Movie Review Hunter Killer

Hunter Killer (2018) 

Directed by Donovan Marsh

Written by Arne Schmidt, Jamie Moss

Starring Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman, Common, Linda Cardellini, Toby Stephens 

Release Date October 26th, 2018

Published October 26th, 2018

Hunter Killer stars Gerard Butler as submarine commander Joe Glass. Glass has just been handed his very first command, aboard the USS Arkansas at a most inopportune moment. It is Joe’s task to take his hunter killer class sub crew into heavily guarded Russian territory and find out what happened to another hunter killer class sub which was sunk in the area, assumedly by a Russian sub that was also downed in the fight. 

What Joe and his crew find is something quite unexpected, both subs appear to have been attacked not by each other but by a third sub which subsequently begins attacking Joe’s sub. The Arkansas survives this encounter but having just sent another Russian sub to the bottom of the ocean, the international incident they were investigating may be exploding into World War 3 unless Joe can quickly figure out why this Russian sub has gone rogue. 

Meanwhile, back in Washington D.C, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Donnegan (Gary Oldman) has tasked Rear Admiral John Fisk with sending a team of Green Berets into Russian territory so they can get close to where the Russian President Zakarin (Alexander Diachenko) and his top military secretary, Admiral Durov (Michael Gor) are holed up near where the subs have been downed. 

What the Green Berets, led by Bill Beaman (Toby Stephens) , find is that there is a coup in process, the Russian President is the hostage of his top military secretary and the secretary is bent on starting World War 3. Now three arms of the American military, along with an advisor from the NSA (Linda Cardellini) must work together to come up with a plan to rescue the Russian President and avert World War 3. 

I must admit, that sounds like a pretty great description of a first person shooter video game. Sadly, Hunter Killer is a movie and thus not nearly as much fun. Hunter Killer is the latest in a long line of lunkheaded military rehashes from Millennium Entertainment, the group that rescued Gerard Butler from the Hollywood ash heap and given him a second act as the purest example of lunkheaded, ill-conceived 80’s action movies, the new millennium Michael Dudikoff. 

For those not among the 10 people who got that Michael Dudikoff reference, Dudikoff was the bargain action hero of Cannon Films, the group behind such glorious 80’s cheese as American Ninja, Avenging Force and the Missing in Action Franchise. Those examples should give you a good idea of the quality of Hunter Killer, we’re not talking high end action here, we’re talking about the kind of slapdash trash that used to go directly to drive-ins and eventually, directly to VHS. 

Hunter Killer is supremely dumb and not in a fun way. Rather, Hunter Killer is dumb in the most boringly competent ways imaginable. Hunter Killer was directed by a newcomer named Donovan Marsh who is just inexperienced enough and just talented enough to miss the point of the movie he’s making. He doesn’t appear to understand that Hunter Killer is cheesy and thus he commits to the idea with all his talent, not realizing that everyone in the cast knows they’re working on something cheap and disposable. They know the company they’re working for. 

Butler and Oldman have worked with Millennium Entertainment for years. Butler is there because Millennium was the only company willing to touch him after his toxic run of bombs from 2008 to 2011 that culminated with him playing a leprechaun in an almost career endingly bad segment of Movie 43. Oldman worked with Millennium because his name was just big enough to work on the box cover of a direct to DVD crime movie and their checks weren’t bouncing. 

No surprise to learn that Hunter Killer was on the shelf for a while before Oldman re-established himself among the Hollywood elite with his Academy Award winning performance in Darkest Hour. Hunter Killer is the kind of movie that if it had come out around Oscar time last year it might have cost him Best Actor just as many speculated that Norbit cast Eddie Murphy Best Supporting Actor by arriving around the time he was nominated for Dreamgirls. 

We know Hunter Killer has been moldering on the shelf for a while because one of the supporting actors, Michael Nyqvist died more than 18 months ago. It’s tragic that a fine, under-recognized pro like Nyqvist has Hunter Killer as the last thing on his resume but at least he was gone before the world had seen what a terrible film he’d closed his fine career with. Here’s hoping he was well compensated. 

