With the 2018 Sundance Film Festival right around the corner, it’s time for me and Joblo.com’s Chris Bumbray to rap about all of the movies that you’ll be talking about for the rest of the year. Except we’ll have seen them mad early. After freezing our asses off under tents.
Plus we’ll review PADDINGTON 2 and the return of the world’s most lovable bear! And the not-so-lovable Liam Neeson is back and in trouble again, this time in THE COMMUTER! Finally, I take aim at Taraji P. Henson’s action flick, PROUD MARY!
You may not know the name Deon Taylor, but he’s the director behind the horror satire, Meet the Blacks, a comic riff on The Purge that starred Mike Epps. It wasn’t very good, but it was a chance for Taylor to venture a little bit out of his comfort zone after directing thriller Supremacy, which is actually worth checking out, and the horror Chain Letter which isn’t.
Now Taylor is back with another nail-biter, Traffik, which stars Paula Patton, Omar Epps, Laz Alonzo, and Roselyn Sanchez, which is a pretty sweet foursome. They play couples at a gorgeous mountainous retreat who are stalked by a violent biker gang and must fight back to survive. Simple premise, and it looks pretty intense. Somebody’s hiding something, that much is clear, and I’m actually pretty interesting in finding out what’s going on. Kinda looks like Green Room, only with 100% more black people, which is nice.
Remember when there were doubts Marvel could pull off a Guardians of the Galaxy movie? Seems like so long ago, doesn’t it? Last year Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 hit a massive $863M worldwide, besting the $770M of its predecessor and, I think, cementing the team as the most popular Marvel has right now. And Marvel knows it, because when their next film arrives it will be fourth year in a row the infamous bunch of a-holes have been on the big screen.
Director James Gunn has confirmed Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 will arrive in 2020, which is the year that has long been rumored. He tweeted the date in response to a fan question…
He didn’t get into specifics, but Marvel has set aside May 1st, August 7th, and November 6th as open spots. The first two movies opened in August and May respectively, so I think one of those dates would make the most sense. Why fix what ain’t broke?
Like I said, this will be four years in a row with the Guardians of the Galaxy appearing somewhere in the MCU. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, followed by this year’s Avengers: Infinity War, 2019’s Avengers 4, and then Vol. 3 in 2020.
1. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle– $27M/$283.1M
At $283M domestic, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle just became the highest-grossing Christmas release of all-time. I bet nobody could have predicted that.
2. The Post (review)- $18.6M/$23M
Steven Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers drama The Post finally expanded into national release after four weeks, earning $18.6M in the process. The Steven Spielberg/Meryl Streep film has been doing well in platform for a while, and looks to do better now as Oscar buzz swirls. Just when I thought audiences were tired of movies that remind us how screwed up things are right now (ala Detroit), the performance of The Post shuts me up.
3. The Commuter (review)- $13.4M
Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra partnered up for the 15th time (give or take), this time for The Commuter, yet another generic action movie with everyone’s favorite geriatric lead. My snark aside, the film got off to a relatively decent start with $13.4M through the weekend, which is right on track with their previous efforts such as Run All Night, Non-Stop, and Unknown.
4. Insidious: The Last Key– $12.1M/$48.3M
5. The Greatest Showman– $11.8M/$94.5M
6. Star Wars: The Last Jedi– $11.2M/$591.5M
7. Paddington 2 (review)- $10.6M
I’m disappointed, America. The sweet, charming, unmissable Paddington 2 opened with a scant $10.6M. The irresistible sequel to 2015’s $260M worldwide hit is just as wonderful as its predecessor, but will come nowhere near the same numbers. Fortunately, the marmalade loving bear remains a force internationally with $125M to date, which should comfort Warner Bros. who rescued the film from Weinstein limbo for a hefty $30M price tag.
8. Proud Mary (review)- $10M
Let’s keep it real: every dollar of the $10M earned by the lousy assassin flick Proud Mary is owed to Taraji P. Henson. Her fan base, which is extensive and much deserving, showed up to support what was teased as her big coming out party as an action star. The film is completely terrible, though, which is why Sony decided to hide it from critics who would have eviscerated it.
9. Pitch Perfect 3– $5.6M/$94.6M
10. Darkest Hour– $4.5M/$35.7M
The future is foggy for Warner Bros. and DC Films, with the DCEU arguably in a worse state now following Justice League than they were before it. That’s not how things are supposed to go. The Avengers pumped renewed energy into the MCU, and Marvel has been surging on it ever since. One of the biggest question marks in the DCEU right now is Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which is either outside continuity or in it, and may or may not star Ben Affleck. We have no firm answers, and the latest rumors don’t really help us understand things any better.
