Review Category: Movie

KNIVES OUT / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: RIAN JOHNSON / STARRING: ANA DE ARMAS, JAMIE LEE CURTIS, TONI COLLETTE, CHRIS EVANS, DON JOHNSON / RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 27TH

The name Rian Johnson works as a summoning spell. You need only whisper it and, from the depths of the Twitterverse, there will awaken an army of enraged Star Wars fans to accuse The Last Jedi director of having ruined the franchise. It seems this intense backlash has done much to inform Johnson’s newest offering, a whodunit with a twist. With Knives Out, he creates an undisputable crowd-pleaser that may just work to redeem him to the angry masses.

A whodunit may just be one of the hardest genres to review without spoiling the entire plot, so let us start where it’s safe: the characters and the set-up. The latter is classic Agatha Christie. A rich and renowned murder-mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead in his home, throat slit, on the night of his 85th birthday party. It certainly looks like suicide, but an investigation must still be conducted.

Enter a detective (LaKeith Stanfield), a slightly dim-witted state trooper (Noah Segan), and Southern private eye Benoit Blanc (a hilarious and absurd Daniel Craig, in the farthest cry from his usual steely image) who may not know who employed him, but is pretty sure the old man was murdered.

In a witty, breathless and incredibly over-the-top interrogation set piece that brilliantly shreds through a novel’s worth of exposition, we meet the family-slash-suspects. They are – deep breath please – Thrombey’s daughter Linda (Curtis), a commanding, ‘self-made’ realtor mogul and her dull husband Richard (Johnson); his other daughter Joni (Collette), a lifestyle guru akin to Gwyneth Paltrow if Paltrow was strapped for cash, and her activist daughter Meg (Katherine Langford); and Thrombey’s knitwear-wearing, intellectual son Walter (Michael Shannon), his wife Donna (Riki Lindhome) and alt-right troll son Jacob (Jaeden Martell).

And that’s not everyone! Late to the party, absent from the funeral and early to the will-reading is Thrombey’s oldest grandchild Ransom, played with riotous enjoyment by none other than the former-Captain America (a quick note to casting agents: give Chris Evans some more baddie roles, please and thank you). Providing another standout performance in a refreshingly non-sexualised role is Ana de Armas as Marta, the dead man’s nurse and close confidante. Marta is not only the moral anchor of the film, she also proves very useful to Blanc’s investigation in her total inability to lie without violently vomiting. Hustlers might have done it first, but Knives Out does it better.

Sounds amazing? That’s because it is. Johnson impeccably walks the line between paying homage to the genre and its essence, while also completely upending its conventions and with it, the audience’s expectations. Knives Out rolls out surprise after twist, juggling a large ensemble and many a plot-twist with apparent ease, yet without any flashy tricks and without seeming self-congratulatory. And while the genre is completely timeless, Knives Out is also consistently of its time. It playfully but sharply comments on today’s political tensions and class divisions without feeling heavy-handed. It’s driven by empathy amidst a host of characters who are decidedly unempathetic, and that makes Johnson’s story feel fresh and timely despite the genre’s golden age being long passed.

This is just big Hollywood at its best. A renowned narrative format honoured yet subverted, a plot that is intelligent but not smug, an all-star cast that is perfectly balanced, giving performances that range from venomous to vulnerable yet are all rip-roaringly funny. Rian Johnson redeemed? I would hope so. I don’t believe anyone can leave Knives Out without having had the time of their life.

THE GALLOWS: ACT II / CERT: 15 / DIRECTORS & SCREENPLAY: TRAVIS CLUFF, CHRIS LOFING / STARRING: EMA HORVATH, CHRIS MILLIGAN, BRITTANY FALARDEAU / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW (ON DEMAND/SKY STORE)

Back in 2015, Blumhouse backed handheld horror The Gallows looked to craft a new icon in Charlie Grimille, a young lad that lost his life on stage in a noose mishap at a 1993 school production of play called “The Gallows”, only to return all those years later as a vengeful hooded spirit to trap, haunt and stalk a bunch of young ‘uns in the school theatre after dark. Despite harsh critical responses, there were big box office returns ($43 million on a $100,000 budget) for Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing’s found footage frightener. So, here comes Charlie once again for The Gallows: Act II.

