Django, on Netflix

He still comes to town dragging a mysterious casket, but this time, the spaghetti western legend carries a lot more emotional baggage. Much of it is guilt stemming from the fate of his long-lost daughter Sarah, his only surviving family member. They will soon be reunited, rather awkwardly, in co-creator-writers Leonardo Fasoli & Maddalena Ravagli’s ten-part series reboot Django, which premieres tomorrow on Netflix.

This time around, “Django” (the totally unremarkable, everyday alias he adopted) is a veteran of the Confederate army rather than the Union Blue. Eventually, we learn he only signed up for the enlistment bonus he thought he needed for his desperately poor family. Unfortunately, war changed Django, so he decided to stay away when it ended. Tragically, he learned too late his family needed his protection.

He has followed a lead to New Babylon, a town of mostly freedmen that looks like it was built by Ewoks. The leader, John Ellis, has been feuding with the ultra-judgmental “Lady” Elizabeth, who is leads a gang of marauding moralizers in the neighboring town. They have some very personal history together, which is partly why her Pops deeded the land for New Babylon to Ellis.

Despite their considerable age difference, Ellis is engaged to Sarah. It is a bit off-putting to some, considering he raised her like a daughter after the tragedy-to-be-revealed-later, especially to his son Seymour, who carries his own slightly incestuous torch for Sarah. Initially, she resents Django’s sudden reappearance, but he is quite helpful saving the good citizens of New Babylon from Elizabeth’s goons.

Django best approximates the neo-spaghetti Western it wants to be through its multinational co-production funding structure. English was probably the fourth or fifth language you would have most likely heard on set, even though it is an English-language production (albeit with considerable over-dubbing). However, it lacks the stark archetypal emotional simplicity of real vintage spaghetti westerns. When it is all said and done, there is practically nothing about Django that we won’t know. For this genre, that kind of over-sharing is annoying.

Fasoli and Ravagli build to a revelation linking the two families that is supposed to be grandly tragic but is really just contrived. However, the climactic gun fight in episode ten is a real barn-burner that partially makes up for all the slow brooding (yes, that is when the you-know-what finally comes out).

Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead) has the right quiet hulking presence for Django (was his name-O), but he must spend more time on daddy issues than gunning down bad guys. Nicholas Pinnock has a convincing swagger and wears the mantle of flawed moral authority quite well as the senior Ellis. However, Lisa Vicari consistently kills any momentum the series might have built up with her whiny portrayal of Sarah. Noomi Rapace maybe fairs even worse. She is cartoony in the wrong kind of way as Lady Elizabeth.

Assassin Club, Co-Starring Sam Neill

Hitman guilds are never very collegial. Just ask Mike Fallon from the Accident Man films. Sure, they will throw a lot of work your way, but sooner or later, they contract all their members to kill each other. Morgan Gaines is about to go through one of those phases. Technically, he really isn’t part of any “club,” title notwithstanding, but shares a common handler with at least one hired guns out to kill him in Camille Delamarre’s Assassin Club, which releases tomorrow on digital.

Gaines always insisted on killing parasitic monsters, like the Slovenian human trafficker he has a bead on, in the opening scene. Unfortunately, Alec Drakos also has a bead on him. Gaines just barely escapes with his life, but Drakos takes out his contract. When he gets home, Gaines is quite put-out by the whole business, but his self-consciously sleazy handler Caldwell only wants to talk about this new super-contract: six targets at one million dollars a pop.

Initially, Caldwell neglects to mention the contract out on Gaines as well. Contemplating retirement, Gaines declines, until he saves his innocent civilian girlfriend Sophie from an assassination attempt (mostly targeting himself). As he starts to get the ugly truth out of Caldwell, he realizes it will more-or-less be a case of kill or be killed. However, the mysterious, faceless assassin Falk proposes a temporary working truce, to her benefit, of course.

