Tag: Dave Bautista

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Now Playing Sept. 13-20: Evil Killers

David Bautista in The Killers Game. (Courtesy Lionsgate)

The Killer’s Game

Dave Bautista stars as Joe Flood, a professional assassin who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Unwilling to waste away, he decides to take out a contract on himself. But then his doctor informs him that his diagnosis was in error. Joe must now fight off his fellow assassins who he himself ordered. Also staring Sofia Boutella, Terry Crews, Scott Adkins, and Ben Kinglsey. 

Speak No Evil 

Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scott McNairy) Dalton take their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) on an idyllic holiday in a rustic country house. The house’s owners Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) are welcoming at first. But then cracks appear in their friendly facade, as their son Ant (Dan Hough) exhibits strange behavior. Soon the Daltons are fearing for their lives, but Paddy won’t let them leave. This Blumhouse production is a remake of a 2022 Danish horror hit. 

Blazing Saddles

Whenever someone says, “They couldn’t make a movie like that today,” they’re usually talking about Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles. The crux of the story is this: a frontier town in the Old West gets a new sheriff who happens to be Black, and that throws the racists among them into a tizzy. If that sounds heavy, it’s not. Brooks is a comedy genius who has tackled racism head on over and over again in his career. The film has a crackerjack cast led by Gene Wilder as a drunk gunfighter who helps the late, great Cleavon Little (who got halfway to an EGOT before dying at 53) get control of the town — after blazing up, of course. Blazing Saddles screens Sunday, September 15 and Wednesday, September 18 at the Paradiso.

Being There

Peter Sellers had a long and legendary career. But his real masterpiece didn’t come until Hal Ashby cast him in Being There. It was the film Craig Brewer (who is featured in this week’s Memphis Flyer cover story) chose when he appeared in my Never Seen It series. (Spoiler alert: he loved it.) The Crosstown Theater film series screens Being There on Thursday, Sept. 19.

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Film Features Film/TV

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

During the height of the streaming boom, when Netflix, Disney, and HBO were swimming in speculative stock market money, studios looking to feed the online content machine made a lot of big deals with filmmakers. The one that raised the most eyebrows was Rian Johnson’s $469 million deal with Netflix for two sequels to the writer/director’s sleeper hit Knives Out. $234 million a pop is in line with what Johnson had to work with when he made Star Wars: The Last Jedi. But Knives Out was a classic cozy mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. There were no special effects-heavy space battles or big expensive stunt sequences. One of the reasons these kinds of stories became so popular in the early days of sound pictures is that they’re cheap to produce. How was Johnson and longtime producing partner Ram Bergman supposed to spend all that money? 

The answer presented by Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is to give everyone Johnson’s ever wanted to work with a cameo. Serena Williams’ cameo even makes a joke of the money burn rate. As “the world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has an emergency conference with Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe) in the gym of tech billionaire Miles Bron’s (Edward Norton) island estate, a video screen in the background promises a private session with Serena. As they speak, what seems at first to be a still image of the tennis star moves slightly. Then Williams, bored with the details of a mystery she isn’t privy to, speaks up. “So you don’t want to work out?” 

No, snaps Blanc. We’re busy. 

“Whatever. I’m still on the clock,” she sighs, then returns to her crossword puzzle book. 

Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Leslie Odom, Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Janelle Monáe, and Daniel Craig have a dinner party.

Serena Williams is not the only A-lister in a funny cameo. When we first see Blanc, he’s stuck inside his New York apartment during the height of the pandemic quarantine, playing Among Us on Zoom with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Natasha Lyonne, Angela Lansbury, and Stephen Sondheim — and losing. But his pandemic blues are relieved when he’s one of five people invited to a murder mystery party weekend at Bron’s palatial estate on a Greek island, known as the Glass Onion. 

