Rambo: Last Blood [18]

Dir: Adrian Grunberg

There has always been more to Sylvester Stallone than his meathead image. Many of his performances are better and more nuanced than he’s ever been given credit for and he has written and directed much of his own work. This strong authorial voice behind the scenes has almost certainly been a large part of how he has managed to sustain not one but two career-defining franchises over a period of around 40 years. The Rocky series may be patchy, but it has only grown more interesting with each entry, drawing together into a sort of alternative autobiography as each entry reflects on Stallone’s career and life.

Rambo was never really meant to be a franchise. In the novel the first entry in the series, 1982’s First Blood, was based on, Rambo died at the end. It probably should have stayed that way in the film, because with each entry the ensuing series has drifted further from that film's downbeat tone. The John Rambo of First Blood is painted not as a hero but as a traumatised Vietnam veteran whose PTSD makes him click into survival mode when a small-town sheriff decides to victimise him. He kills no one on purpose and the film’s crescendo is not violent but emotional. Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo III and the incongruously titled Rambo increasingly dumped any form of introspection in favour of escalating violence. That pattern continues with Rambo: Last Blood.

Last Blood finds Rambo living on a ranch raising horses. He lives with a Mexican housekeeper (Adriana Barraza) and they seem to have been raising Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal) together, though whether she’s actually related to Barrraza’s character is never addressed. With the help of a friend, Gabrielle has found her long absent father and she wants to visit him in Mexico and ask why he abandoned her. In Mexico, Gabrielle is kidnapped by a trafficking gang and hooked on drugs, leading an enraged Rambo to go hunting for her and for vengeance.

Any way you slice it, Last Blood is a bad film. Before we even get to its deeper-seated issues, the screenplay is terrible. The characters are ciphers, particularly Paz Vega’s crusading journalist, who does little in her ten minutes of screen time but point Rambo in the right direction. It recalls another godawful fifth entry in an action franchise: A Good Day to Die Hard. That film, like this one, dumped much of what defined its leading character. The sequels may have progressively pulled back on Rambo’s PTSD, but even Stallone’s 2008 entry found a little space to allow the character and the audience to reflect on how the years of war had shaped him. This film has no such inclination, instead, it’s just a bit of weak setup building to a group of totally personality free bodies being mashed by Rambo in a Home Alone style third act. There are rumours that Stallone ghost directed the second film, but so far it is only the fourth that he has been the credited director on, not that you’d be able to tell from Adrian Grunberg’s anonymous work here. The director delivers the violence fairly competently, but this isn’t an interesting or memorable looking film in any way.

The Rambo series was never the model of political correctness, and I’m not suggesting it needs to start being that now, but by any standard, this is a disturbing and nasty film in the political context of 2019. Of course, trafficking gangs exist, and are bad, but Stallone and  Matthew Cirulnick's screenplay doesn’t even attempt nuance. It’s not just the gang either, every person we encounter in Mexico, with the exception of Vega, who does nothing, is an unambiguous and unexplored villain. Of course Rambo has to have a motivating factor, but Gabrielle is never more than a prop, the same is true of Adriana Barazza’s Maria. It sometimes feels as though the film is using these characters as a get out of jail card for its otherwise racist violence—Rambo likes THESE Mexicans, so he can’t be racist. It’s not convincing. The whole film feels like a Trump voter’s wet dream of the solution to the border ‘crisis’, and a shot of the wall, just before the orgy of ultraviolence that forms the film’s last 20 minutes, only underlines this point.

I’d like to brush off the film’s politics, to say just enjoy it as unserious and vicarious splatter, as we do many horror films. The problem with that is that Rambo has always been political and in 2019, with this particular plot as the driving force, the politics are inescapable. If there had been a measure of thoughtfulness, of nuance, of self analysis or criticism, the politics could have been a genuinely interesting reflection on how Rambo ended up this way. Those things aren't there, so it's just vile. In a way, I hope Last Blood isn’t the end for Rambo because, whatever my issues with the character and the series, an iconic figure like this deserves a better send off. On the other hand, I won’t mourn if he disappears into the desert, like a lot of other dinosaurs before him.

½★

Assassin's Creed [12A] [2D]

Dir: Justin Kurzel

I often find myself asking "what's wrong with mainstream Hollywood cinema right now"? The answer is complex and multi-faceted, but I think I can now boil it down to two words: Assassin's Creed. This borderline unwatchable film epitomises so many of the problems I have with mainstream cinema right now that it almost seems to have been made as a how not to guide for other filmmakers. It is as fundamentally broken as any film I've seen recently, and yet its most frustrating aspect is how easy it is to see how it could be at least partially fixed.