There is nothing wrong with a film about a pack of assassins trying to kill one another, but the Accident Man duology did it so much better. Delamarre (who previously helmed The Transporter: Refueled) helms some serviceable action sequences, but Thomas Dunn’s screenplay is dumber than a duffle full of doornails. There are moments when you have to ask the screen: “seriously dude, you’re going to buy that?”

The Secrets We Keep

They were the Holocaust victims who have always been overlooked. It is easy to understand why a Roma survivor would keep silent regarding her tragic past, after building a new life in post-war America. However, the horror of it all comes back when she suddenly hears the voice of the German officer who killed her sister. She sets out to take justice into her own hands, much to her husband’s shock in an unfolding morality play that could be described as an Americanized Death and the Maiden. Above all else, she wants to hear the truth from his lips in Yuval Adler’s The Secrets We Keep, which releases today in some actual theaters.

Maja met her physician husband Lewis Reed in an Allied medical hospital in Greece, but before that, she had escaped from a Romanian concentration camp. Rather cruelly, the horrific incident that still haunts her happened in between. While seeking refuge with the Allies, they were intercepted by a rogue German unit, who did what you might imagine, before killing her sister. Fifteen years later, Reed recognizes the voice of their commanding officer in their sleepy Americana factory town.

He now calls himself Thomas Steinmann and claims to be Swiss, but the creepy tune he still whistles convinces Maja he is the man from her nightmarish past. Rather resourcefully, she kidnaps him and secures him in her basement, with the intention of extracting a confession. Naturally, it is a lot for Dr. Reed to process, especially since this is the first he has heard of his wife’s internment (or her Roma heritage in general). Yet, he is also deeply suspicious of Steinmann (or whoever he might be), so at least he is more sympathetic than Sigourney Weaver’s husband in Maiden.

In point of fact, Secrets is maybe not perfect, but it is still considerably superior to Maiden (which was helmed Roman Polansky, a convicted sex offender and written by a member of the “Duke 88” lynch mob). One of the major reasons is the Reeds’ compelling marriage dynamic. The ways Dr. Reed struggles with the unimaginable situation are highly credible and acutely human. Noomi Rapace does some of her best work since Stockholm as Maja Reed and Chris Messina does the best work we’ve ever seen from him as Dr. Reed. They have several extended scenes together during the third act that really make the film worth seeing.

Close: The Latest Noomi Rapace Netflix Movie of the Week

Which mining company would you expect to act more ethically, the one based in Morocco or the cronied-up firm from Beijing? It should be a no-brainer, but the Paris Hilton-esque heir to the Hassine mining empire is not helping much. Generally speaking, it is bad for the corporate image when the principal shareholder is accused of killing a cop. Rather awkwardly, it happens to be true in the case of Zoe Tanner. Granted, she was acting in self-defense, but she might not live long enough to tell her side of the story. Fortunately, she has a pesky bodyguard in Vicky Jewson’s Netflix original movie, Close (trailer here), which starts streaming this Friday.

Sam Carlson never loses a client, even when they are obnoxious brats like Tanner. She just inherited a controlling interest in the Hassine company, much to her step-mother’s shock. It is particularly galling for Rima Hassine, because her family built up the mining concern in the first place. She just might have to do something about that.

For Carlson, it is supposed to be an uneventful one-week temp gig, but she suddenly must foil a kidnapping attempt during her final night at the Hassine Casbah. Alas, they fall out of the frying pan and into the fire when a group of corrupt cops tries to finish the job. Tanner really makes a mess of things when she kills one of them, thereby making her a fugitive from justice and a major PR problem for the Hassine company, right at a time when it is competing with a Chinese firm for a major deal in Zambia. Spurned by her stepmother, the heiress can only trust Carlson, who continues her protection duties, out of professional pride and her own maternal guilt.

Somehow, Noomi Rapace has become the queen of mediocre Netflix original films, following up the mildly entertaining Bright and the ho-hum What Happened to Monday? with the competent but unremarkable Close. At least, she shows some of the grit and action chops that brought her international stardom in the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but most of the time, she looks like she is on auto-pilot (and why shouldn’t she be?).