The group, who Miles calls his “beautiful disruptors,” includes Claire (Kathryn Hahn), the Governor of Connecticut who is running for a Senate seat; Lionel (Leslie Odom, Jr.), lead research scientist for Miles’ rocket company; Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), supermodel and fashion designer; and Duke (Dave Bautista), a gun-toting, men’s rights YouTube influencer. Andi, Miles’ former partner in his technology company, is also invited, but the group seems very surprised when she actually shows up. Blanc quickly susses out that these alleged old friends don’t actually like each other very much. When the murder mystery dinner party game is interrupted by a real murder, Blanc (and Johnson) are in their element. I won’t spoil what comes next, except to say that the “onion” in the title refers to layers upon layers of flashbacks that Johnson uses to reveal the mystery and its ultimate solution. 

Janelle Monáe

An all-star cast solving a murder conjures visions of bad ’70s haircuts phoning in performances. But Jonson knows how to assemble a cast with chemistry, and treats Glass Onion like a Robert Altman dinner party movie, where everyone’s having fun and giving it their all. Monáe is captivating as a woman whose secrets have secrets. Hudson disarms with a ditzy blonde routine before revealing the icy calculations beneath her facade. Odom and Hahn, used to being scene stealers themselves, are excellent, but feel a little underutilized. 

Like Knives Out, Glass Onion fronts as a frothy potboiler just out for a good time. But in its heart, it’s a scathing satire of our oligarchic ruling class. Exposing Miles, his “genius” Elon Musk figure, as a garden variety sociopathic manipulator feels particularly timely on Johnson’s part. Netflix execs might feel some buyers remorse when they see Monáe gleefully smashing the astonishingly expensive set, but we the audience get our money’s worth.

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Film Features Film/TV

Blade Runner 2049

“I can’t help thinking it’s a lot like making a sequel to Casablanca,” tweeted author William Gibson while on his way to see Blade Runner 2049. Gibson has the distinction of being one of the first in a long line of creators influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. He was about a third of the way through his first draft of Neuromancer, the novel that invented cyberpunk and indelibly shaped our conception of the internet age, when he saw the film. Neuromancer and its sequels are set in a decaying urban world that looks a lot like the hellscape Scott created for Blade Runner.

Casablanca has been described as having a screenplay made entirely of cliches — but the reason they’re cliches is because subsequent screenwriters stole them from Casablanca. Something like that happened with Blade Runner visually. “It affected the way people dressed,” Gibson said in a recent Paris Review interview. “It affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.”

Blade Runner was released in the summer of 1982, sci-fi’s cinema’s miracle year, in the company of classics like Poltergeist, The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and The Dark Crystal. But Scott’s groundbreaking visual masterpiece had the misfortune to be released two weeks after Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had declared Morning in America, and audiences wanted a feel-good story about a brave, healing alien more than a glimpse into the dystopian future. Even having Harrison Ford as the lead couldn’t put asses in seats, and Blade Runner flopped hard, almost destroying Scott’s career.

But the legend grew over the decades, and so Scott, acting as executive producer, tapped Arrival director Denis Villeneuve to helm the long-awaited (or perhaps long-dreaded) sequel, with screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who had adapted Philip K. Dick for the original film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who worked with Villeneuve on Sicario, was chosen to follow up one of the most visually influential films in history.

Blade Runner‘s opening shot identifies the setting as “Los Angles, 2019.” Blade Runner 2049 begins with an echo of those images: An eye, in extreme close up, and a flying car gliding over the ruins of California. In the ensuing three decades, the ecological crisis has only deepened. The only way to grow food is in vast, climate-controlled greenhouses. When the car lands in one lonely agricultural outpost, K (Ryan Gosling) emerges. Like Rick Deckard, he works for the LAPD hunting down artificial humans or replicants, who have gone rogue. Unlike Deckard, he is unambiguously a replicant himself. At the farm, he finds Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), an android on the run who berates him for killing “his own kind.” He wouldn’t do that, Sapper says, if he had “seen the miracle.” K kills him anyway, but the words ring in his ears. What miracle?

Those fearing a cookie cutter remake of the original will be pleased to discover that this is not the case. Blade Runner 2049‘s story builds logically on the original — a seemingly impossible task pulled off gracefully by Fancher and co-writer Michael Green. Resonances come not out of slavish fan service, but because both films are essentially noir detective stories. Some elements feel more like a sequel to Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? than Scott’s film, such as K’s relationship with his holographic A.I. Joi (Ana de Armas)—two simulated beings experiencing possibly real emotions. Gosling gives by far the best performance of his career. When his investigation leads him to an aged Deckard living in the irradiated remains of Las Vegas, he goes toe to toe with Ford and a malfunctioning Elvis hologram in a bravado sequence that alone is worth the price of admission.

