Tag: Channing Tatum

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The Lost City

You’ve seen it before and you’ll happily see it again: An intellectual woman (Sandra Bullock) falls for a big-hearted himbo (Channing Tatum).

Last weekend, I was at the Time Warp Drive-In for the screening of the classic Indiana Jones trilogy. Yes, there was lots of stuff to do around town on Saturday night, and I’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark hundreds of times, but I just couldn’t resist the rare opportunity to watch a masterpiece of adventure cinema at the drive-in. As Harrison Ford and Alfred Molina skulked through the booby-trapped Peruvian temple, I glanced over to Malco Summer Drive-In’s screen three, where I saw Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in an overgrown jungle temple, surrounded by snakes, lorded over by a guy in a fedora who looked a lot like Indy’s arch enemy Belloq. The movie was The Lost City, and its existence in 2022 speaks to the enduring influence of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s collaboration in the early 1980s.

The dashing archeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones has deep roots in the pulp literature of the early 20th century, where characters like Doc Savage and Allan Quatermain were both scholars and two-fisted men of action who traveled to exotic locales to find treasure and thwart the plans of other well-educated, but evil, Westerners. Lucas encountered these hyper-competent heroes in films like 1937’s King Solomon’s Mines and the adventure serials which ruled the Saturday matinee. You can still see those kinds of heroes get out of unlikely scrapes, most recently in Uncharted.

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum search for the Crown of Fire in The Lost City.

Almost as soon as Spielberg set the new template for the colonial adventure tale, people started parodying it.

The earliest light ribbing of Indiana Jones was Romancing the Stone, Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 romantic comedy starring Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder, a romance novelist thrust into an adventure right out of one of her books, and Michael Douglas as a rakish big-game hunter who comes to her rescue. In The Lost City, Sandra Bullock’s Loretta Sage is the direct descendant of Joan Wilder. She’s the author of a highly profitable series of books about extremely sexy hero Dash and his on-again, off-again archeologist love interest Angela Lovemore. Loretta can’t come up with a good end for her latest romantic escapade, in which the couple searches for the legendary Lost City of D, and her publishing company publicist Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is increasingly agitated about it. When she finally gives up and tacks on a stupid ending, she finds herself thrust into a book tour opposite Alan (Channing Tatum), the hunky model who lends his image to Dash for her book covers.

As with all good rom-coms, we know they’re destined to get together long before they do. Just as the book tour is falling to pieces, Loretta is kidnapped by Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), the embittered scion of a Murdoch-esque publishing fortune who spends his ample free time and disposable income treasure hunting. The mysterious artifact Loretta used as the MacGuffin for her latest novel, the Crown of Fire, is real, and it turns out that, in researching her book, she came closer to discovering its final resting place than anyone in history. Fairfax whisks her away to the island where the crown is allegedly located to help finish his search. Meanwhile, a frantic Beth convinces Alan to contact his old friend Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), a former Navy Seal who promises to return with Loretta in 48 hours “or your next rescue is free.”

Directed by brothers Aaron and Adam Nee, The Lost City is not breaking any new ground, but it’s a pretty tight little film which does exactly what it sets out to do. It succeeds based mostly on the chemistry between Bullock and Tatum, never missing an opportunity to wedge them into a cramped sleeping bag or confront Bullock with Tatum’s bare bum. It’s a given that the intellectual Loretta will eventually fall for the big-hearted, thick-headed himbo. The supporting cast is all in on the joke. Pitt once again proves he’s a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body. Radcliffe steals scenes as the civilized villain whose luxury MRAP has a mini-bar. Randolph carries her own comic B-plot almost single-handedly. The self-referential script, like its protagonist, is often too smart for its own good. Ultimately, it’s very refreshing to see a lighthearted romantic adventure where the stakes are human-sized. Sure, it’s derivative, but as Radcliffe’s villain says when he knocks Bullock out with chloroform, “It’s a cliché for a reason.”

The Lost City
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Film Features Film/TV

Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle

If you’ve been keeping up with the headlines, you know the United Kingdom is undergoing something of an identity crisis right now. For a while, they thought they wanted to leave the European Union, and voted to do so. But now, once the implications of that epic goal are sinking in, a solid majority wants to remain. Yet they stay stuck on a course that only the worst minority of their citizens seem to want, paralyzed by bickering and a few savvy players with a death grip on power.

Hmm. Sounds familiar.

James Bond was the filmic personification of Cold War Britain. Ian Fleming was a man’s man. A veteran of Naval Intelligence during World War II, he created his super-spy as a projection of the best parts of his self image: tough but cultured, competent and ruthless but principled enough to use his death-dealing powers only for good. And, of course, a tiger with the ladies. In the seething fever swamps of online fandom forums, they would call James Bond a Mary Sue — a walking wish fulfillment that is automatically the best at everything he tries.

2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, are Bond for Brexit Britain. Ostensibly, these films are satire of the super-spy genre, but in practice the distance between mocked and mocker is almost nonexistent. It’s only a comedy if somebody gets offended at the puerile sexism.

Director Matthew Vaughn’s basic method is to take the subtext from Bond and Bourne and make it the text. James Bond is a secret agent who dresses well. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is literally a tailor who moonlights as a secret agent. Bond fights for queen and country, which is to say, wealth and empire. Merlin (Mark Strong) and Eggy (Taron Egerton) serve only pure capitalism. With their impeccable suits and high-tech assault umbrellas, they are the personifications of consumption. Pro patria is now keep shopping.

