Movie Reviews: Top Gun and more...
Titles covered: Top Gun: Maverick, Mitchells vs the Machines, Detective Pikachu, Where the Crawdads Sing, Bullet Train, Days of Heaven, Highlander, South Pacific, The Game
Top Gun: Maverick (***)
"Movies like Top Gun are hard to review because the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless. The dogfights are absolutely the best since Clint Eastwood's electrifying aerial scenes in Firefox. But look out for the scenes where the people talk to one another." - Roger Ebert, in his original review of Top Gun.
For its credit, Top Gun Maverick has great aerial cinematography. I’m not sure how much is real and how much is CGI, but it looks good either way. The sound design is great too, as is the big climactic action scene. And it was interesting how they wrote Val Kilmer’s throat cancer into the plot.
However, there’s not much to the story. Tom Cruise trains a group of younger pilots to re-enact the final battle from Star Wars, they execute the mission and… that’s about it. Similar to the conflict in the original movie, we don’t even find out who the bad guys are. Oh, and Jennifer Connely is there as a love interest, but she has nothing to do with anything, so it’s all pretty pointless. For that matter, there’s no depth to Maverick himself. He’s defined entirely by his love of flying jets and events that happened in the first movie. I didn’t get the feeling that this guy has done much else since 1986.
That said, I kind of understand the hype for this movie based on the action scenes alone. The climactic mission is very intense, very well-shot, and overall awesome. I just wish we got to that part faster. A shorter 90 minute run time would have been perfect.
Top Gun: Maverick has great action scenes, but the non-action scenes are pretty boring and could have been cut down. If the original 1986 Top Gun is one of your favorite movies, this improved sequel will blow your mind. As someone who never liked the original movie, I thought “Maverick” was good enough.
Mitchells vs the Machines (****)
Ever have that moment when you feel like a movie represents you? My wife feels that way about the movie Brave, specifically the relationship between Merida and her parents. Well, The Mitchells vs. the Machines represents my fears for the future.
The bizarre and creative story involves an Amazon-like corporation that is taken over by an AI. The AI decides to get rid of humans, and thus sends robotic drones to round everyone up. The Mitchell family lucks out: the droids sent to capture them are damaged, and become so stupid that they give away all the secrets to defeating the AI villain. Thus, there’s a family road trip to find the MacGuffin to save the world.
The part of this that hit me hard was the relationship between the film’s narrator, Katie Mitchell, and her dad. Once inseparable, the father-daughter team have become distant. Dad hates modern consumer tech, while Katie has become involved with social media circles, avant-garde filmmaking, and online trends. They no longer understand each other. Dad tries his best to get the family to put down their phones and actually engage in real life, and it literally takes an apocalyptic robot revolution to accomplish this.
I found myself able to relate to both sides of the conflict. The Dad represented my fears for the future, as the father of two kids eyeing all the bad influences that await them. But I also related to Katie, and remember a time when I desperately wanted to leave the home of my parents and find “my people.” The heart and soul of the father-daughter story ends up adding serious weight to what is otherwise just a fun and kinetic cartoon about a silly family trying to fight silly robots. The result is a surprisingly good film… though one that doesn’t quite stick the landing.
The film’s biggest problem is that it has two climaxes awkwardly fused together. Climax #1 (the shopping mall) is creative, funny, and succinct. It really could have led to the end of the movie, as the themes of rampant consumerism and family unification really came to a head. Instead of wrapping things up, the film starts up the bigger and louder Climax #2 that drags on way too long. You’ve got to know when to stop!
(Nitpick 1: The writers seemed to have patterned Dad’s tech ignorance after their parents, rather than making him a plausible Gen-Xer with a teenage daughter in the 2020’s.)
(Nitpick 2: The little brother needed a better voice actor.)
The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a pretty great film, albeit one with a few noticeable flaws. It’s funny, clever, and heartfelt.
Detective Pikachu (*** and a half)
I’m not a big Pokemon fan. I know who the characters are, of course, and I’ve enjoyed Pokemon Snap and Super Smash Brothers. However, I haven’t played the main series, and I never watched the anime series or any of the 20+ anime films (most of which weren’t released in the US, and/or got terrible reviews).
So imagine my surprise, having to declare that Detective Pikachu is my new favorite videogame adaptation, beating out 1995’s Mortal Kombat.