Easily the most interesting elements of Close are the character of Rima Hassine and Indira Varma performance as the aforementioned. Both are more complex than the Cinderella Stepmother viewers are initially set-up to expect. On the other hand, the entitled Zoe Tanner and Sophie Nélisse portrayal of said are like fingernails on a blackboard. Rather problematically, very little effort is made to distinguish the various thugs, assassins, and crooked coppers who densely populate the film.

Reportedly, Close was based on the experiences of real-life bodyguard Jacquie Davis, but we can only hope she is not as humorless and downbeat as Carlson. Presumably, the title is a reference to keeping close to the client, or maybe the old “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” saying. The Moroccan locations are quite cinematic, but it is more likely to become background television than a film anyone will be compelled to give their rapt attention. Regardless, Close starts streaming this Friday (1/18) on Netflix and nobody should feel any urgency over that fact.

Tribeca ’18: Stockholm

Ostensibly, it is a term used to condone questionable decisions, but the term “Stockholm Syndrome” definitely carries highly negative connotations. In general parlance, it implies the victim was either too weak or too stupid to resist the brainwashing or seduction of their captors. However, the circumstances of the historical incident that coined the term were considerably different. At least, that is how the somewhat fictionalized chronicle of the Normalmstorg Kreditbanken hostage crisis unfolds in Robert Budreau’s Stockholm, which screens during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.

He presents himself as an American singing cowboy, but the hostage-taker’s real identity will be the source of some controversy during the stand-off. Regardless, his love for Bob Dylan is genuine enough (the film opens with “New Morning,” a good one that isn’t over-played). Oddly enough, Kaj Hansson (as he is first assumed to be) is not so shocked when the alarm is tripped. In fact, it is a necessary precondition for him to start presenting his demands, which includes the release of his bank-robbing best pal Gunnar Sorensson.

It turns out Sorensson is rather surprised by the scheme, but he plays along—and maybe plays both sides against each other when the cops offer him a deal to act as a “mediator.” Bank officer Bianca Lind is more perceptive than Hansson (or whoever). She can tell he has more enthusiasm than brains. He is in over his head, but the increasingly infuriated cops are probably a greater threat to her safety. Together with the two other hostages, who also start to see things her way, Lind tries to help plot an exit strategy for Hansson and Sorensson.

For many viewers, the big surprise here is the portrayal of Lind (and to a lesser extent her two fellow hostages). Frankly, they are not victims at all (yes, they were menaced a bit during the initial hostage-taking, but they quickly get over it). There is no question Lind is the smartest person in the room—and she choses to help her serenading captor, making her own voluntary decision. As a result, this film is bound to be controversial, especially in Sweden, considering it portrays the sainted Olof Palme as a craven political beast.

The other happy revelation is just how good Noomi Rapace is as Lind. Let’s be honest, her post-Millennium Trilogy work has been iffy (we’re talking about films like Bright, Unlocked, and What Happened to Monday? here). Maybe going back to Sweden was healthy for her, because she is totally riveting as Lind, but in a way that is both cerebral and humane.

Rapace also develops some intriguingly ambiguous chemistry with Ethan Hawke as the nice guy hostage-taker. Arguably, Hawke is a tad old for the “impetuous kid” role (his historical analog was thirty-two at the time of the standoff), but he might be one of the few thesps working today who can credibly convey the character’s flamboyance and his naivete. Of course, Mark Strong is money in the bank as the intense, borderline sociopathic Sorensson. Terms like “heroes,” “villains,” and “anti-heroes” definitely get a little murky in a film like this, but Christopher Heyerdahl (a distant relation of the explorer) makes quite a memorably severe antagonist as police chief Mattsson.

“Stockholm Syndrome” is a term that gets haphazardly thrown around, but this film makes viewers question its usage, even starting in the first instance. It is a tight, energetic period thriller, helmed with a fair amount of flair by Budreau (who also directed Hawke in the hip Chet Baker bio-pic, Born to Be Blue). Highly recommended, Stockholm screens again this Monday (4/23) and the following Sunday (4/29), as part of this year’s Tribeca.