The only element of 2049 significantly inferior to the original film is the music. Vangelis’ improvisational synth score is as big a part of the Blade Runner mystique as John Williams’ soundtrack is for Star Wars. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch created a conventional, pounding, atonal soundscape that feels much less subtle.

The film’s running time is hefty, but its pleasures are deep and satisfying. Villeneuve’s direction is brilliant, and if Deakins doesn’t win an Oscar for this cinematography, the award has no meaning. See it on the largest screen you can find.

Blade Runner 2049
Now playing
Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 never gets better than its opening sequence. To bring Vol. 1 to a successful conclusion, Groot, the mono-phrased, living tree-man portrayed, as far as it goes, by Vin Diesel, had to sacrifice himself. But, since he’s a tree, he budded and was replanted by his platonic life partner Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) — now known simply as Rocket, because apparently it’s okay to have a talking raccoon heavy weapons specialist in your movie, but using the word “Raccoon” in his name is just a step too far for the Disney marketing department.

Anyway, Groot has now grown enough to walk, and when you’re traveling in Star-Lord’s company, you’re going to get into some weird scrapes. The camera follows Baby Groot through a battle with a rando glitter octopod, introducing the perpetually bickering Guardians of the Galaxy in turn: the giant, blue Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), green-skinned daughter of Thanos Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and the self-appointed Star-Lord, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). Like most of the rest of the movie, it’s practically all computer animated, but director James Gunn and the Marvel team simulate an Alfonso Cuaron-style, single take tracking shot focusing on what all the laser-fueled mayhem looks like to the sapling Groot.

In addition to being visually thrilling, the shot immediately establishes Baby Groot as the audience surrogate and sets the tone for what we’re about to see: spectacular scenes of stylized, bloodless battle delivered with a wink and nudge.

Science fiction started out in the 1800s as a fairly serious-minded enterprise. Then in the early 1900s, it devolved into lurid stories for pulp magazines. Since then, sci-fi books and movies have either embraced the pulp tradition or pushed against it — is it better to be respectable, or is it better to be fun? It seems weird that Arrival and Barbarella are in the same genre, but they represent its two extremes. Star Wars straddled the line between serious and silly by mapping pulp tropes onto a mythological framework. Perhaps because its source material is the descendant of the pulp magazine, comic books, Guardians of the Galaxy sees no need to feign seriousness. Gunn and company just go for whatever feels good from moment to moment. They’ve got jetpacks, and they’re not afraid to use them.

And I’ll have to say, it’s pretty refreshing. We live in, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, the Dark Times. We need escapism. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is providing exactly what Hollywood has historically done best: cinematic comfort food.

The Character Formerly Known As Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).

Zoe Saldana as Gamora

Besides, Kurt Russell is in it. He plays Ego, the Living Planet, who is pretty self explanatory. The question of whether or not Ego is Star-Lord’s long-lost father provides the plot-like structure to prop up one eye-popping space action sequence after another from Disney’s golden hoard of digital artists. It’s a tribute to Chris Pratt’s charisma that he can share scene after scene with Russell and not be overwhelmed by the actor’s epic facial hair.

The other bit of silly alchemy that continues to work for the Guardians franchise is marrying 1970s cheese rock with insane space action. Both Star Trek: Beyond and Doctor Strange tried the same trick, only to fall flat. Guardians nails it repeatedly. Sure, he’s got a knack for snappy dialog and endearing character beats, but Gunn’s unerring ear is his secret weapon.

It’s cool to be back in these characters’ colorful, crazy world, but the story seems like a thin, disjointed collection of leftover ideas. The swashbuckling is first rate, but the scale of the violence and the casualness with which it is dispatched by our heroes is occasionally icky. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a movie that knows exactly what it’s trying to accomplish. Sometimes, that’s enough.