Venom: The Last Dance

He is an alien body-snatcher who decided to become a good guy—sort of. Sure, he still bites off heads, but only those of bad people. Granted, in most films, Venom would be the monster, as indeed he was during most of his first film. Nevertheless, Eddie Brock learned to share his life and his headspace with his parasitic companion. Currently, they are fugitives from justice, but no arrangement is ever perfect. Unfortunately, something from the symbiote’s world starts hunting Venom and Brock, with no regard for human collateral damage, in director-screenwriter Kelly Marcel’s Venom: The Last Dance, which opens tomorrow only in theaters.

Currently, Brock and Venom are laying low (but not low enough) in Mexico, where Venom’s margarita mixing techniques draw unwanted notice. Brock wants to return to America, where he can work to clear his name, so he figures New York City will be the one place where they will not stand out. Getting there will be the trick.

They also need to put some distance between themselves and the large assassin kaiju that tracked Venom from his original space-time-dimension-continuum. As Venom explains to the alarmed Brock, they carry an alien artifact that would free the creature’s master, a malevolent titan intent on destroying all organic life, in all the various universes. That would be a bad thing. Fortunately, the codex-thingy is only visible to the hunter-creature when Venom takes his full black spiderman-looking form—but it is hard to keep the symbiote bottled up.

Eventually, Brock and Venom encounter more symbiotes in a secret government facility cleverly located below Area 51. Unfortunately, that location prompts discussion of the worst aspect of Last Dance: its pronounced and persistent hostility to the American military. There is not one single military character presented in a positive light. That definitely includes the judgmental, shoot-first-ask-questions-later Gen. Rex Strickland, despite his third act heroics. Most are just faceless grist for the mill, so viewers are expected to feel nothing when Venom kills several of them.

Let’s be honest, there is no way any film would portray multiple school teachers or public defenders as soulless villains. Why does Marvel consider it acceptable to uniformly demonize American military personnel, especially when they sacrifice so much more than teachers to serve our nation? In the case of Marcel’s screenplay, this bias is distractingly noticeable.

It is a shame because the symbiotic rapport between Brock and Venom still works. You can say Tom Hardy has good chemistry with himself. His Venom-psycho voice still gets big laughs. It is also cool to see some of the best Venom CGI effects are reserved for comedic bits, like the symbiote’s titular last dance with fan favorite character Mrs. Chen, again played by the returning Peggy Lu, who can hold her own opposite the big serpentine guy.

London Road: The Not Really Verbatim Musical

Sometimes innovative musical theater swings for the fences and knocks the ball out of the part, as happened with Hamilton. Other times, maybe you really just need to see it on stage. Presumably, that must be the case for Alecky Blythe’s “verbatim” musical dramatizing the Ipswich community response to the arrest and prosecution of a serial killer in their midst. Verbatim in this context means the word-for-word transcriptions of interviews and media reports as they were spoken, but duly manipulated to make the speakers sound as petty and narrow-minded as possible. The good people of Ipswich endure another media feeding frenzy in Rufus Norris’s adaptation of London Road (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Before the Ipswich Ripper case, the London Road area was a respectable working class neighborhood with middle class pretensions (Brexit country). It used to be the sort of place you could feel safe raising a family, but the construction of a new stadium changed traffic patterns and brought street walkers into the residential district (literally right in front of their homes). Longtime denizens understandably resented the intrusion, which inevitably colored their response to the brutal murders. Blythe and co-lyricist Adam Cork clearly took pains to cherry pick every “had it coming to them” quote, doing their best to cast the residents as callous moralizers. That is an easy position to take if you live in a coop on Central Park West or a tony flat in the Barbican district. However, anyone who has worried about property values as they worked like a mule to pay their mortgage will take a more forgiving view.

One thing is certain. London Road confirms the greatness of songwriters like Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Yip Harburg, and Dorothy Fields, because it proves memorable lyrics do not “just happen.” Frankly, none of the verbatim libretto rings with either profundity or musicality. Nor is there any natural rhythm to the stray extracts Cork set to music, which gives them all a rather plodding sameness. Good luck trying to hum any of these selections. They are also completely unfair to the neighborhood residents. How would like your awkward words of greeting at a community board meeting set to music and repeated dozens of times over, in the most unflattering manner possible? That’s exactly what happens to poor Julie, the chair, played by Olivia Colman at her iciest.

Throughout London Road, Norris never shows any of the murders or even a whisker on the back of the murderer Steve Wright’s neck. Ironically, that leads to a weird moral equivalency, in which the “good riddances” of Julie and company are as bad or worse than Wright’s murderers, because at least he wasn’t too snobby to mix with his victims. Arguably, this is the most off-key musical since Bialystock & Bloom produced Springtime for Hitler. Not recommended, not even for the novelty cameo of Tom Hardy as a singing cabbie, London Road opens this Friday (9/9) in New York, at the Village East.

