The Exorcism (Not The Exorcist, or is it?)

Anthony Miller is not an exorcist, but he will play one in the movies—hopefully. Unfortunately, the role is really taking a lot out of him. The director is demanding, but a real-deal demon is even scarier. Cheekily, the film-within-the-film is code-named The Georgetown Project. Horror fans know what that refers to, but the demon wants to rewrite the ending in Joshua John Miller’s The Exorcism, which opens Friday.

Miller is known for his mistakes off-screen, but he is trying resurrect his career. The Georgetown Project would be a high-profile comeback vehicle, since the original actor cast in the Father Merrin-like role was killed during the prologue. As a bonus, Miller also secures a production assistant gig for his daughter Lee. They are not exactly estranged, but their relationship is certainly a bit frayed around the edges. He thought spending time together would bring them closer, but instead, he is humiliated when she sees Peter the director wielding all his past failures to prod him, in a method kind of way.

Meanwhile, the demon also starts playing games with Miller’s perception of reality. The combined pressure takes a toll on his physical, mental, and spiritual health. Unfortunately, the film’s technical adviser, Father Conor, does not suspect demonic interference until its claws are deeply embedded in Miller’s psyche.

The Exorcism is not just broadly inspired by The Exorcist in the way of nearly every subsequent demonic horror movie. In this case, the echoes and parallels are deliberately intended. Miller’s father was actor-playwright Jason Miller (born John Anthony Miller), who starred as Father Karras in Exorcist I and III. Peter shares a name with Exorcist novelist and screenwriter, William Peter Blatty, but some of his confrontational tactics are reminiscent of techniques attributed to director William Friedkin. Also, Russell Crowe has had a few off-screen incidents, not unlike [his] Miller.

Regardless, the Anthony Miller of The Exorcism is another example of the troubled souls he now seems to be specializing in, often in otherwise formulaic B-movies, like Sleeping Dogs. In the case of The Exorcism, his performance is just as good, but it comes in a better film.

The Last Son

Isaac Lemay has been cursed by a tribal elder, who has apparently read his Sophocles. The old man actually called it a prophecy, but the way Lemay lets it consume him definitely makes it a curse. Told he will one day be killed by one of his offspring, Lemay sets out to systematically kill his kin in Tim Sutton’s The Last Son, which releases today in theaters and on-demand.

Killing is what Lemay does best. It is what earned him the “curse.” However, he still found time to visit many prostitutes. Anna is one of the last, whose sons are not yet accounted for. Lemay makes quick work of the one she acknowledged, but Cal, the one she gave up for adoption for his own protection, is a slippery outlaw. In fact, he is a lot like his old man.

Cal’s feelings towards his mother are a little confused (again, see the literary allusion above), but the man who makes her swoon is Solomon, a hardboiled cavalry officer. Having been raised by the Cheyenne as a foundling, Solomon always remains a bit of an outsider in white society. Nevertheless, he is determined to bring to justice the outlaws who stole a gatling gun and murdered a detachment of troops. Yes, that would be Cal and his associates.

This is a dramatic change of pace for Sutton, who was previously known for moody art-house fare like Memphis. There is still a whole lot of brooding in Last Son, but everyone also takes care of Western genre business. As Westerns go, it is super-revisionist, but there is also a pinch of Weird West too, which makes things interesting.

Brad Anderson’s Fractured

In this case, better electronic medical record-keeping might have prevented an awful lot of trouble. Yes, that is the takeaway we’re going with. Ray Monroe gets a little concerned when a hospital that is more concerned with paperwork than bedside manner loses his wife and injured daughter in Brad Anderson’s Fractured, which premieres today on Netflix.

While driving across country, Ray and Joanne Monroe bicker like cats and dog, while their daughter Perri listens to CDs. When the disc-player’s batteries die, they pull for a pit stop (in fact, the hygiene-challenged service station is literally called “The Pit Stop”), where Perri takes a nasty fall after getting spooked by a snarling dog. The Monroes rush her to the nearest hospital, but the admitting department is more interested in her organ donation status than her injuries. Eventually, she is examined by a doctor, who recommends a CAT scan.