This time, the film focuses on aspiring actress – and seeker of an online following – Ana Rue (Ema Horvath), whose arrival at a fancy new school raises her hopes that she can finally ‘make it’. But when the young lady decides to embark on a viral trend known as the “Charlie Challenge”, her desires are tested and twisted by an evil presence.

The Gallows: Act II (similar to the vastly disappointing [Rec] 3: Genesis) abandons its core ‘shaky cam’ format early on and the results are a big mess of a movie. Rumours had it this secretly shot sequel was put to one side after disastrous test screenings and after watching it, this seems very likely. You just get the distinct impression the makers lost confidence in this some time ago and the longer it goes on, the more it crumbles.

Despite the effort of lead Ema Horvath, very little here makes any sense either on its own merits or particularly as a sequel. There is a clear intention with the script to raise a point about the obsessiveness of pursuing online stardom but it is so badly handled that the film just comes across as garbled and unsure of what it wants to accomplish. The final twist feels placed here simply because the last film had one, unlike that one though, this twist makes not a lick of logical sense and is hardly even built up to.

Characters come and go, each with rushed or creakily delivered “development” and as the scares jump in and out of proceedings, you’re just struck by the ineffectiveness of it all. None of the familiar scares land and they don’t even have the benefit of a creepy setting (like an empty theatre in the first movie) to give them a leg up.

You just cannot help but think that they thought it was a good idea at the time, started rolling and realised it was too late to rethink. As it lands unceremoniously in select theatres/on demand in the US and on Sky Store over here in the UK, it seems sadly clear that this inferior in every way sequel has choked more painfully than poor old Charlie did.

THE JACK IN THE BOX / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: LAWRENCE FOWLER / STARRING: ETHAN TAYLOR, ROBERT NAIRNE, LUCY-JANE QUINLAN / RELEASE DATE: FEB 2020

A fun concept is executed well in this low budget British horror from director Lawrence Fowler. However, as can be the curse with the more thrifty side of the genre, it sags in the middle and starts to get a little trying as the scenarios and locations fail to change. The one thing they clearly worked on the most, is making sure the monster itself looks menacing and imposing, and they certainly succeeded there.

We start with an effective prologue, set to haunting music, of an old man discovering the Jack in the Box while metal detecting, but it soon turns sinister, with a cloven hand killing his wife and dragging her into the box, we quickly cut to American Casey (Taylor), turning up for his first day of work at a small museum in the British village of Hawthorn. Strangely enough he is a museum and history enthusiast, unlike his co-worker Lisa (Quinlan) who has been in the village all her life and is coasting. It is never totally clear what type of museum it actually is, looking more like a country house, it has a war and a toy exhibit though, and soon Casey discovers a large antique Jack in the Box, which he proceeds to open. This is an action he will come to regret, as people start dying pretty quickly, including two hapless thieves, what they thought they could steal from this tiny museum, is not made clear. We are quickly introduced to our Jack, a tall clown with razor sharp teeth and a terrifying smile, it genuinely looks great, and is backed up by some fun exposition in the form of Internet searching, where we learn Jack’s are a type of demon from France that need to kill a certain amount of people before becoming dormant once again.

Just as the film starts to become enjoyable, the pace slows and you desperately want to see the actors in another location and the film to develop quicker. The Jack also doesn’t kill people in an inventive way, usually just grabbing them by the head, until death. After a tragic backstory for Casey gives him motivation, we do get back on track, and armed with the wisdom of a Demonologist played by Tom Carter, he sets off to destroy the Jack once and for all.