The first rumor from Batman-On-Film reiterates that The Batman will be outside of DCEU continuity, which is something we’ve heard from Reeves before. However, after fans reacted negatively to that idea he backtracked and said that he only meant his film was a standalone. So which one is it? Is it in, or is it out?
That questions like this persist is a chief example why DC Films is failing. If the audience doesn’t understand what’s going on they won’t show up. The idea of a separate banner of non-continuity movies is silly, at least in the live-action arena. You can do stuff like that all day with the animated movies, and that’s where DC Films SHOULD be doing it. But the big money makers, the movies you build $1B brands around, should be simple to figure out and market. However, they seem ready to go full on with this splitting off of their DC properties, including a Joker origin movie nobody is clamoring to see.
Reeves’ film is likely to suit up a new actor as Batman, possibly Jake Gyllenhaal, which makes sense if it takes place in a completely different timeline. While Affleck expressed his enthusiasm for the role in the lead up to Justice League, the prevailing idea is that he’s on the way out. And sure enough we haven’t heard him do any cheerleading of late. That means we could be looking at two different actors playing Batman soon, one for Reeves’ The Batman, and another for films set within the DCEU. That still leaves us wondering how the transition could occur.
The second of the day’s rumors says Affleck could get a send off in either Suicide Squad 2 or Flashpoint, if the latter ever happens. Batman had a minor role to play in the original Suicide Squad, but having him bid farewell in the sequel doesn’t make a lot of sense for such a major character. Whatever your thoughts on Batfleck he deserves better than that.
However, Flashpoint could be an interesting solution to the problem. Since we know it’ll involve alternate realities and The Flash (Ezra Miller) probably mucking up the timestream, they could always have him go back in time and accidentally alter things so Bruce Wayne never becomes Batman. Or maybe he sets off a chain of events that force Wayne to retire early, or die, or whatever gets someone else in the suit. Batman does apparently have a role in the movie, but to me that sounds like it should be the entire storyline, not just some subplot. You could end the movie with Dick Grayson under the cowl, although that would be weird since a Nightwing movie is in the works, too. Maybe Jason Todd, then? Perhaps Thomas Wayne? I’d love to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who played Thomas Wayne in Batman v Superman, get his chance as the Dark Knight. He was actually up for it at one point, if you recall, and Thomas Wayne is actually the Batman of the “Flashpoint” comics storyline.
This is assuming Flashpoint ever gets made, of course. But with no director, no start date, and now no official release date, that is very much up in the air. What it sounds like is DC Films just wants to put the whole Affleck thing behind them as quickly and quietly as possible, which is a shame because I think he’s been pretty good. And it’s hard for me to forget the sheer level of excitement there was when Affleck was first introduced as Batman. The results have been underwhelming but not because of anything he did necessarily, and I think he deserves better than to be shuffled off as a B-player in another hero’s movie.
DC Films is a volatile landscape right now, and as evidence we have confirmation that one film is a go, while another drops into limbo. Warner Bros. has confirmed an April 5th 2019 release date for Shazam, which stars Zachary Levi as the powerful hero who gains his powers from mythical figures Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury. David F. Sandberg is directing with Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Mark Strong, and more part of the cast.
Meanwhile, The Flash’s solo film, titled Flashpoint, has been taken off the books completely. The July 27th 2018 release date it had was never going to happen, anyway, but that Warner Bros. didn’t immediately reschedule it is a little concerning. The Ezra Miller-led film still has no director, and Kiersey Clemons may not stick around as Iris West. Clearly there is a lot of work left to do before the Scarlet Speedster hits the big screen.
Filming on Shazam should kick off soon, and I’ve got Comic-Con marked as the likely spot where we’ll see some actual footage, and maybe some updated news on Flashpoint.
Taraji P. Henson? Badass. We love her as the tough-as-nails Cookie Lyon on Empire, and when she finally received the acclaim she deserved for Hidden Figures, we all saw it as a victory. We’ve been rooting for Henson ever since her character’s transformative arc in Hustle ‘n Flow. So when the trailers for Proud Mary promised Taraji as a John Wick-style killer set to a ’70s Blaxploitation vibe, there was legit reason to get hyped. Taraji’s about to kick some ass, y’all!!!
