Free Guy

I went into Free Guy as I often do, thinking “Please don’t suck, please don’t suck.” For a lot of different reasons, one of them being that Ryan Reynolds is nowhere near as good at picking out movies as I’d like him to be. The Hitman’s Bodyguard? I had to watch the opening credits of Deadpool a lot of times to get over that one.

Well, the good news is that Free Guy  doesn’t suck. It’s a fun movie with a lot of heart in it. Ryan Reynolds is good at playing likeable people; it’s pretty the much the whole schtick of his public persona on Twitter, for a start. So making him the most likeable thing in the movie isn’t just pandering to his ego all Tom Cruise stylee, it’s using your materials efficiently. It’s also a brave actor that decides to go up against the one and only Jodie Comer and hope to be the most interesting thing on screen. And the writers know what they’ve got; within ten seconds of her showing up, there’s a joke about accents. Sadly, there aren’t many actual accents after that, but then if they’d let her go full Villanelle, it would have been The Millie Show with a free guy thrown in that no-one was even looking at.

And that would have scuppered the movie. A few years back Zak Penn wrote the screenplay for Ready Player One, a great looking movie that I really didn’t like, and Free Guy suggests that either RPO went wrong after it was written, or that Penn’s learned something from the experience. Of course it helps when you don’t have a set text to stick to. But all the same you can see a lot of recycled ideas; it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to me that the same writer had been involved in both things. First time the agent of change is outside the game trying to get in, second time he’s on the inside, maybe trying to get out, but in both movies the big point is massive on-line game world at the mercy of an unhinged techno-bro who just sees it as a way of making money.

The big difference is where the heart lies, because while the engine of RPO is essentially the idea that one person can win the world and change everything by starting a war, the engine of Free Guy is that one person can start a movement in which everyone comes to see that they’re free to live a fruitful life, not just fight for victories that only mean something to the people pulling your strings.

And with the cast they’ve got, we can all have fun watching it. Reynolds has always been good at casually competent guys trying to be better at something they’re not being given the space to concentrate on. (Honestly, watch Deadpool again with that in mind and look at how much of the time offing villains seems like a distraction to him rather than the point of the scene). Taiki Waititi is a famously likeable man who can nonetheless play villains whose very ridiculousness is part of their intimidation factor. Nothing’s more frightening in reality that an insecure idiot who’s stumbled into a position of power. Jodie Comer is, well, Jodie Comer, a woman who can put a spin on “Good luck with your life time supply of virginity.” that ricochets off the back of the screen while she’s walking away without looking back. 

Jodie’s the only person stretching herself in the movie, playing both sides of the virtual divide. Her game persona is pretty much Lara Croft with a breastplate and an Aussie accent (wonderfully, the avatar who calls her out on her Aussie accent is played by Ryan Reynolds' go-to butt-monkey Hugh Jackman), all sass and swagger and “ain’t no-one got time for this”. In the real world her character is softer and more beleaguered, and Comer sells both facets without breaking a sweat.

If I’ve a niggle with the thing, it’s that even though the most important role is played by a woman, it’s still a man’s movie. It’s not just that Guy is the focus of the action, and does most of the important hero stuff. It’s that even though Millie is Guy’s motivation for doing everything that he does, her role in that is essentially passive and all down to the decision of another man, her coding partner, Keys. (another stealth performance from Stranger Things’ Joe Keery’s knack for against the odds good guys). Guy comes to life because his original coding was based on Keys’ crush on Millie. I was niggling on that when we smashed our way to the rom-com ending where those crazy kids finally got it together, and while I really liked the way that Ryan Reynolds sold his bit in the reveal, I would have been just as happy without the pay-off. I’d have been happier too if they’d found a better way to nuance the idea that for Guy to getr Molotov’s attention, he’d have to “level up”. Men ought to be better, but being better is not a transaction. Something which Ryan Reynolds gets across really well in the rest of the movie, so I’m blaming the writing here.