Sundance ’14: Locke

This film would not have been possible twenty-five years ago. Without the advent of cell phones, a long dark night of the soul spent on England’s motorways would not offer much drama.  Fortunately, Ivan Locke is a plugged-in guy, but he will suffer through a series of uncomfortable calls in Steven Knight’s Locke (clip here), which screens during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Locke is a construction supervisor who takes pride in doing things the right way.  However, he has made a mistake that will be hard to put right. Acknowledging his responsibility, Locke is driving to London, where a woman who is not his wife will soon enter into labor. This is a really bad time for it. In addition to fielding tough questions from his wife and their two sons, Locke is expected to oversee the pouring of the concrete foundation for a major new high rise. Having gone AWOL, Locke is pretty much fired, but he is determined to guide his loyal subordinate Donal through the process, for the sake of the project. Of course, complications arise, at the work site, the hospital, and the home front.

If nothing else, Locke should go down in history as the definitive film on the intricacies of concrete construction techniques.  It really is educational. Happily, it also has Tom Hardy, putting on an acting clinic behind the wheel of Locke’s BMW.  He goes through a full spectrum of emotions, but he never indulgences in cheap Streepian histrionics.  This is a performance that pulls viewers into the man’s psyche, rather than obsessing over ticks and twitches.

Even though Locke is essentially a one man show, Hardy gets some nice assists from a talented voice cast literally phoning in their supporting turn.  Andrew Scott (Moriarty in the BBC-PBS Sherlock) is a particular stand out as Donal, often delivering some welcome and effective comic relief.

Best known as the Oscar nominated screenwriter of Dirty Pretty Things, Knight deserved considerably more attention for his directorial debut, Redemption, starring a misty-eyed Jason Statham.  Clearly, he has an affinity for noirish tales of nocturnal angst and desperation. Indeed, Knight’s execution is surprisingly stylish, never feeling stagey or contrived.  In fact, there is something rather hypnotic about the constant play of head lights and reflections captured by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos’s three mounted digital cameras.  Deceptively simple, Locke is a film of considerable depth and integrity of character.  Recommended for general audiences, it screens again tomorrow (1/19), Friday (1/24), and Saturday (1/25) in Park City, as well as Thursday (1/23) in Salt Lake, as part of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Lawless: The Moonshine Stills of Franklin County

Scarcity drives up prices.  Just ask bootleggers like the Bondurant Brothers.  The folk hero moonshiners had an intuitive grasp of economic principles sorely lacking in Washington today.  They also produced good home brew.  However, they were not the types to knuckle under when a corrupt lawman from Chicago tries to muscle in on their operation.  Since it is war he wants, the Bondurant Boys will give him one in John Hillcoat’s Lawless (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

Based on Matt Bondurant’s fictionalized novel about his prohibition defying forebears (colorfully titled The Wettest County in the World, as Hillcoat’s film was also known prior to its current bland moniker), Lawless transports viewers back to a time when nearly everyone in Franklin County, Virginia was involved in the illicit booze trade, one way or another.  That is western Virginia, not West Virginia, but you get the idea.  Liquor runs freely around these parts and nobody dares to bother to Bondurant Boys, until now.

Frankly, the eldest brother Forrest and middle brother Howard should have been dead long before the film opened.  Their knack for cheating death gave rise to the myth of Bondurant invincibility—a legend they start to believe.  As a result, when the highly connected Special Deputy Charlie Rakes (from Chicago, the nation’s leading producer of crooked, power-hungry government officials) announces the terms of his protection racket, the Bondurants will not play ball.  Conflict is inevitable, but the expansionist schemes of the youngest Bondurant Brother Jack only escalate the situation.  To make matters worse, the Bondurant whippersnapper’s attention is divided between business and wooing the skeptical daughter of the local Mennonite clergyman.

Not surprisingly, Tom Hardy is kind of awesome as the hardnosed Forrest Bondurant and Shia LaBeouf is kind of not as the immature Jack.  Though probably every groupthinking critic will dub the former “Bane the Bootlegger” there is something electrically charismatic about Hardy’s gruff, grunting Bondurant.  He hardly speaks in complete sentences, except when passing Biblical judgment on a rival, like Jules in Pulp Fiction, but he makes every guttural word count.  LaBeouf’s Bondurant is a different matter, truly looking like a boy among men.  It is hard to believe his brothers would let him drive the car to the store, let alone acquiesce to his reckless wheeler-dealing.

Lawless works best when focusing on its larger than life characters, like Brother Forest.  While Guy Pearce has played a fair number of workaday villains in recent years, he finally gets it right here, oozing clammy evil as well coifed sadist, Rakes.  Making the most of a near cameo role, Gary Oldman also brings a blast of energy to the film as big city gangster Floyd Banner.  While it is not nearly as showy a part, Jessica Chastain still takes a solid turn as Maggie Beauford, Forrest’s potential love interest with a scandalous past.  In fact, the rich, cinematic ensemble easily carries Lawless, overcoming its weak lead.

Like a conclusive laboratory experiment, Lawless proves Hardy, Pearce, and Oldman are movie stars, but LaBeouf is not.  Hillcoat also demonstrates a firm command of period shootouts and nicely suggests but never overplays the tall tale flavor of the Bondurant legend.  Consistently vigorous and entertaining, Lawless is ultimately a very good Prohibition action-drama, easily recommended for Bane fans and those intrigued by the era when it opens this Wednesday (8/29) in New York at the Regal Union Square and AMC Kips Bay.