When Monroe awakens from a brief doze in the waiting room, his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found. To make matters worse, the hospital staff insists they were never there in the first place. When Monroe begs to differ, they first react dismissively and then become increasingly hostile, eventually reaching for the sedatives, but the desperate father won’t be having any of that.

Anderson has made a number of interesting genre films, like Vanishing on 7^th Street, Stonehearst Asylum, and Beirut, which is why Fractured is such a disappointment. The premise is somewhat old-hat to start with, but the film also seems to take forever to build up any steam. Still, Anderson and his intense star, Sam Worthington, manage to keep viewers invested enough to be annoyed by the predictable but still deeply unsatisfying conclusion. “All that for this,” viewers might ask.

The Hunter’s Prayer: Sam Worthington Shoots Up and Shoots ‘Em Up

Don’t worry. Martin Hatto’s dog will be just fine. Unfortunately, the maid will not be so lucky. She will take a bullet between the eyes just as she is letting the pooch out for the night. Nor will he or his second wife survive the prologue, but we really don’t care about them, do we? His daughter is off at a Swiss boarding school, where “Lucas” the world-weary hitman was supposed to cap her. Instead, he came down with a bad case of conscience and decides to protect her instead in Jonathan Mostow’s The Hunter’s Prayer (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Hatto laundered money for the American operation of British financier-drug lord Richard Addison, so naturally he was skimming off the top. To teach a lesson to his other underlings, Addison put out hits on the entire Hatto family. However, Lucas had second thoughts when the sight of Ella Hatto made him all sentimental for the daughter he never met. After Lucas foils an attempt on her life, Addison gives him an ultimatum: either kill Hatto or his estranged family dies. While this leaves him a bit conflicted, his hardcore intravenous drug addiction makes him even more unreliable. However, Lucas can still kill with ease, even in the midst of serious DTs, with one veiny arm tied behind his back.

Frankly, Prayer is a refreshingly lean and unfussy action movie, unencumbered with any narrative fat or extraneous message-making. Addison wants Hatto dead, so he has people try over and over and over again. What does it have to say about the refugee crisis? Absolutely nothing, except maybe it is ridiculously easy to smuggle someone over the Swiss/French border.

As it happens, Lucas is exactly the sort of brooding tortured action protagonist that is totally in Sam Worthington’s wheelhouse. Forget the dreadful Avatar and Clash of the Titans movies and check him out in Hacksaw Ridge, The Debt, and the criminally under-rated Texas Killing Fields. Throughout Prayer he looks he has just weathered the worst convulsions of withdrawal. It is certainly not what you would call a vain performance.

Allen Leech (the marrying-up chauffeur in Downton Abbey) chews the scenery as best he can, but he just doesn’t have the desired malevolent presence. Israeli thesp Odeya Rush shows more poise and presence than we probably have a right to expect in the run-and-whine role of Ella Hatto. To round things out, Verónica Echegui adds sophisticated femme fatalism as Lucas’s dealer-fixer, Danni.

Like Lucas (usually), Prayer gets the job done. It is blessedly free of pretense and slack. Simplicity of purpose is always a virtue, particularly in this case. Recommended for anyone who appreciates throwback action-thrillers, The Hunter’s Prayer opens this Friday (6/6) in New York, at the Village East.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken: Holland’s Most Notorious Abduction

Alfred Henry “Freddy” Heineken was sort of like the Netherlands’ Lindbergh Baby, except he was nobody’s victim. A desperate group of disenfranchised construction workers pulled off the truly daring abduction, but getting away clean turned out to be a trickier proposition. Nevertheless, their crime-of-the-century had considerable long term consequences that are duly revealed in Daniel Alfredson’s Kidnapping Mr. Heineken (trailer here), which opens this Friday.