Well, nah. Proud Mary is a disaster from start to finish, and we see why Sony has quietly dumped the movie in the middle of January with zero buzz. How could that possibly happen? Who could possibly screw up Taraji P. Henson packin’ heat with attitude to match and a soundtrack of Motown’s finest? Blame London has Fallen director Babaj Najafi and a couple of so-called writers who have foisted upon Taraji a bland, boring, and dreary assassin flick the quality of the Bruce Willis/50 Cent stinkers piling up DVD bins at Walmart. Right from the beginning there is something cheap and inartful about it, as trained contract killer Mary Goodwin does her morning workout to the tune of “Poppa was a Rolling Stone” over title credits that may have been lifted from Cleopatra Jones. It looks and feels like window dressing, but at that point we’re still hopeful of a contemporary revival of the ethnic subgenre that spawned so many cool, iconic heroes.
But it isn’t. Mary is the barest sketch of a character. In the span of 30 seconds we see her stealthily slink into a man’s home, gun him down quietly and efficiently, only to realize the man’s son is in the next room unaware of what has happened. Jump forward in time a full year, and Mary is basically non-existent as we follow that boy, Danny (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), who becomes a drug mule abused by the head of a crime family. Mary, who works for a rival family led by Benny (Danny Glover) and his son Tom (Billy Brown), begins to watch him from afar, compelled out of guilt and what we’re supposed to believe is maternal instinct but she’s too thinly drawn for us to really know.
Copying pretty much every assassin movie ever made, with a special nod to Luc Besson’s The Professional (a personal favorite), Mary steps in and becomes Danny’s guardian. She dispatches those who’ve hurt him, and hides the boy from her mob family. Of course they mix like oil and water; she lives in a posh tech’ed out home (there’s an IPAD on her fridge!!), and she’s got rules which Danny ain’t gonna follow. When she warns him to stay out of her room, the first thing he does is go right up in there, discovering a cache of weapons and closet full of colorful wigs that Sydney Bristow would be jealous for. Mary lays down the law, but staying mad at Danny isn’t really an option. She’s risked everything to save him, and her actions have started a turf war that could destroy the only family she’s ever known.
That doesn’t sound so bad on paper, but that’s because plot isn’t really the issue. Execution is the problem. The soulful posture of the opening sequences is nowhere to be found after the opening credits, replaced by dull, rote, and lazy hitman movie tropes. Where is the brassy, take-no-prisoners Taraji P. Henson we were promised? Where has the potential in a slick action vehicle led by a top African-American actress disappeared to? It’s certainly not in Proud Mary, which mostly has Taraji delivering long yet pointless exposition through teary eyes, but her opportunities to be the action star we hoped for are few.
Even the editing is a glaring weakness. Each scene haphazardly cut to maximum incoherence, it’s hard to tell what the Hell is going on even when it’s just two people talking…which is most of the damn time. It only gets worse during the action, most notably in a bizarre gear shift at the end of the movie as Tina Turner’s “Rollin’ On the River” is ham-handedly jammed into the soundtrack, when Mary finally turns into the unstoppable angel of violence with the over-the-top choreography we had been hoping for. So what was all that boring crap before this?? By the time we get what we had been hoping for it’s far too late for Proud Mary to be saved.
I don’t blame Taraji, nor do I put fault on Jahi Di’Allo Winston who has the makings of a rising star. She’s fearless when given opportunity to show it, but it seems like Najalfi wants to edit away the scenes where Mary shows vulnerability. Actually, it seems like he wants to edit away anything that would give Proud Mary any sense of style. And if there’s one thing we can say about Taraji P. Henson is that she has style. She deserves a better chance to show it than Proud Mary affords her.
In the works for nearly two decades at multiple studios, the sci-fi film Gemini Man is quickly moving forward under the guidance of Ang Lee. And the Oscar-winning director is putting together a top notch cast, with Clive Owen joining the previously cast Will Smith.
The story stars Smith as a pair of clones, one a younger hitman who is out to kill the older version of himself. Owen’s role is antagonistic but that’s all we know about it at this point. There’s still a female lead to cast, and Lee will reportedly meet with Elizabeth Debicki (The Great Gatsby), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (10 Cloverfield Lane) and Tatiana Maslany (Stronger).
Owen was most recently seen in another sci-fi film, the hugely expensive flop Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Gemini Man is expected to open October 4th 2019. [Variety]
We’ve got a long wait for the third, possibly final, chapter of the John Wick saga, with Keanu Reeves back as the deadly assassin for hire. But there is good news in the meantime, and it’s that the long-rumored TV series has found a home and a title, The Continental.
Starz has picked up the John Wick spinoff, and as the title suggests it will center around the Continental hotel, the one that Ian McShane’s character runs as a haven for assassins between jobs. I found everything about the Continental, from its rules, décor, and clientele, to be the most fascinating part of John Wick’s incredible world building. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t concern me that the concept may get watered down in a weekly series.
