Movie Review A Haunting in Venice

A Haunting in Venice (2023) 

Directed by Kenneth Branagh 

Written by Michael Green 

Starring Kenneth Branagh, Tina Fey, Kelly Reilly, Jamie Dornan, Michelle Yeoh, Jude Hill 

Release Date September 15th, 2023 

Published 

I want to like A Haunting in Venice, but I just can't. I've written and rewritten this review several times, each with a different take on the movie. I tried to find what I liked about the movie and leaned into that for a while. Then I went hard on the movie and tore it up and erased that. I don't know why I am struggling with a movie that is not really so complicated as to require such mental machinations. But here we are with a film critic having seen a movie and still trying to decide if he liked it or not. Do I like A Haunting in Venice? Yes or No?  

A Haunting in Venice returns Kenneth Branagh behind the camera into the role of famed detective Hercule Poirot. In this adventure, Poirot is several years retired from his experience in Death on the Nile. Now living in Venice, Poirot has hired a former police detective, Vitale (Riccardo Scamarcio), to keep away those that would draw him back into the detective role he's trying to leave behind. And yet, Vitale makes way for one of Poirot's old friends, Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) to get in to see him. Oliver is the author who created the legend of Poirot by basing her bestsellers on his cases. 

Naturally, she has an interest in getting her friend back to solving murders and she's got just the thing for him. On this night, Halloween night in Venice, she's attending a seance. She intrigues Poirot by admitting that though she's a skeptic, she can't seem to figure out how famed psychic Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) does what she does. Oliver wants Poirot to help her debunk Reynolds or confirm that there is something real to her and thus a confirmation of something beyond life. Poirot dismisses her notions of the fantastic and agrees to debunk the psychic. 

Attending the seance alongside Oliver, Poirot, and Poirot's security man, are a rogue's gallery of potential murder suspects, per usual for a Poirot mystery. First, there is the host of the event. a former opera singer and celebrity, Roweena Drake (Kelly Reilly). Roweena set up this event on the notion that Reynolds could contact her late daughter, Alicia, who died under mysterious circumstances a year before. She's invited her family doctor, Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dorner) and he has brought his young son, Leopold (Jude Hill). Already on hand is Roweena's maid and caretaker, Olga (Camille Coltin), and uninvited but arriving regardless is Alicia's former fiancee, Maxime (Kyle Allen). 

Though Leopold is excluded, for obvious reasons, the rest will gather in Alicia's bedroom as Reynolds attempts to contact Alicia. In the process, Poirot will expose Reynolds as a fraud, survive an attempt on his life, and then Reynolds will end up dead. Her death is the true catalyst for the film's central mystery, one that will grow to encompass at least one more body and connect back to Alicia's death, tying everything up in a neat little bow. It's all very clean and efficient and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that except, if you're like me, and you guess the plot at hand early on, the fun drains out of the proceedings quickly. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: A Private War

A Private War (2018) 

Directed by Matthew Heineman

Written by Arash Amel 

Starring Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Stanley Tucci 

Release Date November 2nd, 2018

Published November 6th, 2018 

A Private War stars Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) as Marie Colvin, famed war journalist who was killed in a bombing attack in Syria in 2012. To her dying breath, Marie Colvin was a reporter, fighting to bring the facts of the story to the masses with the power of words. It was what she’d done since the 80’s when she became one of the first western journalists to interview Muammar Gaddafi when he was the name in middle eastern terror as the leader of Libya. 

The story begins on a shot of devastation in Homs, Syria where Marie was killed in 2012. We then quickly flashback to 2001 when Marie was reporting on the conflict in East Timor, Sri Lanka. Against the explicit instructions of the government, Marie went to interview members of the Tamil Tigers who were fighting a vicious, inhuman war in East Timor and were ravaged by starvation and violence. 

It was during this event that Marie was nearly killed when government backed forces attacked the rebel guides leading Marie back to a safe area where she was to write and report her story. Even after Marie told the soldiers that she was a journalist, she was nearly struck by an RPG fired by government soldiers. In that attack Marie lost sight in her left eye but still found a way to write 3000 words about the conflict and do so in time for her deadline. 