Welshman Fowler, who is still relatively new to the horror genre, does a decent job here, trying to develop his titular villain and make the most out of the budget and locations he has to work with. The monster design is good and some of the action scenes are set up well, with a bit more money and some faster pacing, The Jack In the Box could of really given us something exciting, although it never quite gets there, it would be perfect for an anthology of movies on Halloween night, and you never know, Jack just may be back!

DOCTOR SLEEP / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: MIKE FLANAGAN / STARRING: EWAN MCGREGOR, REBECCA FERGUSON, KYLIEGH CURRAN, CAREL STRUYCKEN, ALEX ESSOE / RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 31ST

It takes a brave filmmaker to stand toe-to-toe with creative titans Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick, but writer/director Mike Flanagan and producer Trevor Macy have done so by adapting King’s 2013 novel Doctor Sleep (a sequel to The Shining) for the big screen. King famously shunned Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of his 1977 novel, but due to the overall universal love for it, Flanagan and Macy have treated Kubrick’s film as canon and adapted the literary sequel as a mutual follow-up to both the book and movie; while doing their best not to overly emulate King and Kubrick’s distinctive, contradictory styles. A monumental mind-fuck of a task, but one that Flanagan has both thankfully embraced and miraculously smashed.

The film Doctor Sleep re-introduces us to a now forty-something Danny Torrance (McGregor): son of possessed psycho Jack. Danny is a recovering alcoholic battling psychic disadvantages and personal demons and dilemmas, spawned from the incident at the Overlook which saw Dad Jack go bat shit with an axe before freezing to death in a massive maze. The sequel sees Danny form a psychic connection with a kid called Abra (Curran) who has also connected to, and is being pursued by, a gang of psychic ‘vampire’ drifters, led by the devious and alluring Rose the Hat (Ferguson). Abra tracks down Danny for help and the two go on the run before Danny is soon put in a position where he has to confront demons from his past in order to conquer present ones.

While Doctor Sleep (the novel) doesn’t quite have the door-stop girth of most of King’s opuses, Flanagan’s film still clocks in at quasi-whopping two-and-a-half hours. Some scenes and subplots have been trimmed to tighten the pace. This results in a slightly clunky, fragmented plot, but Flanagan makes it fly, as the story swerves from slow-burning, supernatural, character drama into a chase and evade thriller enriched with surrealism. Weirdness stems from stunningly rendered dream/vision scenes augmented by rich, twisted visuals. Meanwhile, chase sequences are interspersed with character development and Flanagan’s trademark creeping dread, providing depth, terror, and suspense.

In his twenty years of filmmaking, Flanagan has worked exclusively in horror and honed the skills to unnerve and frighten. Here he reigns in the frights to focus on story, characters and visuals but Doctor Sleep is consistently creepy. Horror manifests through characters, circumstance, and story instead of via inelegantly jimmied-in jump scares and set pieces. Flanagan has also expertly recreated locations from Kubrick’s original film and reintroduced old characters without resorting to digital de-aging and re-constructing.

Aside from its aforementioned fragmentation, Doctor Sleep sometimes feels slightly synthetic, maybe due to being overly digitally polished in post. It still looks unnaturally stunning but lacks the raw edge and chilling potency, instilled by the icy artlessness of Kubrick’s original. There is also a slight narrative sag in the final act, but for the better part Doctor Sleep tinkers on genius, and on the cusp of becoming a masterpiece. Contradictorily, not because of its respect to King and Kubrick, nor its adherence to the components that made The Shining so powerful, but because Flanagan’s style blends so well with theirs while shining equally as bright and distinctive as a key component in making Doctor Sleep unique.

Flanagan’s film has been undoubtedly crafted with love, care, and admiration for both Kubrick’s masterpiece and King’s novel. It frequently, frustratingly, tinkers on fantastic, but is slightly hindered by a few wonky plot cogs, a synthetic air, and clunky ending, yet remains far better than anyone could have imagined. Doctor Sleep deserves to be canon, for Flanagan’s film is freaky, unique, creepy and captivating as both a standalone horror and heart-felt hat tip to Kubrick and King.

Expected Rating: 7 out of 10