Bright: Will Smith Comes to Netflix

Welcome to a post-racial alternate universe, but human nature still really isn’t so different. In this modern-day fantasy world, all mankind stands unified in their contempt for orcs and their jealousy for elves. Class distinctions are more stratified than ever, but even though we are mere mortals, we stand firmly in the middle, because the orcs threw their lot in with the Dark Lord way back when. They will never shake that scarlet letter, not even when one of their own joins the thin blue line. Daryl Ward does not like orcs any better than the next fellow, but he is stuck riding with Nick Jakoby, mismatched buddy-cop style in David Ayer’s Bright (trailer here), which premieres today on Netflix.

Ward was not exactly thrilled to partner with an orc in the first place, but he is even less so after getting shot by an orc thug, whom he suspects Jakoby deliberately let slip away. There is not a lot of trust there, even though Jakoby is desperately trying to make nice. Unfortunately, a clique of crooked cops wants Ward to set up his partner. Orc or no orc, that kind of dirty business does not sit well with Ward, but they leave little choice. However, the stakes really start to rise when Ward and Jakoby respond to a call involving magic.

According to screenwriter Max Landis’s system of magic, only “Brights” can wield magic wands. Of course, over 99% of such magic users are elves, but occasionally there is a human Bright. Sorry orcs, next time don’t side with the Dark Lord. As it happens, this might be the next time. Lialeh, the leader of the evil elf clan known as the Infirni aspires to raise the infernal overlord, but her wand was stolen by her remorseful protégé, Tikka. Now there is a mad scramble amongst all LA’s unsavory elements to recover the wand, which really doesn’t make sense, because if any non-Bright touches it, they will basically get atomized. You’d think they’d at least bring some oven mitts from home.

Bright is not the dumpster fire many critics are making it out to be, but it is safe to say internal logic is not its strong suit. On the other hand, Landis creates a compelling mythology, which he establishes without lines and lines of clunky expositional dialogue. Yet, on your third hand, there is no denying Bright gets clumsy and didactic driving home its admittedly well-meaning message of tolerance. We just so get it, after having our noses rubbed in it, six or seven times.

Regardless of all that, Joel Edgerton does some of his best work to date, despite the layers of orc prosthetics, as the painfully earnest Jakoby. It is a shockingly soulful performance, capturing the all the lonely alienation of an orc rejected by his own kind and despised by the rest of the world. In contrast, Will Smith never pushes himself the least little bit as Ward. He seems to think he can get by flashing his grin and cracking wise—and we really start to resent him for it, because he is more or less correct.

As Lialeh the villainess, Noomi Rapace looks like she gets indigestion from chewing scenery. It is too bad Vietnamese superstar Veronica Ngo does not get more dramatic heavy-lifting to do as her hench-elf Tien, considering she only appeared in Last Jedi for about thirty seconds as Paige Tico, but she still totally stole the picture as far as many fans as concerned. At least Edgar Ramírez looks like he is having fun as Kandomere, the Elfish federal Magic Squad agent.

The effects are pretty ho-hum, but Edgerton is terrific as Jakoby and Will Smith is Will Smith as Ward. The world-building is also impressive, but it would be even more effective if the film could go ten minutes without a teachable moment. Given the obvious parallels with Alien Nation it is also almost unforgivably awkward that the orc makeup looks so much like that of the “Newcomers.” It is more fun than you’ve likely heard, but it is not $90 million worth of fun. Recommended for fantasy fans who like their films loud and heavy-handed, Bright is now streaming on Netflix.

Michael Apted’s Unlocked

During the Cold War, there were a number of traitors who did indeed betray America and the UK for ideological or pecuniary reasons. In the current War on Terror era, the prospect of living large as a hero of the Caliphate has thus far been far less tempting. Yet, cynical thrillers need turncoats, so now we have the highly placed official who is so disgusted with Western softness, he or she secretly pulls strings to help the Islamists detonate a nuke in the Earth’s core that will send the remaining fragments of our planet hurtling into the sun, all for the sake of waking us up to the dangers of terrorism. This is one of those. It is a shame Peter O’Brien’s CIA-disparaging screenplay bends over backwards to equate Western intelligence services with Islamist terrorism, because it wastes some jolly nice supporting performances in Michael Apted’s Unlocked (trailer here), which releases today on DVD.