No, it’s not a great movie. The plot doesn’t completely come together, and the acting and dialogue is somewhat middling. But it’s a solid movie, and one that takes place in a very unique video game world.
Many previous video game adaptations chose source material that was somewhat generic to begin with (Uncharted, Max Payne, Tomb Raider, Wing Commander, etc.), or diluted it down to a more generic premise (The first Final Fantasy and Sonic movies, Prince of Persia, Warcraft). Detective Pikachu is something entirely different. It creates a truly unique world based on the games, and thus is entertaining even when the story isn’t running on all cylinders.
If I have to compare Detective Pikachu to another movie, the obvious one is Who Framed Roger Rabbit? We see an alternate world in which humans and toons Pokemon live side by side in harmony, but the main character hates Pokemon due to some bad history, and has to solve a mystery concerning his past trauma and an evil scheme. The world of this movie is really a joy to see, with many different types of Pokemon filling in all kinds of roles, from housepets to wild animals to combatants in underground fights. The Pokemon are rendered with realistic fur, scales, and textures, but maintain their cartoony proportions and designs. The result looks absolutely fantastic, and helps us truly believe in this crazy world. Silly anime creatures like Charizard and Ditto are actually scary!
I guess if Detective Pikachu won over someone like me, who doesn’t particularly love Pokemon,, it must be pretty great.
Where the Crawdads Sing (**)
Sigh. This is one of those movies I really wanted to like more than I did.
Where the Crawdads Sing is a murder mystery in which the main “hook” is the unusual prime suspect. The suspect and main character is sort of a hermit who lives alone in a sparsely-populated wetland. The story is mostly told in flashback, telling her strange and often tragic life story. It’s an interesting tale that gets the film off to a good start.
However, the movie lost me in the middle, when it focuses on a love triangle involving two young men. Both of them are generic hunky guys who might as well have been played by the same actor (seriously, they’re actually hard to tell apart). But one of the guys is a bit nicer, and the other is kind of a jerk who morphs into a psycho jerk by the end.
The murder mystery also lacked something for me. A decent portion of the movie is a courtroom drama. It’s helped by a strong performance by David Strathairn, but isn't very tense. Frankly, the prosecution’s case is so obviously weak that I never believed they would have gone in front of a jury. The final reveal is intriguing, but lacks the mandatory flashback/montage to show how the killer could have pulled off such an unbelievable stunt.
Where the Crawdads Sing contains the pieces of a great movie, but it just doesn’t come together. The mystery isn’t twisty enough, the love triangle is too cliche, and the intriguing idea of a wild “marsh girl” is lost when she looks clean and pretty in every shot.
Bullet Train (*** and a half)
Oh boy, this one’s pretty wild!
The concept of this silly, silly movie is that Brad Pitt is an anxiety-ridden thief who’s been tasked with stealing a briefcase from a bullet train. However, the train just so happens to be filled with all sorts of colorful assassins and Yakuza henchmen, leading to lots of fights, intrigue, quirky dialogues, and tense scenarios in which everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
The main highlight for me was the assassin duo of “Lemon” and “Tangerine,” two British brothers who engage in a lot of weird and profanity-laden verbal sparring throughout the whole movie. It’s the sort of off-beat pedantic dialogue that often fills Tarantino movies… but so ridiculous that it’s pretty dang funny. The rest of the cast does well too, filling different roles that sometimes play to our sympathies (“The Father”), and sometimes absolutely don’t (“The Prince”).
I don’t have much else to say about this movie, but I do recommend it. Bullet Train is silly, kinda dumb, and doesn’t really have a point. But dang, is it a lot of fun!
Days of Heaven (****)
A Terrance Mallick movie that isn’t 3 hours long?! What is this?
Days of Heaven is a short and sweet movie that represents the typical style of Terrance Mallick: very pretty scenery, little dialogue, and a story told through scattered “slice of life” bits rather than long scenes.
The story involves a very young Richard Gere as a migrant worker in the early 20th century. He travels with two “sisters,” one of whom is actually his girlfriend. I’m not sure why he doesn’t just claim the girlfriend as his common law wife, but oh well. Maybe it was a lie they got stuck with. Anyway, there are love triangles and murders and lots of farming.
The movie is very pretty, and relies a lot on visual storytelling. There’s some narration to tie it together, but mostly you just watch these people go through their lives on the farm, fall in love, deal with locusts and fires, and so on. Dragged out to 3 hours, this would probably get boring, but at a breezy 94 minutes, the story works perfectly.
