Don’t Breathe

by | Aug 26, 2016 | Movie Reviews

By: Kevin Jordan

Happy Thanksgiving

That tagline will make sense later, but for now let’s talk about the latest horror flick to cross the silver screen – Don’t Breathe.  Also, this is the earliest SPOILER alert you will ever get from me.

The premise is simple – three young burglars pick the wrong house to rob.  The plot is also simple – will the burglars survive the night in the house or will the blind, Iraq-war veteran (Stephen Lang) who lives there kill them all?  It’s your standard slasher, cabin-in-the-woods flick with very morally ambiguous characters.  The real question you will have is who to root for?  On one hand, the burglars deserve what’s coming to them.  It takes a special kind of asshole to rob a blind war veteran, especially, a blind war veteran whose daughter was killed in a car accident.  And, yes, the burglars know all of this information prior to the burglary because their goal is to steal the settlement money the man got from the family of the girl that killed his daughter.  On the other hand, the movie will reveal some very disturbing things about the Blind Man (I’d love to tell you the Blind Man’s name, but it is never given, his character is literally listed as The Blind Man in the credits) that will make you think twice about rooting for him.  In other words, flip a coin.

There’s a turkey baster in your future.

Of course, that coin is weighted.  Of the three burglars, only one of them truly deserves death – Money (Daniel Zovatto).  Yes, that’s his real name and the first glimpse we get of him is during an earlier robbery in which he is breaking things for no reason and pissing all over the kitchen.  He comes by his assholery honestly and is purely in this for the money.  Conversely, Rocky (Jane Levy) is just trying to score enough money so she can take her young sister to California to escape her dead-beat mother.  She’s the easiest one to root for as our third burglar, Alex (Dylan Minnette), doesn’t seem to have a motivation at all.  His dad works for a home security company and they seem to be doing just fine, especially considering this is happening in Detroit.  Alex uses his dad’s access (in the form of passwords, remotes, and keys) to target and rob homes that use said security service.  The best motivation I can come up with for Alex is an apparent crush on Rocky (whose boyfriend is Money), but that’s a pretty thin reason to commit larceny.  He’s also the brains of the outfit, constantly reminding the crew what they should and shouldn’t do in order to avoid felony charges should they be caught.  He even warns them against robbing the blind man, initially refusing outright, and then ditching them during the penultimate robbery when Money brandishes a gun.  Plus, he’s also cautioning them that he doesn’t want to get his dad in trouble, which begs the earlier question – what the hell is Alex even doing this for?

Dick move, bro.

As a standard slasher flick, the movie is pretty tight, but not without flaws.  They avoid several of the standard horror movie clichés, but not all of them.  A great example is the lack of a double-tap.  At one point, Alex clocks the Blind Man in the head with a hammer, twice, then handcuffs him in the basement.  The problem is that the Blind Man regains consciousness extremely quickly and even holds a conversation with the remaining burglars before they attempt their next escape.  The obvious fix for this is to just leave the Blind Man unconscious because, either way, we know he’s not done.  It’s just more believable my way.

If there’s one major flaw with the movie, it’s in the unevenness of the directing.  Parts of the movie are masterfully done to create great levels of tension and misdirection while other parts come off like an elementary school play.  There are unnecessary zoom-ins on props and set pieces that scream “this will come into play later,” robbing the viewer of any kind of satisfaction of recognizing those things without prompting.  There is the terribly misused “let’s show the viewer something at the beginning of the movie that actually happens much later” technique that serves no purpose other than to tell the viewer that a character is going to make it at least until you see that scene again, thus destroying the viewer’s belief that said character might die at any moment.  Finally, there are lots of plot elements that you have to just live with if you want a chance to enjoy the movie.  (Again – SPOILER ALERT)  Don’t ask how a blind man managed to kidnap the girl who killed his daughter.  Don’t ask why the Blind Man is the only resident in an entire neighborhood filled with abandoned, dilapidated homes (his home is just fine).  Don’t ask why the Blind Man’s senses seem to come and go as the plot requires (he can smell stinky shoes, but not stinky feet.  He doesn’t notice or hear the person in the hallway that he misses running into by less than an inch).  Don’t ask why a guy holding a hostage in the basement would have an alarm system capable of alerting the police.  Don’t ask why security-service-dad keeps a drawer full of keys to his clients’ houses in his desk at home or why said service would have those keys at all (would you trust ADT with the keys to your house?!)  And don’t ask why the news report following the conclusion doesn’t mention the weird room in the basement.

No way this works.