Not having played any of the Assassin's Creed games, I don't know how accurately the film represents them, but even if it is extremely unfaithful to the series that, I'm confident, is the very least of the film's problems. One of the larger problems is the screenplay, which manages a trick you would imagine was difficult, but is all too often achieved; being insanely intricate and complicated, but also  dumber than a box of rocks.

Michael Fassbender plays Callum Lynch, a death row prisoner who wakes up from his 'execution' to find that he's in a facility where scientists led by Marion Cotillard's Sofia want to plug him into a machine called the Animus. Using this machine they will allow (read force) Cal to experience the memories of his ancestor, an assassin named Aguilar, in order to find the Apple of Eden, which supposedly contains the genetic code that will allow control of humanity's free will. How will this genetic code actually be used? Here are some keys, watch them jingle. The intricacies of this plot dictate that roughly 97% of the dialogue is unspeakable technobabble. The other 3% is the phrase "Apple of Eden" and no, it never sounds any less silly.

Fassbender and Cotillard are merely the tip of an overqualified iceberg when it comes to casting. Other unfortunates chewing their way through the dialogue include The Babadook's Essie Davis, brilliant French/Greek actress Ariane Labed, Michael K. Williams, Brendan Gleeson, Denis Ménochet and Charlotte Rampling. Every single one of them is totally wasted on a screenplay that has no time for such niceties as characterisation, indeed in the case of the people Cal is imprisoned with at the facility it actively avoids giving them any life, rendering the third act totally inert. Outside the action scenes, Fassbender couldn't seem any less engaged, but he qualifies as one of the film's harder workers, Rampling and Cotillard often seem slightly perturbed to have been woken for their scenes. It's a particular shame to see Ariane Labed, one of the most interesting young actors in European cinema, given so little to play. She has a few lines (all in Spanish), but mostly just has to look stern. She does it well enough, but I wanted so much more for her in her first big budget film.

I could forgive many of the film's sins if the action were better. To be fair, Fassbender and Labed (who plays a female assassin working alongside Aguilar) each get a couple of extended moments to show that they did at least some of their own action. The rest, however, seems heavily doubled, is largely shot with shakycam and often cut to ribbons. It's just not very involving, because you can seldom see a single action all the way through. It's also hamstrung by the 12A certificate, which means that a climactic slashed throat can hardly be seen to bleed. Adam Arkapaw's cinematography, accomplished as it is, also creates problems for the action. Arkapaw and director Justin Kurzel's frames are, in the 1492 set action scenes, so dusty and misty that it's often tough to see much of what's going on, even before the camera motion and editing become an issue.

To be fair to the screenplay, it has a beginning and a middle. Unfortunately what it lacks is an end. After about 110 minutes the film appears to decide that it, just as we have, has had enough of this crap and it stops. To say that it ends wouldn't be true, that would suggest that there was some sort of climax or resolution. It stops, as abruptly as if the projector had broken, inviting a sequel we'll almost certainly never see. 

However, I've saved the film's biggest problem, its figurative raised middle finger to the audience, for last. It's one line of dialogue. Introducing Cal to the Animus, Sofia tells him that while he's experiencing Aguilar's memories "you can't change anything". This is a calamitously stupid idea. It means that for a full third of the running time we're watching a foregone conclusion. Yes, we keep cutting back to Cal, going through the actions we see Aguilar doing, but because his actions have no bearing on the action scene, what it amounts to is watching a man get overly animated in his involvement with a video game cut scene. The other problem with cutting frequently back to Cal is that it seems to happen every time the action threatens to develop some sense of flow. Another great decision there.

When the action scenes finally move to the present day, with Cal actually doing something, it is no more involving, because the people fighting alongside him are total non-entities. Michael K. Williams has said a few lines, but the rest are just bodies, occasionally glimpsed in the background. The stakes are non-existent, the plan they're trying to stop is so vague despite having been discussed endlessly, and the final action scene is a total anti-climax. It doesn't even manage to have the coolest moves in the film (those belong to Ariane Labed in one of the 1492 sequences).

I said that I could see an easy way to fix Assassin's Creed, at least to some degree. It's this: set the whole film in 1492. Immediately the action is more involving, you lose the impenetrable technobabble and reduce the film down to a focused conflict between good (Assassins) and bad (Templars). This would also mean there would be more space to develop the relationships, especially between Aguilar and Labed's Maria, adding weight to the action scenes. I don't know if that would make the film more or less faithful to the games, but I do know it would make it a better film. It might even mean it could have an ending.