Frankly, if Holland in the early 1980s had better respected property rights, Cor van Hout and his business partners might have never resorted to crime. They desperately needed a loan to keep their small construction enterprise afloat, but their only collateral was a building infested with legally protected squatters—not exactly a property the bank would be happy to assume should they default. Ironically, old man Heineken, a supporter of the Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, probably would have empathized. Regardless, when Van Hout and his hot-tempered mate Willem Holleeder resolve to follow Willie Sutton’s advice and go where the money is, it necessarily means Mr. Heineken.

Showing considerable patience, Van Hout, Holleeder, and their accomplices spend two years in planning, rather than rushing into the operation. They want the authorities to assume Heineken was grabbed by a well-funded international terrorist organization or the mob. Initially, it all goes according to plan, but old man Heineken is cool customer. His chauffeur Ab Doderer is a different story. Heineken tries to reassure his panicking employee through the walls of their makeshift cells, but the working class immigrant is not holding up well.

You can expect to see a lot of negative reviews of Mr. Heineken from those hung up on class warfare rhetoric because of its largely positive portrayal of Freddy Heineken. He is consistently calm, collected, and caring with respects to poor Doderer. It is also rich to learn how he responded to his kidnapping as a capitalist once he was released (no thanks to his captors).

In large measure, Mr. Heineken is the sort of caper film where the whole point is to watch it go spectacularly wrong. Getting the ransom is the easy part, as it usually is. The getaway is way more difficult. However, in this case, the endgame is especially long and twisty.

Screenwriter William Brookfield incorporates a number of fascinating historical details into the narrative and the mostly British Commonwealth cast looks appropriately continental and suitably beaten down where applicable. Of course, Sir Anthony Hopkins is totally credible as Freddy Heineken, instantly establishing his intelligence and charisma. Jim Sturgess does his best work in years as the angsty Van Hout, while Sam Worthington is reliably tightly wound as Holleeder (but not nearly as awesome-nuts as he was in the under-rated Texas Killing Fields).

Alfredson, who helmed the second two Swedish Lisbeth Salander films, keeps the action moving along and the tension cranked up, despite the fatalistic direction it must take. Cinematographer Fredrik Bäckar also gives it a gritty look that nicely suits the times. It is quite a well-produced period-thriller that does justice to fascinating real life events. Recommended quite highly, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken launches on iTunes and opens in select theaters this Friday (3/6), including George R.R. Martin’s Jean Cocteau Cinema in Albuquerque.

Based on True Crimes: Texas Killing Fields

They like their justice swift in the Lone Star State (and God bless them for it), but it will take a transplanted New York cop to break open a heinous serial killer case. Inspired by the gruesome history of the marshland outside Texas City, TX, a notorious dumping ground for corpses, a somewhat fictionalized pair of lawmen show their grit, warts-and-all, in Ami Canaan Mann’s Texas Killing Fields (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Nobody wants to face up to what goes on in that swamp, least of all the Texas City police officers charged with investigated it. However, Brian Heigh is new around these parts. Out of a reasonable sense of duty, he agrees to help Pam Stall, a cop from a neighboring jurisdiction, investigate a series of disappearances linked to the marsh.

His tightly wound partner Mike Souder advises against getting pulled into an open-ended morass. It also hardly helps that Stall is his ex. Heigh and Souder have very different approaches to their job, but eventually they get on the same page. Unfortunately, by that point time is running out for the latest abductee, whom the cops have a particularly personal interest in.

Frankly, the procedural element to Fields is fairly standard stuff. A bit messy, the screenplay leaves a major side-plot largely unresolved. However, the two leads really deliver the goods. Indeed, based on his work here and in The Debt, it is time to forget the big awful blockbusters like Avatar and become a believer in Sam Worthington. He is fantastic as Souder, viscerally intense and unpredictable as a live wire. While he plays the easy-going understated cop (isn’t that usually a Southern thing?), Jeffrey Dean Morgan is genuinely compelling as the slow-burning Heigh. Though largely underutilized, at least Jessica Chastain’s Stall has a cool interrogation scene (that not surprisingly has been released as a teaser).

