one aspect that made the films so enjoyable - John McClane was vulnerable in the past. Remember how he struggled to make his way across a floor covered with broken glass in the original movie? Well, it seems that age has somehow strengthened McClane, so that in this movie, he can drop multiple stories through numerous plate glass windows, without suffering so much as a scratch. It saddens me to say, John McClane has essentially become a cartoon. Much like the classic Looney Tunes characters, he can seemingly get blown up or tossed from a moving vehicle, and simply stand up and brush himself off. The human element behind the character is gone. Yeah, so he still gets off a couple funny one liners once in a while. Great, so he's a sarcastic robot now. This is a soulless, loud, and overly generic entry. No wonder the studio decided to bury this one in the middle of February, when all the previous films were placed as big summer movie events.
Even the plot itself is entirely standard, and holds little interest. It revolves around John's adult son, Jack (Jai Courtney), who is working as a CIA agent in Russia. He has now been arrested for murder and is awaiting trial. Hearing this, John decides to fly to Moscow to be with his son, and hopefully reconnect, as the two have not spoken in years. Before John can even get to the courthouse, it is blown up in what appears to be a terrorist plot. The target of the villains is Komarov (Sebastian Koch), a political prisoner who has a disc filled with inside information that could damage some very powerful people. Jack manages to escape with Komarov during the chaos, and not long after fleeing from the courthouse, they run into John. Now he's involved, and the remainder of the film is built around a number of particularly mindless action sequences, while John and Jack have some very lame father and son banter that is this movie's idea of character development.
As the events unfolded, I felt that there was a curious lack of menace. I was trying to figure out why, and then it hit me - A Good Day to Die Hard does not have a strong, central villain character, like Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber in the original. Here, McClane and his son mostly fight against faceless thugs who hide behind machine guns at all times. There is no menace, because there is no real physical threat. Our heroes are mainly going up against hired goons. There is a reveal of a main villain in the third act, but by then, it is far too late. We don't care by that point, and the reveal isn't special enough to make us wait that long. You know, with all the "retro" action films that have hit the box office lately (The Last Stand, Bullet to the Head), it's odd that the latest Die Hard plays it so modern. Instead of relying on what made the earlier movies work, this one concentrates on shaky-cam action, and villains who act like targets in a video game. If ever there was a movie that should have been reaching into the past for inspiration, it's this one.
But then, action movies have not exactly been drawing in the big business lately. The previously mentioned The Last Stand and Bullet to the Head came and left theaters fairly quickly. There was also Parker, the latest Jason Statham vehicle - that one was a blink and you missed it, too. Are audiences not in the mood for these kind of films, or is it just the lack of quality? (Although, to be fair, I did enjoy The Last Stand.) I predict that this movie will do better than the ones that have been released so far this year, but it will fall short in comparison to past Die Hard entries. It just does not pay respect to the series. Yeah, it's fun to see Bruce Willis back in the role that made him a big screen star, and he still has what it takes. The problem is, it's not enough. This movie is just very generic. This series has always been about spectacle, and there's very little of that on display here. Yes, the movie is competently made for the most part, but we expect more with this series. It never delivers, and it never reaches for the heights of its predecessors.
As the film opens, we find our young and attractive heroine, Katie (Julianne Hough) on the run from the law. We see brief and fleeting glimpses of her backstory throughout the film, which makes it looks like she is fleeing from a murder scene. When we get the full story late in the film, we learn that she is truly innocent. Not that we don't know that right off the bat. Romantic heroes in Nicholas Sparks stories can do no wrong. Katie hops on a bus to escape the detective pursuing her. After riding for what seems like days, she hops off in quiet little seaside town that seems to be made up of I'd say around 20 people, tops. Of primary interest to Katie is Alex (Josh Duhamel), a handsome and kindhearted young man who runs the local general store. Not only did Alex lose his wife a few years ago to cancer, but he has two adorable little kids who sometimes help him out in the store, and act as a plot device when needed. (His little boy is still upset over his mom's death, and doesn't know how to handle it.)
Katie settles into the new town, buying a small little shack for herself out in the middle of the woods, and getting a job working as a waitress at the local diner. She has a lot of run-ins with Alex and his kids, and before too long, they're getting closer, going on day trips to the beach, and canoeing. Before you know it, Katie and Alex can't seem to stay away from each other. Never mind that they never really have much to talk about. They're both attractive, that's all that counts in this movie. As the two begin to fall into lover's bliss, the film constantly hints that there's trouble afoot. Remember the detective pursuing Katie at the beginning of the story? He's played by David Lyons, and he seems to have quite the obsession with her, for reasons I will not spoil, should you choose to see this film. Not that it's too hard to figure out his role in the story. The movie makes it clear right from the start that he's pretty much slime, who likes to threaten little old ladies. And hey, that's not water he's drinking in that bottle he always carries with him, that's vodka!!