The attack in Sri Lanka however, would have long term effects on Marie as few stories had. Marie suffered from PTSD, something she dismissed but her repeated nightmares and increased reliance on alcohol indicated was true. Even this was not enough to keep Marie from going to Afghanistan and then Iraq in the wake of the September 11th attacks. It was Marie Colvin and her photographer who, against the explicit instructions of the American government and Iraqi leaders, helped to uncover Saddam Hussein’s horrific mass graves in 2003. 

A Private War bounces around in time to an occasionally confusing degree. The film does use captions to orient us to what time we are in but it’s up to us to catch up to where we are, which might be Marie’s apartment in London in the midst of a nightmare or some foreign journalist hangout in some unnamed war zone. Director Matthew Heineman is a documentarian by trade so perhaps the weaknesses of the story structure of A Private War come from inexperience in the structure of a narrative film as opposed to the more edit heavy word of documentary. 

That said, Heineman is exactly the right director for Marie Colvin’s story. Heineman’s time in the documentary world placed him in many of the same dangerous circles of the Marie Colvin’s of the world. Heineman’s previous documentary feature, City of Ghosts was filmed in Raqqa, Syria among a group of citizen journalists who likely would have been inspired by Marie Colvin had they known her. Raqqa is just 4 hours from Homs, where Marie was killed. 

Heineman’s style is strong, especially considering that the move from the intimate digital of documentary to the more filmic and controlled style of narrative feature can be jarring for some directors. A Private War is a great looking movie and that should come as no surprise as it was lensed by Academy Award winner Robert Richardson, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarentino protégé. The film has a similarly hazy, heady quality to Richardson’s work for Scorsese. 

Rosamund Pike is a complete badass in A Private War. She captures Marie Colvin as a human character in a way that we’re rarely allowed to see a woman in a movie. It’s not merely warts and all,  it’s honesty and bravery and the warts and all. Not only is Pike’s Marie tough, she’s also super sexy in a way that is similar to the swaggering way actors like Richard Gere are sexy when they play rebel journalists in war zones. 

Pike’s femininity is enhanced by her tenacity. The film shows her being bolder and crazier than some of her male counterparts and then shows her completely nude, stripping bare your perceptions of what it means to be tough and feminine. It’s a striking scene and one in which the nudity matters, it’s a demonstration of her character, a statement about her sexuality and desirability and how these are not separate qualities from toughness and intelligence. 

Rosamund Pike is on her way to a Best Actress nomination if there is justice in the world. Her Marie Colvin deserves that. This performance and this person deserve that tribute. It’s a shame that Marie Colvin didn’t receive this kind of recognition when she was alive to revel in it. She had already earned her stripes even before she helped put a face on the crisis in Syria and not merely her own. It was Marie Colvin’s stories about the dead and the dying in Syria that put the crisis in Syria into the homes and minds of the world and in ways many world powers would prefer she hadn’t. 

A Private War is imperfect as a movie, it’s far too episodic in nature to quite satisfy as a narrative feature but Rosamund Pike’s performance goes a long way to correct many of the qualms I had with the narrative structure of the movie. Pike is incredible and for her, A Private War is an absolute must-see.

Movie Review Robin Hood (2018)

Robin Hood (2018) 

Directed by Otto Bathurst 

Written by Ben Chandler, David James Kelly

Starring Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, Ben Mendelsohn, Eve Hewson, Jamie Dornan 

Release Date November 21st, 2018

Published November 20th, 2018

Robin Hood is among the most ill-conceived blockbuster action movies in history. The attempt by Hollywood to sex up and modernize the Robin Hood legend is sad and desperate instead of new and cool. Director Otto Bathurst, a veteran of numerous popular TV shows, botches Robin Hood so badly you're left to wonder if it was intended as serious or as parody. The film is riddled with so many genre cliches that parody feels like a genuine possibility. 

We begin just as the crusades are getting underway. Young noble, Lord Robin of Locksley (Taron Egerton) is madly in love with a peasant girl named Marion (Eve Hewson). Their love affair is interrupted when Robin is drafted into the Crusades by the evil Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn). He leaves and finds himself somewhere in the Middle East where the film becomes a straight up, modern war movie. 