Mann (yes, the daughter of Fields producer Michael Mann) nicely exploits the lonesome Texas backdrop and cranks up the tension down the stretch like an old pro. Yet, one thing that really distinguishes the film is its sympathetic portrayal of Heigh’s Catholicism. As the body count mounts, he has something of a crisis of faith, but not in a way that leads him to question his beliefs. Rather, he struggles to find his proper path amid the chaos or what his wife suggests might be his calling. Not only does this humanize Heigh, it provides some light in a very dark film. 

Nobody will mistake Fields for a buddy-cop movie, but Worthington and Morgan are compulsively watchable as they dispense some justice. Recommended rather enthusiastically for those who want strong character studies in their crime dramas, Fields opens this Friday (10/14) in New York at the IFC Center.

The Debt, Restructured

Rachel Singer understands the dark side of human nature. Her ex-husband Stephan Gold is a high-ranking cabinet official, and her daughter Sarah Gold is a journalist. In fact, Gold’s new book has reopened a number of old wounds for her parents. Singer and Gold were part of a three agent Mossad team charged with capturing “The Surgeon of Birkenau,” a National Socialist war criminal clearly modeled on Mengele. Though they were supposedly forced to kill the doctor when he attempted to escape, we quickly discover there is something wrong with the official story in John Madden’s restructured The Debt (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

Based on Assaf Bernstein’s Israeli film of the same title, The Debt first presents the account of the fateful mission that made Singer a national icon in Israel. It is that story Sarah Gold told in her bestselling book, which Singer dutifully agrees to help publicize. Yet, when press reports surface of a senile patient in a Ukrainian nursing home claiming to be the notorious Surgeon, Dieter Vogel, she and her ex take it deadly seriously. So does David Peretz, the third member of the team, who was always too troubled by the events that transpired in 1965 East Berlin to enjoy their heroic celebrity.

Now a wheelchair-bound senior intelligence official, Gold’s field ops days are behind him. Though the conscience plagued Peretz has recently reappeared, he will be in no condition to deal with the Surgeon. It is up to Singer to covertly enter Ukraine and finish the job. While she cases the sanatorium, The Debt flashes back to East Berlin, showing how it all really went down.

As adapted by screenwriters Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan, Madden’s Debt closely hews to the plot and structure of the original. However, the new version plays up the three Mossad agents’ romantic triangle and also adds a bit of a moralizing "truth is important" spin to the ending. However, like the source film, The Debt never suggests Singer’s team had the wrong man, only faulting their execution, the result of stress exacerbated by generational guilt and sexual tension. Indeed, The Surgeon is presented as evil incarnate, played with icy menace by Jesper Christensen.

When casting an actress of a certain age for somewhat action oriented film, Helen Mirren is pretty much the extent of the short list. Though she brings the appropriate presence and credibility to the 1997 Singer, the heart and guts of the film remain in 1965 (as was the case with its predecessor). Madden cranks the up the claustrophobic tension in their “safe” flat quite effectively, while making it vividly clear how the legacy of the Holocaust weighed on the team as first generation children of survivors.

Frankly, Sam Worthington is surprisingly compelling as the young but already too tightly wound Peretz, suggesting he might actually be a very good actor, who just had the mixed luck to be in utterly terrible but hugely successful films, like Avatar and Clash of the Titans. Yet, perhaps the greatest surprise is Jessica Chastain, who rises to challenge of playing the same character as Dame Helen, in the same film. In fact, she might even get the better of her, investing the younger Gold with equal measures of strength and vulnerability.

Though it still has not fixed the problematic third act showdown, The Debt remains a leanly muscular morality play-thriller. While the English language version might be a bit more inclined to cast the Mossad in an unfavorable light, there is never any ambiguity as to the Surgeon’s truly malevolent nature. A surprisingly faithful and well executed remake, The Debt should definitely satisfy those who enjoy a John Le Carrré-esque story, who have do not already know the twists and turns of the original. It opens this Wednesday (8/31) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.