I realize that some people enjoy this stinky cheese of a movie but it’s definitely not for me. Butler is his usually dopey self, swaggering about spitting nonsense dialogue in his god-awful American accent. He doesn’t appear to care that he’s not acting but caricaturing American swagger in the most unfunny way possible. It’s hard to know if I pity Butler for his complete lack of talent or if I am meant to laugh at his dimwitted burlesque attempt at bringing back the 80’s action movie. 

Hunter Killer is bad in a most bland and peculiar fashion. It’s not shot poorly, it’s inoffensive in that the jingoism is tempered by having so many foreigners lead the cast of this American action movie, Butler, Oldman, and Toby Stephens, are not Americans and appear to have no interest in selling America f*** Yeah attitude that a true 80’s action movie would. Had this film actually starred Michael Dudikoff it would have ended with him planting an American flag in the heart of the dead foreign secretary while American jets flew overhead dropping tiny American flags. 

I guess, in that sense, we can consider Hunter Killer restrained. Not any good, but restrained. Unfortunately that restraint keeps the movie too tasteful to be bad in a fun way. Instead, the film is bad for being deathly dull, populated by bored actors either over-performing or under-performing masculine military cliches and spouting nonsense jargon that sounds cool but comes off like boys playing with toys and not serious-minded military adults. 

Movie Review The Curse of La Llarona

The Curse of La Llarona (2019) 

Directed by Michael Chaves

Written by Mikki Daughtry, Tobias Iaconis

Starring Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velasquez, Marisol Ramirez

Release Date April 19th, 2019

Published April 19th, 2019 

The Curse of La Llorona is another movie under the banner of The Conjuring movie universe. The film was produced by James Wan but not directed by the man who has made this the most underestimated movie franchise going today. I may not be a fan of any of these movies, not even The Conjuring, but there is no denying that The Conjuring Movie Universe is a legit phenomenon. The Nun, The Annabelle movies and now The Curse of La Llorona, go to show the enduring power of ghost stories.

The Curse of La Llorona stars Linda Cardellini of Freaks & Geeks fame as Anna, a DCFS worker and recent widow, living in the early 1970’s Los Angeles with her two kids. Anna has been struggling at work and having cases taken from her but when a long term case comes back up for a review, she insists on being the investigator assigned. This will be a fateful decision as she will attempt to save two boys from a manic mother only to have tragedy prove to be unavoidable due to circumstances beyond her control.

The mother in question was attempting to save her two sons from the Curse of La Llorona, aka The Curse of the Weeping Woman. In a prologue set in 16th Century Mexico we see a woman in a wedding gown caring for her two sons until something mysterious and strange happens. Soon, one of the boys is alone and wanders until he finds his mother crying while murdering his brother by drowning him in a lake. How this curse lingers from Mexico in the 1600’s to 1970’s Los Angeles is not something the movie cares to explain.

After failing to save the two boys from the supposed curse, Anna finds her and her two kids, Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), the subject of the curse and in desperate need of help. In a cameo, Tony Amendolo portrays Father Perez who was first introduced in Annabelle. Father Perez is the first to step in and offer help but when church protocol slows things down, he offers up a former clergyman, Rafael Olvera (Raymond Cruz), a man who battles demons in a fashion that even the church finds extreme.

That’s the set up for the rest of the plot, such as that plot is. If you aren’t a fan of movies that are merely a series of loud noises leading to creepy people in makeup popping into frame at random moments, The Curse of La Llorona is not the movie for you. There is nothing more to The Curse of La Llorona than a series of jump scares. You could get the same thrills watching a cat run into a room and back out again without warning.

The Curse of La Llorona is yet another silly ghost movie where the ghost in question has unlimited powers and yet never bothers to actually complete its goal of killing the people it came to kill. Weirder still is how powerless anyone is to stop La Llorona and how ineffective she is. Her targets are children whom she is easily able to corner, one of them she even has twice, trapped under water, and she is still foiled. How is she foiled? Good question, I was watching the movie and I don’t have that answer.