Alice Racine is a highly trained CIA interrogator, but she has been slumming in a low-level cover position after she “unlocked” her last subject slightly too late to prevent a terrorist attack in Paris. However, when a courier is intercepted ferrying a verbal message to a major U.S.-born terrorist from his London-based spiritual advisor, she reluctantly swings back into action. However, halfway through the unlocking process, she gets a call from her Langley handler, telling her to sit tight, because they have this courier they need her to unlock.

Obviously, there is a high-placed traitor in the agency, but with eye-rolling predictability, Racine is assumed to be in league with the shadowy squad that intercepted the now deceased courier. Racine goes on the run to ferret out the traitor with the wink-wink encouragement of her MI5 colleague Emily Knowles and back-up provided by Jack Alcott, an ex-military cat burglar, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (or should that be the right time?).

Aside from the moral equivalency, O’Brien’s screenplay is also ridiculously predictable. If someone looks like they have a treasonous haircut, you can bet they will be doing some third act back-stabbing. However, there are two reasons to possibly consider soldiering through Unlocked, should all your other entertainment options fail: John Malkovich and Toni Collette. Malkovich is laugh-out-loud hilarious as the wickedly snide CIA operations director Bob Hunter. We can only hope there is someone with that kind of take-no-prisoners attitude protecting our country. However, Collette totally hangs with him as the incisive and sophisticated Knowles. When they spar, the film becomes a thing of beauty. In contrast, Noomi Rapace basically punches the clock as Racine, while Orlando Bloom telegraphs his character’s secrets from a mile away.

Still, Apted keeps it all chugging along smoothly enough. As a director, he is hard to classify, landing somewhere on the spectrum between journeyman and auteur. Besides the Up series of documentaries, Apted has helmed a Narnia film, episodes of Showtime’s Masters of Sex, a Bond movie, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Sting’s “I Burn for You” video, so it is safe to say nearly everyone has seen his work. Unfortunately, Unlocked is no Gorky Park, but it is not really Apted’s fault—and Malkovich and Collette certainly are not to blame. The fundamental premise is simply too unlikely and too stilted. Not recommended, Unlocked is now available on DVD.

What Happened to Monday?: Multiple Noomi Rapaces on Netflix

In the medium-future, the Euro-dystopia has adopted China’s family planning policies. One-child allotments are rigorously enforced by the jackbooted Child Allocation Bureau (CAB). Extra siblings are humanely put into cryogenic sleep to await a better, more sustainable world. Yeah, sure there are. In any event, cranky inventor Terrence Settman was not about to let his orphaned septuplet granddaughters get whisked away to a bureaucratic fate worse than death. Instead, he secretly raised them to live as the tag-team Karen Settman persona. However, when the first Karen Settman of the week fails to come home, her grown twins must track her whereabouts without revealing their secret in Tommy Wirkola’s What Happened to Monday? (trailer here), a Netflix original film, which starts streaming this Friday.

Old Man Settman, seen in formative flashbacks, assigned each twin a day of the week to leave the apartment, which became their informal names among themselves. At the end of each day, the siblings would have a group review, so they could fake their way through their respective days. Since they each have their respective talents (Friday is a numbers cruncher, Thursday can drink all night with clients), they have risen up the corporate finance ladder quite quickly. However, on the day Karen Settman receives the big promotion they had been working towards, Monday disappears.

Obviously, if anyone on the outside sees two Karen Settmans, it would be curtains for at least six of them. Nevertheless, Tuesday will have to venture out to determine the fate of Monday. Despite some tiresome smoke-blowing from a work rival, it quickly becomes apparent the dastardly Nicolette Cayman is involved. Not only is she the architect of the draconian One Child policies and the director of the CAB, she is also a candidate for parliament, so she is not eager for news of septuplets surviving undiscovered well into adulthood to leak to the press.

