The Predator

The story goes that the original script had a one minute cameo at the end in which Arnie showed up in a helicopter to tell everyone it was time to fly off into the sequel. It could have been shot in in an hour, just like Arnie’s cameos in Expendables movies. And Arnie, who in some ways is the laziest actor alive, turned it down. To me, this suggests that for once in his life, he read the whole script.

Not even the first Predator movie is anyone’s idea of a masterpiece, so it’s not as though I was waiting with bated breath for another attempt to keep the franchise going. But then they attached Shane Black to it, and I got stupidly optimistic. Iron Man 3 isn’t actively terrible. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys are genuinely good movies. The Long Kiss Goodnight might be one of the best stupid action movies ever made, and The Last Boy Scout is the last time it didn’t hurt to watch Bruce Willis murdering everyone with worse dialogue than him. All right, then, I thought to myself.

No. All wrong. The Predator is a stupid, incoherent mess that looks like someone killed Shane Black, scrabbled through his dustbin for any bits of paper that didn’t have coffee grounds on them, and then went down to the studio with a rubber Shane Black mask and the hope that no-one would ask why he smelled of latex. It’s full of bits of what I think of as the single transferable Shane Black script; moppet driving part of the plot, bad parental relationships, smartass anti-heroes, even smarter-ass sidekicks, steely government conspiracies made out of evil, and as many people suffering from PTSD and psychological issues as the plot can accommodate. It’s just that it all feels like the Walmart own brand version instead of the high spec version we liked in the past.

Holding it all together, or rather not holding it all together, is a plot that sounds like someone heard two five year olds playing in the next room and tried to write down just the squeaky bits while the room they were in had a wolverine in it. Nothing makes any real sense from scene to scene; the characters need cars, and then they’re somehow IN cars, but there’s no way to figure out how it happened or if it even matters. It’s all so disconnected that I kept getting jolted out of even the bits I was liking. 

What’s good? Well, if you can make out the dialogue, which is always being swamped by other things, there’s a lot of fun there. And the characters are fun. Obviously, don’t get attached to them. It’s a Predator movie. Pretty much everyone you meet is there to get ripped apart, but they’re funny while they last. Which in some cases is surprisingly long. I counted four survivors, one of them only by inference. The other three are so obvious I don’t even feel like it’s a spoiler to announce that the last people standing are the hero, the moppet, and the feisty chick. Because of course they are. And say this for Shane Black; he can do feisty chicks. In other Predator movies the female characters are pretty much passive plot coupons, but give The Predator this much; its women may be a minority, but they’re survivors who can think for themselves.

One thing which really doesn’t work is something which should have worked. It’s a clever idea that this movie is part of the continuity of the earlier films, and that the shadowy government is getting its act together and knows at least some of what it’s up against with Predators. That’s good. But then it goes too far; the government knows things which it couldn’t possibly know. They keep referring back to things which have just happened in the movie without any witnesses at all and with no time for anyone to have tried to analyse it - not to mention that after the Predator gets loose, the analysts are so much confetti and their secret analysis base seems to be burning down around them. And yes, if the movie was going as fast as it needs to, I wouldn’t have had time to think of it.

But say this for Shane Black. We’ve seen a lot of movies lately which have been full of references of earlier better parts of the franchise, and man it’s got old fast. Black keeps most of the references fleeting, and when he rolls out a catchphrase, he makes the most of it. “Get to the choppers!” yells one of the characters, and after a cut, our motley crew of actual lunatics are on big old Harleys.

BlackkKlansman

Blackkklansman is a movie too heartfelt to be fun, even though it’s got a lot of funny moments. It’s bookended by reminders of what hate looks like; it opens with a montage of Alec Baldwin making a racist propaganda film in the 1960s, and closes with footage of the real events of the last couple of years, hammering home that this is something which hasn’t gone away, no matter how much it might feel like the characters in the main action have managed some kind of local victory against racism.

The movie’s set unobtrusively in the 70s, getting most of the setting and costumes right without making a big deal of it, but there’s a constant undercurrent of echoes of the present day, to the point where it almost wouldn’t be surprising to have someone look right out of the screen at the audience and say “Y’all know this isn’t really set in the past, don’t ya?"

The weird thing to me was not that it made racists ugly and repellent, but that it made everyone human. The racists were repellent, but for every one of them there was at least one moment where they did something that was just the stuff that people do, those moments of affection and trust which make the hatred even harder to understand. And strikingly, it doesn’t make white authority figures either fools or monsters. For the most part, the white cops who surround Ron Stallworth are a believable mixture of decency and obliviousness, people doing their best and finding it hard to understand how anyone wouldn’t. Adam Driver, who plays Stallworth’s white beard, pretty much steals the show whenever he gets a scene to himself, and the rest of the time is utterly convincing as a guy who just wants to get his job done and is being dragged against his will into giving a damn about it. John David Washington, who plays Stallworth, has an easier job as a smart guy who can’t believe how dumb the world is, but like his dad Denzel, he has an effortless charisma which lets him hold his own against the likes of Driver.