It’s a niggle. In a movie which most of the time takes an idiotic premise and makes it work better than any video game movie I’ve ever seen. In its best moments it reminds me most of The Lego Movie: both are majoring in good natured anarchy where anything can happen and most people are doing their best. And I like its core message of rebelling against routine to be a good person instead of a bad ass. Most of the audience had probably paid for their tickets by doing stuff they didn’t much want to do that didn’t make the world any better for anyone they cared about. I don’t imagine a dumb video game movie is going to change that, but if it gets even a few people thinking...

And if it doesn’t, it’s still a fun movie with a positive message. I’ll take that. Signs are, I’ll take it again in a couple of years, since apparently they’re trying to figure out a sequel….

Riders of Justice; please don't remake this with Liam Neeson

Fun things to ponder; when they hired Mads Mikkelson to be the face of Carlsberg, did they make the calculation that hardly anyone had noticed him playing Hannibal Lecter for three years, or did they think, hell, it’s funny having a cannibal as the quirky face of our product?

Having watched Riders of Justice I now realise that I don’t understand the Danish sense of humour well enough to call it, but it seems way more likely to have been “Hannibal as our spokesmodel? Cooooool!”. There are positively Korean levels of mood whiplash going on at all times in Riders for Justice, which lurches in and out of farce, nerd-mockery, ultra-violence, the philosophy of coincidence and the weight of bereavement as if there aren’t any real differences that matter between any of them.

And somehow it works; each different thing the movie tries to do is done well enough to land, and the characters make enough sense that they can hold all the different tones together somehow. Yes the three computer geeks are walking punchlines, but they’re also somehow kind of compelling as people. Well, OK, maybe not Emmenthaler, who’s a bit too one-note. But Otto and Lennart have a kind of space integrity to their stumbling.

It’s a lot of different kinds of movie all at once. It’s a vengeance movie, it’s a found family movie, it’s a very black comedy, it’s a movie that’s thinking about how nothing really means anything and how we’ll do almost anything to avoid accepting that, including wiping out an entire biker gang.

Mostly though, if you’re in the English speaking world, it’s a movie that has you sitting there thinking “They are totally going to remake this in English with Liam Neeson.” Because it’s a nordic movie about a strong silent man with a set of special skills taking revenge on a gang of criminals who murdered his wife. Hollywood law pretty much requires a US remake with Liam Neeson playing Mads Mikkelson’s role.

And - and hear me out here - Neeson would nail that bit. Mikkelson’s really good as a father making a mess of, well, everything except being mean to Afghans. Neeson could take that bit and do it all over again his own way. The man is, even when he’s not trying, an actor. But Hollywood would screw everything else up. Otto and Lennart would become young hipster hackers. The ache in the middle of the movie would be replaced by simple anger. They’d probably hire Jack Black to play Emmenthaler. And so on. The whole delirious knotty mess of “What tone have we got now?” would go out the window. Hollywood doesn’t have it in it to run with Lennart becoming the world’s worst therapist to an orphaned teenager while Otto explains that it will be fine; after all Lennart’s had 4000 hours of therapy with 25 different therapists; there’s nothing he doesn’t know about how to talk to them.

So, with any luck at all, Riders  will stay just enough below the radar in Hollywood that it can be its own bonkers self, unsullied by a remake. In my own small way, I’m helping that obscurity by talking about it on the world’s most unread blog for post number 600 of something I never thought would get more than dozen posts before I got bored with it.

Freaky

Freaky is a perfectly effective horror spoof that left me thinking about why horror movies were so popular in the 80s. It’s not because people were really that into seeing teenagers getting horribly murdered, or even because there was some anti-sexual undercurrent in 80s life which meant that English-speaking societies wanted to send a message that anyone who had illicit sex would die horribly. I appreciate that if anyone was reading this, they’d be jumping up and down to point out all the semiotics studies which correlate teen slasher movies to the AIDS pandemic and various other moral panics. Yeah, sure, right. Might even be true, for semiotic values of true. It would, perhaps, have had something to do with why some people bought some tickets. But.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Movies get made and distributed for money. So if you want to understand why Hollywood does something, look at the margins. Slasher movies are just efficient.