The familiarity continues with the plot, which starts with Mission Impossible before spinning off into supervillain stupid. Eggy, who inherited the code name Galahad after his mentor Harry took Samuel L. Jackson’s bullet in his face in the first movie, is leaving work after a tough day of tactical tailoring when he’s confronted by a gun-wielding cyborg named Charlie (Edward Holcroft), who has a Kingsman-sized chip on his cybernetic shoulder. After a thoroughly ridiculous black cab chase that ends with a riff on Roger Moore’s submarine supercar from The Spy Who Loved Me, what looks like an easy Kingsman victory turns into catastrophe. Left to its own devices, Charlie’s severed cybernetic arm hacks the cab’s computer and transmits the names of all the Kingsman agents to Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore). She’s the mother of all drug lords who lives in exile in a faux ’50s small town she’s constructed for herself in the jungle. Also, she’s holding Elton John hostage for some reason.

Poppy kills all of the Kingsmen except Merlin and Galahad, forcing them to swallow their pride and seek help from their American counterparts. The Statesmen, whose front-line troops include Agent Tequila (Channing Tatum) and Agent Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), who bears a striking resemblance to Smokey and the Bandit-era Burt Reynolds, are fronted and financed by a Kentucky whiskey distillery. Naturally, they are appalled when Poppy reveals her master plan to blackmail the countries of the world into legalizing all drugs, because they’re afraid she will cut into their profits. The inherent contradiction in Poppy’s plan to legalize drugs by poisoning drugs is immediately exploited by the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood), but the Kingsmen and Statesmen fight her anyway.

Taron Egerton (left) and Mark Strong star in Kingsmen: The Golden Circle.

To be fair, Poppy’s plan isn’t really much stupider than, say, Drax from Moonraker‘s scheme to take over the world by killing everyone in it with an orbital poison gas bombardment. And for all their over-the-top competence, the Kingsmen aren’t that bright, either. Watching two well-dressed gangs of idiots fight with high-tech gadgets and wallow around in 1970s Bond tropes should be a lot more fun than this. This mutated lad mag of a film wants to be suave, polished, and witty, but is really loud, boorish, and impressed with its own cleverness while insisting you laugh at its dad jokes. I’d say they’ve captured the zeitgeist just fine.

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Film Features Film/TV

Logan Lucky

Who is the greatest living American director? That’s the kind of question I usually avoid because it’s unanswerable and ultimately meaningless. Ranking is for sports. What’s important is not who is better than whom. It’s “does the movie work?” Does it make you feel like it intended to make you feel, and if so, is that a good feeling? If a film not only works in the moment, but transcends it and becomes something people want to watch again and again for years to come, that’s the kind of win a director wants to chalk up.

Nevertheless, as I was leaving Logan Lucky, the question of who is the greatest living American director was on my mind. There’s Steven Spielberg, who has an unparalleled breadth and depth of work over the last 43 years. Then there’s David Lynch, who is currently unspooling an 18 hour epic about the struggle for the soul of America with Twin Peaks: The Return.

And then there’s Steven Soderbergh. Along with Spike Lee, he was there at the creation of the modern indie movement, winning Sundance in 1989 with the sleeper hit sex, lies, and videotape. He made George Clooney a movie star with Out of Sight and defined the 21st century’s first crop of superstars with Ocean’s Eleven. Yet he can adapt Soviet sci-fi with Solaris, get his hands dirty in the DIY underground with Bubble, and take a deep dive into political biography with the two-part, four hour Che. Soderbergh is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, the one young directors look to to learn how it’s done. He works fast and lean and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bullshit.

It’s that commitment to craft that led him to quit Hollywood filmmaking in disgust in 2013. On his way out, he torched the current corporate regime with his State of the Cinema speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival. What was his idea of retirement? Single-handedly writing, shooting, and editing The Knick, a Cinemax TV series.

Everybody knew Soderbergh couldn’t stay out of the game, and he managed to come back on his own terms. At a time when the mainline studios are running up $200 million tabs to pay for a sinking Pirates of the Caribbean ship, Soderbergh’s new film comes into theaters already paid for using an innovative financing and sales scheme that cut out layers of corporate bloat. Logan Lucky isn’t going to win the weekend, but it doesn’t have to. And that means Soderbergh gets to work without an MBA looking over his shoulder. The results of this financial experiment speak for themselves: Logan Lucky is the best movie I’ve seen in 2017.

Channing Tatum (left) and Adam Driver star in Steven Soderbergh’s directorial return, Logan Lucky.

There I go ranking again.

Rebecca Blunt’s script is so tight you can bounce a quarter off of it. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver are Jimmy and Clyde Logan, two West Virginia brothers who’ve been down so long they don’t know what up looks like. Along with their sister Mellie (Riley Keough), they hatch a needlessly elaborate plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway, just across the North Carolina border.

Every part of the sprawling cast is spot on. Katie Holmes swills chardonnay as Jimmy’s ex-wife who left him for a rich car dealer, greased to perfection by Seth McFarlane. Daniel Craig has way too much fun as a mad bomber named Joe Bang, who has to break out of, then back into prison, where Dwight Yoakam is the nicotine stained warden. Just when you think things are winding down, out pops Hilary Swank as an impossibly flinty FBI agent hot on the trail of the robbers-turned-folk-heroes.

It probably goes without saying that the photography and editing are beyond reproach, but I’m going to say it anyway. Logan Lucky is a ruthlessly designed and executed entertainment machine, but its obvious virtues may obscure its depth. Appalachia’s lack of affordable health care, the toxic at-will employment environment, the ravages of the for-profit prison industrial complex, and the impossible burdens of patriarchy on women young and old all serve to create plot points along the way to wacky larceny. With an instant classic comedy as subversive as it is hilarious, Soderbergh has served up a stunning rebuke to corporate Hollywood and cemented his status as one of the all-time greats.