The plot of the detective trying to track Katie down is obviously supposed to add tension to Safe Haven, but it doesn't do a very good job. That's because very little actually happens here. After Katie arrives in the new town in the first five minutes of the film, we pretty much get to spend over an hour of her slowly opening up to Alex and his kids. She laughs, she goes for a swim, she plays with the kids, and she tries to pick out the right color to paint her kitchen floor. It would at least be something if we got a sense of a relationship growing between her and Alex, but the movie doesn't even do that good of a job conveying that. We never really get to see what they want in each other, other than the obvious physical attraction. Anyone can make a movie about a woman falling in love with Josh Duhamel. It takes a real script to give these characters personality, and an actual reason to fall for each other.
To be fair, the movie does have one element that came as a surprise to me, and not in a good way. That would be the very loopy plot twist that the film tosses in quite literally in the final two minutes. It's so unnecessary and so far out there, you have to wonder who thought it was a good idea. I have not read the novel the film is based on, but doing some research, I learned that the book ends the same way, so it's not exactly the fault of the screenwriters for throwing it in there. But still, couldn't anyone see that the ending the way it is written just doesn't work? Did they have no desire to maybe change it? It's the kind of last minute revelation that leaves you sulking out of the theater, which is definitely the wrong tone to go for in your feel-good romantic drama.
Beautiful Creatures is based on the first book in "The Caster Chronicles" series by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. It's obviously intended to lead to many more sequels based on the further books. Whether or not the movie hits it big enough at the box office to ensure more movies, this is an interesting film. Writer-director Richard LaGravenese has obviously studied the teen supernatural romance craze very well, and gives the young girls in the audience plenty to squeal over. And yet, he throws in a little more wit and intelligence than you might expect. The characters are certainly smarter than anyone who's ever inhabited a Twilight movie. They talk about and read from authors like Kurt Vonnegut, and have a sense of humor about themselves. It's almost like the characters are in on the joke. The moment I heard Emma Thompson proclaim "Well slap my ass, and call me Sally!", I knew that the actors were having as much fun with this stuff as I was.
The story is set in the fictional small town of Gatlin, which is home to 12 churches and no Starbucks, our young hero proclaims at the beginning of the film. That would be Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), a disillusioned young man who escapes into books like Slaughterhouse Five in order to avoid the more popular students at his high school, who are general Bible thumpers, and see anyone different from them as a threat. Ethan has enough easy going charm that one of the popular girls likes him, but he has no interest in joining their clique, and plans to get as far away from Gatlin as soon as he graduates. On his first day of school, a new student shows up in his class - Lena Duchannes (the likable Alice Englert). Lena is treated as a total outcast almost the instant she shows up in class, due to the fact she lives in the decaying Ravenwood mansion with her Uncle Macon (Jeremy Irons), whom many in the town suspects is a devil worshiper, due to the strange tales of rituals that surround the home. Ethan is smitten with the girl, and becomes even more fascinated when it seems like she can make the windows in the classroom shatter in an instant without doing anything when the other girls in class start picking on her. This leads to her following her home one day.
At Ravenwood, Ethan strikes up a friendship with the withdrawn and cautious Lena, who seems very nervous about making friends in this narrow-minded community. Turns out, she has good reason. Lena is a "Caster", and holds tremendous magical power. In fact, in her family of witches and warlocks, she is the most powerful. Lena is set to turn 16 on December 21st, and apparently that's an important milestone, as when they reach that age, a Caster discovers their true nature in a ceremony, and whether they will be claimed for the forces of good or evil. With her fateful birthday approaching, some uninvited guests show up in the town of Gatlin. Lena's mother, Serafine (Emma Thompson), a dark Caster, and Lena's cousin Ridley (Emmy Rosum), a siren who can control the minds of men, have arrived to make sure that Lena follows their path of darkness. While this battle for Lena's future soul begins to ignite between the "light" and "dark" Casters, the town itself seems to take little notice. They're too busy gearing up for the annual Civil War re-enactment, which just happens to fall on Lena's birthday.
Beautiful Creatures comes dangerously close to being overly stuffed and going over the top at times, but its reeled in with its laid back humor, and the fact that the two young lovers in the middle of it all are quite likable. For all of its special effects and eternal battle between the forces of good and evil, this really is a simple love story about two outcasts who find support and comfort in each other. What's more, these are semi-interesting characters who talk like they have brains. Unlike the vapid lovers of Twilight, Ethan and Lena act like they've had an intelligent thought in their young lives. That alone makes them at least interesting to watch. As for the story that surrounds them, as silly as it is, it's certainly never boring. I was interested in the hidden world of Casters, and wanted to learn more. One of the annoyances of the screenplay is how condensed the plot feels, despite having an overly generous running time of just over two hours. I guess that's what the books are for.
I also like how many of the actors just throw themselves into the performances. Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson are obviously having a grand time playing the head representatives of the "good" and "evil" sides of the Caster world, respectively. Should sequels to this movie be made, I hope it will go further into some of the interesting characters that we only catch glimpses of in this movie. This would include most of Lena's family, who are introduced during a dinner party scene, show up throughout the film, but are never really developed. However, at least the filmmakers have planned for the worst. In case this movie bombs and no more get the green light, at least we're not left with a cliffhanger that will never be fulfilled. The movie does end in a somewhat open-ended fashion, but in case no more are made, it works as a resolution to this particular film's story.