Chris Collins (Sons of Anarchy) will write the script and act as showrunner, and it’s expected that Reeves, on board as an exec-producer, will make sporadic appearances as Wick. David Kolstad and David Leitch will also exec-produce, with Leitch’s co-directing partner Chad Stahelski set to helm the premiere.
If the thought of a John Wick series has you worried about it achieving the same level of elegant shoot ’em up action, Starz CEO Chris Albrecht would like to reassure you…
“This series is truly unlike anything else on TV. The Continental promises to include the thunderous fight sequences and intensely staged shootouts between professional assassins and their targets that fans have come to expect in the John Wick movie franchise as well as introduce some new, darkly compelling characters who inhabit this underground world.”
No hard start date yet but I wouldn’t be surprised if The Continental‘s debut is timed with the release of John Wick 3 on May 17th 2019.
Steven Spielberg’s The Post has literally everything going for it. Arriving at a time when more people believe in “fake news” that suits their political ideology than legitimate news sources that don’t, it serves as a reminder of a time when we all trusted journalists to be our check against a corrupt system. And as the #metoo movement escalates, putting power in the hands of women in fields where they have been either abused or disregarded, The Post focuses on Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), the first female newspaper publisher and one of the most powerful women in journalism.
The perfect storm continues in the film’s focus on the release of the crucial Pentagon Papers, secret documents that exposed the White House’s lies about the Vietnam War and set the stage for Nixon’s eventual resignation. The parallels to today are almost too rich, and Spielberg the perfect director to romanticize the hard-working, altruistic newspaper men and women, devoted purveyors of the truth. If The Post had ended with a mocking “For @realdonaldtrump” we would totally get it.
And yet The Post isn’t all it could be, failing to reach the incredibly high standard of the film it most closely relates to, Alan J. Pakula’s seminal Watergate drama All the President’s Men. Serving as a loose prequel of sorts, this isn’t about the gumshoe work that went into investigating the veracity of the Pentagon Papers, but of the agonizing decision whether to publish them at all. Tom Hanks is the determined, ferocious Washington post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee, a hot-tempered muckraker willing to stoke the flames of controversy to see The Washington Post reach the national level of The New York Times.
Deeper concerns weigh on Graham’s mind, though, and it begins with the Nixon administration putting an unusual amount of pressure on the press to cover the news as they want to see it covered. Gee, that sounds familiar. Seeing as how the paper has just been banned from covering Tricia Nixon’s wedding, one can only imagine what kind of repercussions there would upon releasing documents that showed how the government really felt about the Vietnam War. Graham has to worry about what Nixon could do to her newspaper and its legacy, which she is now the rightful keeper of. She’s surrounded by men who see her as illegitimate for gaining the paper only through her husband’s death, and not someone who knows the business. She has questions of loyalty, chiefly in the case of family friend Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) who happens to be Nixon’s Secretary of Defense. Most of all, Graham has self doubt to compete with, and that may be the most crippling concern of all. It doesn’t help that her board, entirely comprised of sexist old men, undermine and demean her, knowing she’s in the next room within earshot.
Streep is fantastic as you already guessed, and it’s fascinating to watch Graham shed her reserved, quiet demeanor and become someone who can stand up for herself in a crowded room of egotistic men. That she’s actually evolving to fight for a cause bigger than herself, the right of a free press to be defenders of the truth, is like catnip for Spielberg and screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer who give her plenty of grandiose, schmaltzy monologues to bite into. It can be a bit much, which is something I think you can say for practically every Spielberg movie. There’s always one extra heartwarming beat too many, one extra monologue that underscores the movie’s themes too pointedly. The Post has multiple, and while we expect a certain amount of rhapsodizing over journalism and feminism, the pandering does get excessive. Hey, we get it. Streep is perfectly fine in showing us this stuff, thanks. Hanks is pretty good at it, too. But nope, they are forcefully played in such a way that we have a pretty good idea they’ll be the Oscars vignette for the inevitable Best Picture nomination.
Spielberg’s adoration cuts both ways and where it truly inspires is in his depiction of the newsroom. His camera zips in and around the paper’s newsroom, creating a palpable buzz so thick it’s only matched by the whirring of the newspaper printing presses. You can’t help but get wrapped up in every new development, delivered by an amazing ensemble (Carrie Coon, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts just to name a few) with the urgency of a breaking news headline. The Post makes me wish I had spent more time in offices like this during the formative years of my career; the electricity, the energy is exhilarating.
While its imperfections glare like the marker corrections of an overworked copy editor, The Post is an important, necessary statement on journalism’s place in strengthening democracy by speaking truth to power.