Lee also does something which needed to be done, and which I haven’t seen much before. In a movie which is largely about how terrible white people can be, he takes a long, long take in the middle to show the audience how beautiful black people can be. Stallworth goes to a Black Power meeting early in the movie, and the camera pans endlessly through the audience, catching their delighted reactions to the speaker. It’s black faces in a darkened room, and from a purely technical point of view, lighting it must have been the biggest challenge in the whole movie. Film is optimised for white faces, and exposing for black faces is always trickier than it should be. Lee’s work here is masterful, and does something for everyone who watches it. 

Afterwards, I was mulling over the persistence of the Klan and the way in which bigots always seem to feel that they are being outnumbered and overborne by the people they used to oppress. And it struck me that in one way, bigots are right to feel outnumbered. At some level they know that while white people are the majority, assholes like them are a tiny minority. There are, indeed, far more black people in America than there are white people awful enough to say out loud the things which Klansmen say. The problem, of course, is that the white majority stays quiet in the face of the Klan. There’s nothing new about this. It’s a long time since Edmund Burke pointed out that for evil to prosper, all that is needed is for good men to do nothing. But perhaps people need to stop thinking of themselves as good people when they do nothing. Perhaps it’s time for them to accept that if they do nothing, they’re not good people at all.

M R Carey: The Boy on the Bridge

No-one is going to buy this unless they’ve already read The Girl with All the Gifts, and so everyone reading it is going to feel their heart sink a little as they realise that we’re back in the Rosalind Franklin, the armoured mobile lab which shows up in central London in Girl and becomes Miss Justineau’s prison. We all know that Rosie winds up abandoned in the middle of London with its crew dead or missing, so we know that the forecast for the people in this book is …  not promising.

Just like Girl, this is a book that I read in short stretches, tip-toeing through the prose and pausing at intervals to steel myself in case the next chapter turned into Benjie’s world of blood. Rosie is doomed, and the suspense is just how doomed the crew are, and to a lesser extent how Rosie winds up abandoned in London.

How Rosie winds up in London is almost irrelevant; Carey dashes it off in a couple of pages after the main action of the book has unfolded. What matter is what comes before. The heart of Girl was the three cornered relationship between a child, a mother surrogate, and a weary soldier as they cross a devastated landscape. In and around that were other tensions; ambitious scientists with no morality left and semi-expendable grunts trying to keep the world at bay. Carey’s used essentially the same template, but put new characters into it.

Melanie has become Stephen Greaves, a teenage genius who might just be smart enough to figure out how the fungal infection works, but is so damaged by childhood trauma that he can’t explain it to anyone. Miss Justineau has become Samrina Khan, a scientist who has replaced Stephen’s mother in every way that matters, and Sgt Parks has become Col Carlisle, the military leader of the expedition. They occupy the same spaces on the emotional board of the book, and yet they’re nothing like the characters from the first book, and they work out their redemptions and sacrifices in very different ways.

It’s a very satisfying book, especially for a prequel. It fills in points that the earlier (but later) book didn’t bother with, but it doesn’t make a point of explaining all the back story. What we’re told is what the story itself needs, nothing more. That’s something I can really respect having sat through Hollywood’s notions of how a prequel ought to work. But what made me put the book down at the end in complete satisfaction was the ending, which closes out both the story of the survivors of this book, and the story of the survivors of Girl. Harder hearts might argue that the ending is pat and sentimental, but for me it gave the good guys the ending they deserved.

The ending might even, for all I know, be some kind of sequel hook. What’s been done will stand on its own, and I thought the same thing when there was just Girl. So if Carey comes out with a third book one of these days, it might really be something.

Equalizer 2; the Sequeliser

I didn’t really like The Equalizer all that much, but I am encouraged to see that what I kind of liked in the first movie was what I kind of liked in the second one; Denzel’s Robet McCall is better company when he’s good humouredly watching the world around him and sticking his thumb on the scales from time to time to let the little guys get a little more than they might have coming. Everything else just underlines why making the Equalizer into a movie was a mistake. The Equalizer doesn’t do big movie length projects; he does small neighborhood stuff. Ramming a big plot into the movies just hammers home how much they should have stayed as episodic TV.