Days of Heaven is a “small” movie, but a really good one. It’s probably the easiest Mallick movie to watch, and leaves you with a lot of memorable moments and images.
Highlander (***)
“Haven’t you already seen Highlander?” my wife asked me. Actually, no.
I’ve heard it referenced, I know the basic plot, and I remember knowing Christopher Lambert as “the guy from Highlander,” but I never actually watched the whole thing through. And to be honest, I was slightly disappointed.
But, let’s start off with something good. The story is interesting. The concept is that the human race sporadically produces semi-immortals who can sense each other and eventually need to kill each other. “There can be only one!” When this happens, the last survivor inherits all their collective power called “The Prize.” When one of the immortals turns out to be a powerful psychopath, the others worry that he will use this power to enslave humanity. The plot is interesting, and I liked the parts that charted different events throughout history. Particularly effective is a montage (set to Queen’s “Who wants to live forever?”) in which the main character must watch his wife slowly die of old age, deprived of the children he was never able to give her.
The film-making, on the other hand, is not great. The cinematography is mostly bad (aside from a few decent shots of the Scottish countryside), and the editing is a mixed bag. The acting is also pretty mixed. Clancy Brown and Sean Connery deliver solid performances (Connery’s accent aside), but Lambert seems to be in a TV movie. He was much better as Raiden in “Mortal Kombat.” I also didn’t really like the heavy focus on the modern-day NYC setting, which was somewhat boring and cliched. The flashbacks are much more interesting, and I was always disappointed when the movie cut back to modern day.
Highlander is a great story, but not a great movie. With better acting and more focus on the interesting historical settings, it would have been fabulous, but as-is… it’s fine.
South Pacific (****)
One of the more famous memoirs of WWII is “A Helmet for my Pillow,” which was later adapted into the mini-series The Pacific. The backstory for the memoir is that WWII veteran Bob Lecke attended a showing of South Pacific and was so disgusted by it that he walked out halfway through and vowed to tell the real story.
Yes, South Pacific is a bloodless and sanitized depiction of WWII. Yes, it’s also politically incorrect by modern standards, along with most old movies. But… is that such a bad thing? Nowadays, we have dozens and dozens of bloody, gritty, and depressing movies about WWII. Is it so terrible to have a few about the guys who weren’t on the front lines, and instead goofed around singing silly songs and chasing women?
To be fair, the pacing of the story is pretty odd. The first half of the movie is largely a romantic drama, with not much happening aside from the songs and the smooching. The second half is when the plot actually happens, with a bit of war action and some interesting racial dynamics between the Yankees and the Islanders. Maybe Bob Lecke should have stayed for that part.
The main appeal, however, is the musical numbers. South Pacific is by the famous duo of Rogers and Hammerstein, and might be one of their most consistently-good soundtracks. Every song is catchy, interesting, and well-sung. The best thing I can say about the music is that I wanted most of the songs to go on longer (I think some were shortened from the stage version).
Aside from story pacing, my only major criticism of South Pacific is the colorizing. The post-production team went way overboard trying to readjust the color in scenes to match the mood, and it looks very artificial. Otherwise, South Pacific is a classic that I’d love to do on stage.
The Game (***)
This one is… weird.
I’d sort of heard of “The Game” when I was a teenager, but all anyone had to say about it was that it was weird. And yeah, it is.
The premise is that a Scrooge-like millionaire becomes the participant of an alternate-reality “game” in which various actors pretend to be bystanders and stage weird and unsettling scenarios around him. He is initially aware that it's all one big prank, but the scenarios get more and more outlandish, to the point that he has to question if the “game” is actually an elaborate criminal enterprise. The movie does well with playing off both the expectations of the audience and the main character, and it keeps you guessing.
Of course, the whole affair is also so absurd and implausible that it could only happen in a movie, in which everyone around the main character is an actor conveying a plot. It would have been more interesting if the tricks were more realistic, or at least got a more satisfying explanation at the end. I was definitely interested in where the movie was going, but never really impressed with the game itself, since it obviously relied on cinematic suspension of disbelief rather than a truly clever plan.
I found The Game entertaining and interesting, but wasn’t sure what the “point” of it was. On the whole, I’d say it's worth a watch just for the sheer weirdness of it.