Watching someone do a very expert parody of a slasher movie hammered the point home for me. Slasher movies are cheap to make. They have small casts, shot in easily controlled environments, doing essentially mundane things. At intervals, someone dies horribly. Which is a little expensive, but it’s usually very controllable and involves practical effects that have been around for years. There’s nothing that’s hard or expensive to do; no big crowd scenes, no car chases, no explosions. Just a small group of kids being whittled down by a looming bad guy who’s got enough of a drop on them that most of the kills don’t even require fight choreography. Film-making doesn’t get much cheaper than this. No wonder they made so many of them in the 80s. Anything else would have cost more.

Do not get me wrong. It wasn’t that Freaky bored me so much I got to thinking about other things like the economics of movie making. It was that watching its own efficiency and appreciating it for what it was got me thinking about how efficient the originals were.

Above all and anything else, Freaky is well scripted. I don’t mean that it’s got good dialogue, although it does have that going for it. I mean that the plotting is clever.

Here’s the basic plot-line; your stereotypical slasher movie goon unintentionally swaps bodies with one of his teen girl victims. That’s it. Teen girl stuck in the body of a killer goon, trying to figure out how to get her body and her life back, goon stuck in the body of a girl and trying to figure out how many people he can kill at homecoming weekend.

The cleverness in the plotting is that this is a comedy, more or less, so there has to be the prospect of a happy ending, more or less. For that to work, everything that happens has to be plausibly attributable to the goon so that if the teen ever gets her body back, she’s not going to be spending the rest of her life in jail anyway. Freaky pulls this off so well that you can see them doing it and enjoy the thought that went into it. The plot is put together just so; it’s got all the beats and fakeouts of the originals, tweaked just enough both for comedy and the sensibilities of a more critical era, but like all good homages, it also tells a satisfying story.

For any of this to work, two things have to happen. One is that you’ve got to spend enough time with the larger cast that when they start getting murdered it feels like it matters. Which is one of those places where slasher movies save money; there’s lots of stuff which just establishes character - or the lack of it - and which is really cheap to film

The other is that your two leads need to sell the body switch. I’d had my doubts about Vince Vaughan convincing me that he was a teenage girl trapped in a lumbering body, but he did better than I expected. Kathryn Newton actually does the real groundwork as Millie, because by the time the swap happens, we’ve got to know Millie and we’re primed for what Vince is going to do to try to imitate her. And Millie’s been so beaten down as herself that when she starts gooning it up the audience is pretty much rooting for her to kill some dudes in her cool red leather jacket. 

All in all, it’s a lot more fun than a movie ought to be where people get skewered, sawn in half the long way, flash-frozen, beaten to death with toilet seats and choked by having a champagne bottle hammered down their throats. Not all of them have that shit coming to them either. Some of the fun is Millie in the Butcher’s body enjoying the idea of having strength on her side for once in her life. Some of it is the Butcher in Millie’s body finding out how hard it is to murder people when you’re only five foot four and flimsy. As I say, a lot of the rest of it is watching the setups which mean that when the cops are trying to make sense of this, the Butcher will be more in the frame than Millie. The scripting and plotting are nimble enough that none of that seems forced. I always like good writing.

But the simple question about this, if you’re wondering if you’re going to like it, is this. You’ll know in the first five seconds, when a huge smash title comes up saying just “Wednesday, the 11th”. If that makes you burst out laughing, you’re going to have a great time. 

Jasper Kent: The Danilov Quintet; wrapping up

As fate works out, I first tried to use this thing as a way to ramble about books with Jasper Kent’s The Twelve, and here I am after a two year hiatus trying to get back in the saddle with some thoughts about the rest of what turned out to be the Danilov Quintet. 

After I bought and read Thirteen Years Later, I let Kent drift. A few years back I hoovered up the other three books and put them into my Kindle queue, but it took a lot of lockdown to get me to the point where I decided to see how it all worked out for those crazy Danilovs. Push, I said to myself, and it’s a block of three books off the queue.

