THE DARKNESS Review

The Darkness has a lot of good pieces that come together to somehow make a bad movie.

The Darkness stars Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell as Peter and Bronny Taylor, the apparently happy parents of Stephanie (Lucy Fry) and the autistic Michael (David Mazouz). On a camping trip to the Grand Canyon, Michael falls into a cave and finds a set of carved stones. His curiosity gets the better of him, and he takes the stones home with him. After the trip, the family gets increasingly strained as strange things begin to happen.

Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell both give good performances, as should be expected by these two very good actors. David Mazouz is unnerving in the role of the young autistic boy who is tuned into the spirits haunting the house. Lucy Fry is good, but she is completely wasted in this obvious, angry teenage daughter that is in every single one of these haunted house movies. The direction is also solid. Greg McLean knows how to put together a shot, and The Darkness is very competently made film. Having said all of that, this movie sucks.

I’m going to be straight here; I have never liked the haunted house horror film. They are so difficult to do well, and for the most part they end up being nothing more than cookie cutter examples that all look the same. I’m aware that this can be said of just about every type of movie in the horror genre, but for me the haunted house is particularly egregious. But I was ready to like this movie. Kevin Bacon is great, Greg McLean is an indie director that I absolutely want to root for, and the images from the trailer really piqued my interest.

Unfortunately, the best imagery is all in the trailer. Those hands that appear on Lucy Fry? Fantastic, but also in every single trailer for this film. The creature designs are good, but we never see them. The great imagery and design choices this movie has going for it are completely wasted by what appears to be an unwillingness to be scary, or to even put the characters in any real danger at any point. The movie is so focused on the family drama that it forgets to be scary and use the cool stuff that it created. The Darkness throws a few jump scares around, but that is not enough. This is where the competent directing of McLean somewhat gets in the way. The film is typically well lit and well put together, but that style does not necessarily lend itself to creating atmosphere, and if you aren’t going to use creature design to be scary, you have to at least attempt to create some sort of mood.

The biggest problem with The Darkness is its structure. Story wise, the family drama provide some interest despite being predictable. But the real problem is how the haunting is handled. The issue of having to explain the ghosts who the characters do not initially believe exist, despite the audience knowing for a fact that they do, is always a problem for me in these movies, but The Darkness handles it in one of the worst ways I have ever seen. Without spoiling anything, Bronny is the first character to  decide to look into the house being haunted, so she begins searching on the internet and comes across a YouTube video that explains exactly what is going on. She then sends the video to Peter, who also watches it. Later on, Peter watches the same video again, in its entirety. And just a few scenes after we have watched the video for THE THIRD TIME, the spiritual healer character shows up and explains all the stuff in the video AGAIN. It’s boring, unnecessary, and clunky as hell.

The third act is awful. The “cleansing of the house” scenes are laughable, the finale is terrible and does not feel threatening at all, and the ending is so shockingly abrupt that me and several of the people I was watching it with screamed up at the screen saying, :That's it?!" There is some stuff in the first twenty minutes that gave me hope. The performances, the direction and the imagery are all solid, but everything falls apart as soon as the second act begins and the focus shifts from the family drama to the haunted house stuff. The Darkness falls prey to bad script writing, non-existent stakes, and a lack of set pieces that ends up being a boring and predictable paint-by-the-numbers movie.

CRIMINAL REVIEW

Criminal is about as mediocre as they come, which is a real bummer.

Criminal has a lot of things going for it, and while the premise is interesting and the effects look good, this movie’s selling point is the cast. I’m just going to list some of the cast off, and see if you can avoid getting the same movie boner I got when I first looked it up: Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Scott Adkins, Gary Oldman, Ryan Reynolds, fucking SCOTT ADKINS, Gal Gadot, and Jordi Moliá. It’s a great cast. Unfortunately, they are almost entirely wasted due to paper thin characters and a fairly predictable plot.

Billy Pope (Reynolds) is a CIA operative working out of London. He has brokered a deal with The Dutchman (Michael Pitt) for the return of a program called “The Wormhole,” which controls all of the United States missile facilities. Before Pope can make the deal, he is captured and killed by an anarchist named Xavier Heimdani (Moliá). In order to find The Dutchman and recover The Wormhole, CIA officer Quaker Wells (Oldman) calls upon the services of Dr. Franks (Jones) to transfer the memories of Billy Pope into Jericho Stewart (Costner), a convict and sociopath with a rare frontal lobe disorder.

This movie has no right to be as average as it is. The only actors who get to do anything with any sort of depth is Costner and Gadot, who plays the wife of Billy Pope. Their interactions have an emotional depth to them that none of the other characters can compete with. Costner is great as Jericho, playing someone really outside of his normal image. He is both endearing and scary at the same time, and it creates an interesting dilemma in the viewer, in that the audience is being pushed to root for this guy who is essentially a monster. Costner does really good work in that realm, as we believe both the vulnerable moments and his moments of shocking disregard. Gadot is also very good as Jill Pope, who is probably the most complicated character in the film, as she must navigate both her husband’s death and the revelation that his memories and emotions are alive in someone else’s brain. These two performances carry the film.