Still, Robert McCall’s breathtaking sadism is still firmly in place. Don’t kill anyone simply when you can hurt them a whole bunch beforehand. Reflecting on it afterward, I thought to be myself that Denzel could have made a movie which was the equal of his real talent by making McCall a sadistic sociopath who knew he was a problem, and rationed out his moments of sadism only when he felt like he’d earned them. Denzel would have been more than up to the job of someone doing the right thing precisely so that he could reward himself by doing the wrong thing.

Instead he just goes around hurting people in ways that I think are supposed to make the audience give an atavistic “yay!” as various button-pushing low-lifes get maimed or stabbed to bits because they’ve somehow fetched up on McCall’s radar. Quite why Boston PD isn’t hunting him down as a serial killer is never very clear. In one of the early fist-pumping sequences he goes all medieval on the asses of a bunch for frat boy lawyers who’ve raped an intern and then poured her into McCall’s Lyft taxi as though that was all the consideration she needed. He does not cotton to this, and comes back to give them some lessons in what pain feels like. And particularly in 2018, the sight of rapists getting maimed is sort of cathartic. But he leaves his witnesses alive, having told them he’s the Lyft driver who picked up the girl. He even makes a point of asking the last of them to leave him a five star rating. How does that NOT turn into a sub-poena fired off at Lyft to get his home address?

Still, Denzel’s easy going charm makes a lot of it work. One standout is the moment when he pulls the world’s most polite hostage-taking, walking off with the villain-in-chief’s wife and kids as if he’s just cadging a lift instead of taking them hostage to stop the villain and his mooks from stabbing him. It’s elegant, minimalist, classy and - when you think about it - really creepy.

But it’s just a wrong movie. And there’s one moment that tells you who the audience is supposed to be, and why they should all be on some kind of watch list. McCall takes on the last of the big bads in a small town during a hurricane, and one of his jinks takes him through a bakery. As he strolls through, he casually slashes open every flour sack in sight and turns on all the fans he can find. “Ah,” I said. “Expedient flour-air explosive.” And so it came to pass. This is a movie written to please the kind of people who think that they could improvise a bomb out of whatever they can find in their kitchens.

King of Thieves; what's it really telling us.

King of Thieves can’t make its mind up whether it’s a comedy or a drama, which makes it pretty lifelike, but would be a disaster if they hadn’t simplified the problem by hiring a cast of old stagers who could make the characters come to life either way. It’s a movie about a jewellery heist which ends in disaster. Ealing used to do this all the time, making genial comedy out of failed robberies in a time when people weren’t supposed to get away with their crimes but still needed to be loveable enough that you kind of hoped they would. Time moves on, and we don’t be doing that kind of thing any more, so it’s not an Ealing movie at all.

It’s based - I’ve no idea how loosely - on the real world robbery of the Hatton Garden diamond vault in 2015, which was carried out by a bunch of geriatrics who briefly amazed the world by pulling off an apparently perfect robbery before getting caught by police who used modern technology to pin them down with CCTV and phone triangulation.  As brought to life by Caine, Gambon, Broadbent, Courtenay and Winstone, they come off as a bunch of a curmudgeonly old gits who brought themselves down by a mixture of hubris and mutual distrust. They’re utterly believable as a group of old men struggling with both modernity and a lifetime of mistakes and unresolved arguments. It feels true, but you’d hate to be stuck in a lift with them.

It’s also a movie which simply keeps the camera on its stars. Francesca Annis is the only speaking female presence, briefly there as Caine’s wife, whose death seems to have jolted him out of quiet retirement into the notion of one last job. The police circling the gang in the aftermath of the heist are never seen speaking; they wordlessly pass files to each other or sit watchfully in the shadows until finally they pounce, modern, diverse and armed to the teeth. The huge back catalogue of all the old stagers lets the director cut to flashback of the crooks’ heydays, dropping in clips from older movies to suggest what they were like in their prime; to be honest, it’s a gimmick which would have worked better if it had been less flashy. When it’s used for the last time, as the lags walk off to be sentenced, it works best, slow and dignified.

Well, it’s an anti-Ealing. But more than that, it’s a metaphor for something else. The heist is planned meticulously, even though the plan doesn’t quite work. It’s striking that there’s nothing like the same amount of planning for the aftermath. It’s almost as though the gang never really thought they’d get away with it, so they didn’t need a plan for fencing off the loot or sharing it out. As soon as they’re clear, they start to fall out and squabble over the division of the spoils, with no apparent sense of the value of what they’ve stolen or who might be able to shift it for them. And I started to think that it was all just like Brexit; a gang of backward looking people planning a spectacular coup with no plan for the follow up, only to be brought down by mutual distrust and a failure to understand how the modern world works.