But, like I said, there are great elements in the movie as well.  The best is when the Blind Man kills the power and we are treated to him hunting Rocky and Alex in his maze of a basement, shot in grey night-vision.  There are long takes of the burglars exploring the house upon their initial entry that lend depth and direction to the house.  And then there’s the turkey baster scene that will make you fear Thanksgiving for the rest of your life.  All I will tell you about it is that the entire audience realized what was going on in unison, uttering a theater-wide groan in revulsion at the revelation.  Yes, I said turkey baster.

Rating: Ask for two dollars back.  My “don’t ask” questions can’t be completely ignored.

War Dogs

by | Aug 19, 2016 | Movie Reviews

By: Kevin Jordan

A case study.

When it comes to movies, writing is more important than everything else.  Without writing, the stuff in a movie is meaningless.  Costumes are being worn because actors get cold and the movie is supposed to be rated PG-13.  Sets are just piles of wood, nails, and paint that actors run across because a guy with a bullhorn and a headset just gave the go ahead to blow up that car.  Lights are turned on so the actors don’t trip over props while running from the explosion.  In other words, nothing is happening for any reason, and nothing you are seeing has any meaning…without a story.  Writing gives all of that stuff purpose and good writing ties all of it together in ways that make you glad you spent money and time to watch it.  And that’s how we got The Dark Knight.  But without a story or any decent writing, I guess a movie like that must simply meet its release date.  And that’s how we got Suicide Squad.

But, this isn’t about DC movies.  This is about a movie called War Dogs.  War Dogs is the perfect example of how good writing makes a great movie.  More specifically, it’s a perfect example of how to adapt source material into a screenplay.  One of the biggest complaints by moviegoers about Hollywood book adaptations is that “the book was better.”  In other words, Hollywood often screws up the source material in an adaptation.  While there are countless examples of poor adaptations, there are also numerous examples of superior adaptations, and War Dogs is one of them.

War Dogs is based on a Rolling Stone article titled Arms and the Dudes telling the story of the rise and fall of two twenty-something American men who became international arms dealers and found themselves winning a $300 million defense contract to supply arms to the US military in order to arm the Afghan army.

If the screenplay writers had adapted the story with no changes, it would have made for a fairly uninteresting movie.  Don’t get me wrong, the article is fascinating and worth the read, but it isn’t worth two hours in a theater.  The two men, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller) are both greedy war-profiteers who have no qualms about the legality of what they are doing.  The US government officials contracting them are well aware of what they are doing and simply don’t care.  They work with several shady arms dealers who are all in it for the same reasons – money.  Do you see the problem here?  Not one character or entity discussed in the article comes off as the hero or even anti-hero in this story.  So, in the movie version, who are you supposed to root for?  After watching such a movie, you’d wonder why they spent $45 million on what amounts to a 60 Minutes segment.

Rather than bore you with an overly long night-time news segment, the writers took the characters, the bones of the story, and a couple of fun details (David was a masseuse prior to running guns) and turned it into something worthy of a theater.  To start with, they made David the hero and improved his motivation.  He also gets a pregnant wife, Iz (the gorgeous and scene stealing Ana de Armas), and is forced to work for Efraim because he is failing to earn enough money to support his family.  In contrast, the writers bring Efraim as-is because being a sleazy, greedy, shitbag of a friend makes him the perfect villain.  Now we have two well-defined characters whose roles are clear throughout the film.

Then, they embellish a couple of the contract stories and align them in a way that perfectly escalates the stakes and the tension as the movie approaches its climax.  The best way to describe it is as a movie that plays out much like Two for the Money or 21.  Our hero is brought into the lucrative business, finds early success which leads to more success, which leads to the ‘big one,’ which leads to the inevitable crash, which leads to a satisfying end.  In addition, the US government doesn’t come off nearly as shady because the movie needs it to be the uncorrupt lawman (if only this wasn’t an embellishment *sigh*).

There were a few more tweaks, but that’s the meat of the movie and I’m not sure they could have adapted the story any better.  On top of that, they nailed the casting.  Hill was every bit the villain they needed him to be and you’ll want to punch Efraim as much as David does.  Teller also proved that he can actually act when given a decent character and we can now forgive him for his abysmal Mr. Fantastic.  As I mentioned earlier, de Armas manages to upstage Teller in their scenes together, especially when she calls him out for being a liar late in the movie.  And then there’s the gorgeous and scene-chewing Bradley Cooper (playing arms dealer Henry Girard), every bit as engaging as we’ve come to expect from him.  Even in his relatively few scenes, it’s hard to believe he’s not actually a slimy, dangerous arms dealer brought into this movie to make it more real.  And that, my friends, is how you write a movie worth watching that is based on literary source material.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back and go read that article.