“xXx: Return Of Xander Cage” [our review]
One clever way to make Vin Diesel‘s return to the unlamented “xXx” franchise less humiliating for him is clearly to make it way more so for everyone else. And so a stacked cast including Samuel L Jackson, Toni Collette, Tony Jaa, Donnie Yen and even Ice Cube, who we’d all assumed had “Bye, Felicia”-ed this nonsense a long time ago, all show up to debase themselves in his honor, delivering lines like “I just wanted to work with the legend: Xander Cage!” while bad CG stunts happen because of some rent-a-villain’s plot to kill people with satellites. All this would be maybe forgivable, as even would be the frankly insulting pretence that love interest Deepika Padukone has one millionth the chemistry with Diesel that she does with MVP Ruby Rose, if literally every beat wasn’t hit better in some other 2017 blockbuster. And usually that blockbuster is Diesel’s own “Fate of the Furious” which, bad though it is at least outbiggens ‘xXx: ROXC’ and doesn’t boast a team member there solely for his mad DJ skillz.
“Ghost In The Shell” [our review]
To give Rupert Sanders, the director of “Ghost In The Shell,” some credit, his remake of the beloved 1995 anime was at least one of the more visually startling blockbusters this year: crisp and with some haunting imagery, even if much was copied directly from the source material. On almost every other level, however, the movie was a washout. Staying relatively close to the original by the letter (except where it counts, like a dumb final twist that nods to the film’s whitewashing controversy while somehow making it worse) but never capturing the spirit or brains, it ultimately ends up feeling like a higher-tech version of the kind of dumb 90s cyberpunk movie (“Johnny Mnemonic,” “Hackers” et al) that it was clearly trying to avoid, with a visibly bored cast (Scarlett Johansson can do distanced transhumanism in her sleep, and apparently is here) and no meat whatsoever underneath the pretty pictures.
“Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” [our review]
The good news: the fifth “Pirates Of The Caribbean” movie, “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” is significantly better than the absolutely terrible fourth one, “On Stranger Tides,” mainly by virtue of having competent filmmakers behind it rather than Rob Marshall. The bad news is that it’s still significantly worse than the first three, and most of the movies we’ve seen this year. It takes a back to basics approach, bringing back original cast members like Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley and an otherworldly villain (Javier Bardem’s uninterestingly written and performed Salazar), but it feels like a lumbering run through the greatest hits en route to a boring MacGuffin, but robbed of the flair and weirdo qualities that Gore Verbinski brought to the series that actually made it interesting. With Johnny Depp now playing Jack Sparrow as a caricature to itself, the only reason this appears to have to exist, one half-fun set piece aside, is to make the second and third movies look like masterpieces.
“War Machine” [our review]
We’ll say this much for “War Machine” — there’s probably an argument to be made that some of the reasons that the film is so bad is deliberate, that its drudge-inducing swampy mess of a movie is deliberately intended to reflect America’s involvement in the war on terror. But that’s probably giving it too much credit, because Netflix’s first true homegrown A-list movie, which pairs the incredibly promising “Animal Kingdom” director David Miçhod with the usually reliable Brad Pitt for the thinly veiled story of U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal. There’s an interesting movie in here somewhere, but it’s just executed so badly, from the wildly uneven tone (which takes an odd third-act divergence seemingly from another movie with Will Poulter & Keith Stanfield’s ground-level soldiers), to the curiously flat comedy, to anonymous photography and score. Worst of all is Pitt, whose mannered, broad, goofy turn is so misjudged that it feels like he went entirely undirected, and it unbalances the whole movie. Not exactly the killer app the streaming service were looking for, then…
“The Great Wall” [our review]
Zhang Yimou‘s staggeringly overblown but paradoxically quite dull “The Great Wall” is a strange experience: you feel yourself in every moment “participating in a unique international IP opportunity,” “witnessing a gargantuan landmark in Chinese/US cinematic co-operation” and, of course “consuming China’s most expensive ever filmed entertainment product,” but only rarely do you really feel like you’re watching a movie. It occasionally looks great, has some fun set pieces and Matt Damon‘s role is not as “white savior” as had first been feared. But he is nonetheless oddly miscast and uncomfortable-looking, which manifests in the variety of different accents he affects throughout, and the less said about a storyline that can politely be summed up as “borderline culturally exploitative humbug with dragon monster thingies and Willem Dafoe,” the better. Mainly though, it’s just an exasperating and slightly depressing missed opportunity for one of China’s most important and audacious directors to have turned in such an accurate simulacrum of an anonymously subpar Hollywood blockbuster.