This sequence is laughable with arrows that destroy walls more effectively than most bullets and fly at a rate that only cartoon arrows have ever flown before. Cartoon is an appropriate metaphor here because the arrows are a laughable example of bad CGI. Here, Robin Hood plays out a sequence that is a remarkable cliche from every modern, Iraq war era war movie. An arrow shooting machine gun has the crusaders pinned down and only Robin can get to him to shut down that arrow gun. 

This sequence made me laugh embarrassingly loud. The creators of Robin Hood believe they are bringing Robin Hood into a more modern context but the attempt fails miserably due to the remarkable series of incongruencies and anachronisms. On top of this, the idea that Robin was ‘drafted’ ruins the idea of Robin as a noble man disillusioned by what he thought was a just war. Instead, you just have Robin as a bratty dilettante who happens to be the only Englishman with a conscience. Here the movie tries to be a Vietnam movie and once again, I was embarrassed for myself laughing and for the actors selling this nonsense. 

During this sequence Robin meets John (Jamie Foxx), a middle eastern fighter who sees Robin as someone in a position of privilege that could be to his advantage. Stowing away on the ship taking an injured Robin back to England, John seeks out Robin and unfolds the plot. They will train and become thieves and steal the fortune of the Sheriff of Nottingham, disrupting the funds needed to continue the Crusades. 

In his time away, the Sheriff has condemned and burned Robin’s home and announced him as having been killed in the war. Because of this, Marion has left and moved on and is now in a relationship with WIll Scarlett (Jamie Dornan). Marion is also secretly conspiring with Friar Tuck to uncover a piece of information that will take down the Sheriff and his supporters among the corrupt Church of England. 

Could any of this nonsense have worked? Maybe, there are a lot of elements in play, plenty of complexities that could be explored. Sadly, the script for Robin Hood is so dopey that it botches everything from beginning to end. There is a conspiracy plot at the center of the movie involving the Church and the Sheriff and it’s all complete nonsense. There is a plot involving stealing documents that then play no role whatsoever in how the story plays out. 

The documents prove a plot that the sheriff is involved in but he’s already robbing and killing the people of Nottingham. Do they really need a conspiracy to want to stand against him? The unneeded nonsense piled into this story only serves to drag things out in remarkably ill-conceived. At one point a character played by the wonderful F. Murray Abraham arrives and appears solely so that he can help Ben Mendelsohn deliver one of the dumbest talking killer monologues in the history of talking killer monologues. 

Because the script is so incredibly dumb and the plot is so remarkably convoluted, the actors are rendered silly throughout. The cast carries out actions that are mostly nonsensical, as if the plot were being written and rewritten mid-scene and all they can do is try to minimize how confused they appear to be. Poor Eve Hewson is the most let down by the nonsense script as Marion appears capably inept, able to steal useless information and just as quickly deliver dialogue dismissing the importance of what she just risked her life to steal. 

I must mention the anachronistic costumes as well. Wow! Leather bars don’t have leather as lovely and durable as they had in the era of The Crusades, several hundred years before leather was even invented. The sheriff wears a gray leather duster that I am pretty sure you could buy at a store for well over a thousand dollars. I realize that the suspension of disbelief is required but the modern touches brought to this story are never justified. 

Set the film in an alternate universe, include magic or monsters, or make it a fairy tale universe, do something to establish a universe where the ludicrous anachronisms aren’t so silly looking. The filmmakers do nothing to make this a believable period in human history and yet it uses history, i.e the Crusades as a touchstone. I am being unnecessarily pedantic about something as dimwitted as Robin Hood but I am trying to contextualize my reaction to this movie which was repeated, embarrassed giggles. 

These giggles were not intended. The movie doesn’t want to be laughed at but I couldn't help myself. The laughable script, the awful CGI, the ludicrously faux cool costumes made me repeatedly burst into giggles I found hard to stifle. I was laughing at the movie and not with it and it was not fun. I didn’t go to this movie to laugh, I wanted it to be the adventure that the marketing promised but no, it’s just all so terrible, so hysterically terrible.