Jones is completely wasted as an uninteresting scientist, Oldman does little but be angry and yell a lot, and the villain is completely average and predictable. The worst offense, however, is the complete waste of Scott Adkins. You get one of the best martial artists working in movies today, and you have him do nothing but run around with a gun? I don’t even think he gets to fire it at any point. Every character other than Jericho and Jill Pope are basically non-existent, and could have been played by just about any working actor, which makes the presence of these fantastic actors quite frustrating.

There isn’t a ton of action in Criminal, but the scenes that are there are all solid, comprised almost entirely of practical effects. It is refreshing to see stuff actually blow up instead of watching fake looking animated explosions, but that isn’t enough to push this film over the edge for me. The director, Ariel Vorman, clearly knows his way around an action sequence, and overall acquits himself well with Criminal, but I was still left wishing for more.

I liked Criminal. It is a refreshing, made for adults suspense film that we used to get a lot more of out of Hollywood. But it is by no means a great movie, and much of that can be attributed to weak characters and a wasted cast. Ariel Vorman is clearly a talented director with a good eye, the settings are beautiful, the action is effective, and all of that only makes me believe that this film was capable of being something really special, but simply doesn’t pull it off. Even just giving the minor characters one character driven moment might have been enough, but instead most of them stay entirely one note and are quite frankly, boring as a result. Overall, I think Criminal is perfectly O.K., and that is its greatest crime.

AMERICAN ULTRA REVIEW

American Ultra is a strange and confused movie. It wants to be a dark action/comedy, but fails to produce many laughs, while at the same time centers on an incredibly touching and sincere romance between its two leads, Jesse Eiesenberg and Kristen Stewart. This dichotomy leads to a difficult relationship within the movie, where the sweetness of Eisenberg and Stewart is fighting against the awfulness of nearly everyone else in the movie and the incredible shifts in tone that this causes drags the film down a bit. However, the action is staged nicely and there is a lot of cool practical effects in the movie that give the completely impossible actions happening on screen a little more reality.

The plot in brief is something we have heard many times before. Mike and Phoebe (Eisenberg and Stewart) are a young stoner couple working average, minimum wage type jobs. Their lives are turned upside down over the revelation that Mike is actually a CIA sleeper agent who has been targeted for termination by CIA operative Adrian Yates (Topher Grace). Mike’s previous handler Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) activates Mike in an attempt to both save Mike and stop Yates. Let the killing ensue from there.

The movies greatest strength is the performances of Eisenberg and Stewart, who have a great chemistry and really sell their relationship. The scenes between the two of them are so great, and they help prop up the rest of the performances. There is a scene in the very beginning of the film between Eisenberg and Stewart where they are driving back home from an airport, and the conversation they have is so incredibly sweet and wonderful and early on sets up this great relationship the two of them have. There are several moments like that where Eisenberg and Stewart’s performances kind of serve as a lifeline of emotional reality next to a bunch of crazy fight scenes. Stewart is particularly good in American Ultra, and she might have been my favorite part of the movie. There is a sense of fun between her and Eisenberg, and she sells so well Phoebe’s love for Mike that at no point are you left wondering why she stays with him, even when it seems like there is little holding her there. Most importantly, she has some moments that really got me emotionally, and part of that is me bringing my own baggage to the party, but that is never enough. Stewart really had to bring it in those scenes, and I certainly think she does.

The other performances are not nearly as impressive as either Eisenberg or Stewart. Topher Grace is playing a part we have seen a million times: the over-ambitious, Machiavellian prick. I’m not saying he does that job poorly, but the performance never transcends the trope it is based on. Walter Goggins falls into that same trap, and Connie Britton never really brings much to the table for me. To be fair, none of these characters are particularly deep to begin with, and the actors probably did just about as well as could have been asked, there just isn’t much there.

The biggest problem with this movie is its tone. What it wants is to be a dark comedy with some cool action sequences. The problem is, none of the dark comedy lands, and the few laughs it does have come mainly from Eisenberg and Stewart. That is a real problem, because everything that was supposed to be funny now just comes off as kind of gross and mean. Thankfully, there is Mike and Phoebe’s relationship to fall back on, but many of the jokes miss and this definitely takes away from the movie. The action is quite good, which also helps. Everything is edited well, nothing is ever confusing, and a lot of the effects appear to have been done practically, which helps ground some of the crazy impossible stuff that the characters can do. There are a few moments where the camera is probably a little too close and things start to feel a somewhat claustrophobic, but other than that the action is entertaining and bloody. There is some really good squib work here as well, which most hardcore action fans will appreciate.

American Ultra is certainly hit and miss, but the highs are overall stronger than the lows, and at just over 90 minutes, is paced too quickly to dwell on the weaker moments. As a stoner black comedy, this movie fails. But as a stoner action/romance, this movie succeeds. So if you can get over the tonal mishaps and the sub par minor characters, you will probably have a pretty good time.

By Tim Smedlund