Sometime in the 1970s, the apocalyptic left recognized Marx’s failures and adopted an 18^th Century British country curate as the guiding philosophical star. Thomas Malthus’s dire forecasts of exploding population and dwindling resources could be used to justify no end of governmental controls. Formerly a liberating force, the masses became the rapacious instrument of their own destruction. Happily, Malthusian analysis was thoroughly debunked by Julian Simon, but screenwriters Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson obviously did not get the memo. People are still little more than a drag on resources in Monday’s world. It is just a little tacky to kill them outright, like Cayman does.

Obviously, there are echoes of Orphan Black to be heard in Monday. It also bears some similarities to Ben Bova’s entertaining 1980s novel Multiple Man, in which a series of clones managed to get elected President of the United States and then somehow lose their “Monday.” Bova’s novel would probably require a lot of updating, but its political intrigue would still be more fun than Wirkola’s derivative dystopia.

Most problematically, Noomi Rapace does not distinctly delineate her various Karen Settmans, forcing us to rely on superficials, like wardrobe and hairstyle to tell them apart. Glen Close has chewed plenty of scenery as various villainesses, but she phones it in as Cayman. However, Willem Dafoe’s Grandpa Settman is appropriately intense and (justly) paranoid, while Marwan Kenzari charismatically upstages his love interest[s] as Adrian Knowles, the CAB officer who has been secretly carrying on an affair with Monday.

Dystopia is getting old. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back towards Heinleinesque and Roddenberryesque science fiction optimism. Monday is a case in point. It all just feels like familiar ground. Okay as a time-wasting stream, but instantly forgettable, What Happened to Monday? launches this Friday (8/18) on Netflix.

Shainberg’s Rupture

If Martyrs was torture porn as informed by millennial theology, this would be the equivalent for the secular faith so many place in UFOs and fringe conspiracy theories. When a shadowy cabal abducts and tortures a single mother, they do so for the sake of what they consider the greater good. Isn’t that always the case? However, their latest victim will be surprisingly resourceful in Steven Shainberg’s Rupture (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Renee Morgan is pretty cool for a mom, but her ex is a big jerkweed, so their son is a bit confused. She had planned to go skydiving with friends as an exercise in empowerment, but winds up in a life and death struggle instead. As the victim of a highly-organized kidnapping, Morgan finds herself captive in a grungy, dungeon-like laboratory, where the evil people in lab coats and business suits try to get her to “rupture” through drug treatments and scare tactics, a la the rats in 1984 (its spiders for Morgan).

Just what it means to rupture is sort of a secret, but it is safe to say it would profoundly alter Morgan’s nature and identity. Regardless, she would prefer not to stick around to find out. Her mothering instincts override everything, as we can easily believe. However, we would also expect her drive to reunite with her son to bring out more of a killer instinct as well, but Morgan is strangely well-behaved during her escapes into the ventilation ducts.

In other hands, Rupture could have been far more torture-focused, so Shainberg’s restraint, so to speak, is appreciated. The top shelf cast also helps immensely. Noomi Rapace does some of her best work since the Lisbeth Salander trilogy as the resilient Morgan, making her both resolute and vulnerable. Michael Chiklis, Kerry Bishé, Lesley Manville, and Peter Stormare bring more color and variation to her tormentors than you would expect. Even if it is not spectacularly original, the lab-lair is still a creepily effective setting.

The real problem is it simply isn’t much fun to watch a narrative like this unless it evolves into a shameless payback movie. The fundamental premise, incorporating elements of Martyrs, X-Files, and any number of abduction horror movies, is not exactly unprecedented either. In this case, Shainberg makes us go through all that for an awkwardly flat payoff. The tension is considerable and the performances are more than competent, but it is still hard to justify the trip they take us on. Earning deeply mixed emotions, Rupture opens tomorrow (4/28) in New York, at the Cinema Village.