Justin Kurzel began his career with the brilliant true crime tale Snowtown. A film that gave us  3 dimensional, portraits of a range of often terrifying characters, a film that told a complete and horribly compelling story, a film that stuck with you. I'm not sure what he and his cast saw in this material, but he certainly doesn't deliver on whatever promise he felt there was here. The film doesn't look bad, but it's not got any imagery that will stick in my mind either. I hope this is just a blip for Kurzel and Arkapaw, who are much more talented than this dreadful, boring and very, very stupid film suggests.
½★

Your Highness [15]

Dir: David Gordon Green

The Princess Bride is good and all, but you know what I think it's missing? Dick jokes and swearing. Who am I? I'm a fucking moron, and I just made a film called Your Highness.

Your Highness sees Danny McBride and James Franco as Princes (McBride a lazy stoner, Franco a chiseled hero) in Medieval England. When Franco's bride (Zooey Deschanel) is stolen by an evil wizard (Justin Theroux) the brothers must go on a quest to get her back before - oh god, kill me now - The Fuckening. They're joined in their quest (for no especially apparent reason) by Natalie Portman, who also holds a grudge against the wizard.

The responsible morons in this case are star and writer Danny McBride (I say writer, I imagine the screenplay for this misbegotten piece of trash was merely transcribed while sat on school bus listening to witless 13 year olds make dick and stoner jokes and discuss their comparatively recent discovery of the wonder of boobs) and director David Gordon Green. Green isn't totally useless, I liked his 2004 film Undertow a lot, and he has several other acclaimed dramas under his belt but, on this evidence, a comedy director he is not, we'll come to that in more detail soon.

Danny McBride, on the other hand, is completely useless. Movie stars are usually possessed of at least one of a few essential ingredients: notable talent; supernatural charisma; likeability; astounding good looks. McBride not only lacks all these qualities, he seems almost be a black hole, sucking them from those around him and into some dark oblivion. I have seen tree stumps more compelling than Danny McBride, and funnier, for that matter. The problem is that McBride has very few ideas. Two actually. The first is 'hey what if we had a stoner in medieval times?' The answer to this one is that he's just as tiresome and unfunny as he'd be in modern clothes. The second idea is saying fuck, a lot. Look, I swear all the time, and I'm especially fond of the word fuck, its versatility astounds me, but that doesn't magically make every utterance of the f word funny. It's perhaps mildly amusing once, in the first seconds of the film, because it at least possesses a novelty factor, but you have to do something with your words to make them funny, and McBride, repeatedly, settles for the simple incongruity of medieval people saying fuck (or shit, or cock), he simply lacks the ability (or perhaps the will) to use the f word in the near poetic way that, say, David Mamet is capable of, it becomes like someone prodding you with a stick while screaming 'I said fuck, isn't that hilarious?' No. No it's not. Grow the fuck up.

There are one or two sequences that don't revolve entirely around the utterance of expletives. Unhappily they are no funnier for it, and one, in which Franco and McBride consult a Yoda like figure who - HILARIOUSLY - is a sexually abusive homosexual (I know, my sides are splitting too, sexual abuse is just so funny when a gay does it), is just out and out offensive. Another sequence exploits the magical comic qualities of boobs, by essentially saying; 'look, boobs, aren't they simultaneously awesome and hilarious?' Rather than a truly coherent story, the film is largely a series of deadly unfunny sketches. The boobs based set piece is the perfect example; it's set in a forest ruled by a man who looks like a large baby and is surrounded by topless women. Why? What is this society? Who is this guy; a king, a deity? What's with the nudity? The film doesn't care, it just thinks it's funny because, check it out, he's all ugly and stuff, but they're hot and naked, comic genius right?

The script is hideous, and it's more than matched by the dreadful performances. Because the film is so brutally unfunny it is hard to tell whether the uniformly appalling English accents are part of the joke, either way, it's not funny. Everyone looks ill at ease here, even McBride, who despite creating this role for himself manages to do precisely nothing with it. Every character works on a single note, and none of the late and half hearted attempts to find any of them an arc convinces (least of all the laughable coda between McBride and Portman's characters). Natalie Portman seems particularly adrift here, she never convinces as a badass warrior woman and her gifts as an actress (which are variable at best and depend largely on her director, it seems) seem not to stretch to broad comedy.

David Gordon Green also seems disengaged. There are some pretty landscape shots, but for the most part the film looks dull and there is no real invention in his shot and editing choices. There also some shockingly poor technical issues waved by, most damagingly the Yoda like puppet, which is so poor that it may as well be a sock on the director's hand (actually, that would result in better lip sync). The main problem is the acting though, and the fact that Green seems content to wave through these lazy and boring turns from actors who can, largely, do so much better.

There were, to be fair, about twenty seconds of Your Highness in which I didn't want to punch something, but then who can resist when Zooey Deschanel is singing? Otherwise, this is a total waste of time, money and celluloid.

½★