When I was grumping about Thirteen Years Later ten years ago, I grumped about the focus on Iuda being a mistake. I didn’t know how committed Kent was to that mistake. Never mind the Danilovs; Iuda’s the connective tissue through all five books. He’s in all of them, and he’s the puppet master of an awful lot of the action. Sure, the big bad is your actual canonical Dracula, but the engine for the books is Iuda trying to play Dracula off against everyone else out of some weird mixture of morbid curiosity and the impulse to be awful just for the sake of being awful. 

So, how does it all go? Well, I was right that the fourth book would have the Russo-Turkish War in it, but not in any terribly important way. I was right that the last book would be the Revolution, but how easy was that to guess given the obsession with the Romanovs? In reality the action is anchored between Moscow and St Petersburg in all three books; there are outings to fun travel spots like Sebastopol and Yekaterinburg, but Kent keeps the things which matter in the cities which have always mattered the most to Russians and Russian-ologists. For the rest, the background is the general awfulness of the struggle between Tsarist Russia’s tiny middle class and the forces of Romanov autocracy. Which was a long grim slog from the efforts of the Decembrists to the Bolsheviks, and it’s hard to fight the idea that if the Romanovs had listened to the Decembrists, the two hundred years since then would have been a lot easier on everyone. 

Of course, while all of that’s going on, the Danilovs are fighting vampires, and if I were a smarter man I’d have some kind of idea of how that mirrors a fight for the soul of Russia. Anyhow, there’s a lot of vampires, and they don’t have a plan. Because most of them are stupid, and the one at the top is that particular kind of stupid that you get when no-one has the nerve to say no to you, and the one really smart one just seems to enjoy meanness for its own sake, which is no kind of plan for anything.

How much fun is any of this? Not very much. While the bad guys are bad, the Danilovs are not necesarily great company.  They’re mopey and self-absorbed, which is a very realistic thing for Russians under a curse to be, but not something that’s necessarily fun to read about.

So there’s not a lot of fun to be had. Most of it comes from the cleverness of Kent’s thinking. His notion on why vampires don’t show up in mirrors is a very clever one. Vampires look so awful that everyone, themselves included, just edits the reality out when they’re looking at them. But when they edit out what they see in the mirror, they can’t write over that missing reflection with anything else, so it all disappears. It’s clever, and he makes a very good plot point out of what happens when someone clever - Iuda, who else? - figures out how to make a mirror which vampires can see their reflections in.

The other bit of cleverness is in the fifth book. Which opens with the fun news that Dracula is dead, solving all the problems the other four books are obsessed with. With Dracula dead, he can’t threaten the Romanovs any more, and the Danilovs can relax their vigilance at last. I liked it that Dracula got killed, because Kent is true to the meta-canon. The events of the fourth book sent him off to London looking for a McGuffin, and he ran afoul of Van Helsing just as he did in the Stoker book and got schwacked. I like a bit of respect for the established verities. But what on earth is going to keep the Danilovs suitably miserable, other than the Ootober Revolution? 

A nutty plot to resurrect Dracula, what else? Which is when the whole thing really does start to feel more like the adventures of Iuda than anything to do with the Danilovs, since the nutbag in chief of the resurrection plot is Iuda’s first girlfriend, and when the resurrection does not quite go according to plan, it’s Iuda who gets brought back, not  Dracula. I had been really thinking Iuda was good and dead at the end of the fourth book and I was quite fine with that.

Credit where credit is due; Kent pulls that off. Iuda winds up sharing a body with the last surviving Danilov, and they alternate not just control of the body, but control of the narrative. Kent gives us two very different narrative voices, and a set of clever challenges for the two squabbling occupants of one body. It keeps the suspense going very well through the book and right up to an incredibly downbeat ending. Yes, sure the day is saved and the vampire plague put to bed at terrible cost, but Kent makes sure in the epilogue to remind the reader that nothing good is going to happen in Russia any time soon.

So, a bit of a slog, and it took me a long time to get there. On balance it was sort of worth the effort, but it’s not something I’m coming back to.

Unlike this on-again off-again rambling. I’m not a John Wick levels of thinking I’m back, but it’s time to get back on the horse.