La Llorona throws over chairs and slams doors and throws children into swimming pools and down flights of stairs and yet she never appears able to actually finish what she starts and we have no idea why. The makers of The Curse of La Llorona have so little respect for our wits as audience members that they don’t bother to create a rational set of rules for the character to follow. Sometimes she can be foiled by Anna yelling at her, other times she’s foiled by dirt from sacred ground or holy water. It’s whatever arbitrary device the movie needs to sustain more than 100 minutes of run time.

This lack of logic, this lack of care for character motivation sinks pretty much every movie in The Conjuring Movie Universe for me. Never once are we introduced to a demon or ghost character with any motivation for their malevolence. The ghost/demon is evil and that is all the motivation the filmmakers feel is necessary. But from a structural, plot standpoint that is simply wrong. It sets up a scenario where you know that the main characters A, B and C will be fine at least until the end because the runtime dictates it and the supposedly terrifying scenes of the first two acts of the movie are just creepy for the sake of creepy because the payoff can’t come until the end

I will never understand why so many people enjoy a jump scare machine movie like The Curse of La Llorona. It’s almost the same movie every time. The same jump scares, the same lingering camera on windblown curtains, the slamming doors and overturned chairs and the same creeptastic makeup design for the creatures who pop into frame to pop goes the weasel you into dumping your popcorn.

Why does this continue to be fun for you?

Movie Review Scooby Doo

Scooby Doo (2002) 

Directed by Raja Gosnell

Written by James Gunn 

Starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Geller, Linda Cardellini, Matthew Lillard, Rowan Atkinson

Release Date June 14th, 2002

Published June 14th, 2002 

I came into this review all set to bemoan art in films, Hollywood's lack of creativity and why producers can't find original projects and so on. Then I saw the movie, and while I could still complain about all of those things, I have to be honest and say on some level I enjoyed this product of Hollywood's inability to be original.

As the story begins, we join our heroes Fred (Freddie Prinze of Darkness), Daphne (Sarah Buffy Geller), Velma(Linda Cardellini), Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and the most famous Great Dane in the world, Scooby Doo. After doing battle with a ghost in Pamela Anderson's toy factory (yes that Pamela Anderson), the gang unmasks a janitor posing as a ghost. Another case solved by mystery Inc., except when approached by the press, Fred takes all the credit. Velma gets upset and quits, so does Daphne, and the gang is no more.

Two years later, Scooby and Shaggy are living in the Mystery Machine when they are approached by a messenger offering them money and all they can eat if they will come to the Spooky Island amusement park and solve a mystery. Fred, Velma and Daphne have also received invites and the gang is reunited. The film is as simplistic as its setup, with simple messages about friendship and teamwork that are aimed at the preschool audience. There are a couple of good chuckles for adults, such as subtle references to Shaggy's pot smoking and numerous send-ups of the cartoons classic setups.

The casting is pretty bad save for Matthew Lillard who was the perfect choice for Shaggy. He provides most of the film’s best laughs with his physical humor. Freddy Prinze Jr., to criticize him would be pointless so I'll move on. Linda Cardillini as Velma seems uncomfortable throughout the film struggling to ape the cartoon voice and manner of her cartoon counterpart. Sarah Michele Gellar as Daphne may have seemed like a good choice but after performing as long as she has on TV's best show (personal opinion) she looked bored by this material that is obviously beneath her. 

The CGI Scooby turned out surprisingly well. After the first trailer I thought he was going to look creepy. In the film, however, Scooby is well realized and the actors do a good job playing against a character that wasn't really there. Lillard had the most scenes opposite Scooby and he does a great job, it was probably easy for him, after working so often with Freddie Prinze he is used to talking to vacant spaces. I know, cheap shots.

One of the charms of the Hanna Barbera cartoon was that every episode was exactly the same. The film version does a good job at sending up those setups while still living into them. But don't be mistaken, Scooby Doo is a kid’s movie. It's meant for those between the ages of 3 and 12. And on that level Scooby is a partial success