Maverick (1994)

 

Place Your Brets

Maverick
USA 1994 Directed by Richard Donner
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This review contains a big
spoiler about a character from the outset.

Maverick was a big budget reboot, by director Richard Donner and actor Mel Gibson (the director/actor team of Lethal Weapon fame) of the classic James Garner small screen character of Bret Maverick, who had been in many iterations of the show (you can read my reviews of the various variants of Maverick here). And it’s kind of open to interpretation to just who Gibson is playing in this one as he’s called Bret Maverick and, just like Garner used to, provides a voice over narrative as he goes along on his adventure... although I could have honestly done without the added swearing here because it didn’t seem quite right sitting in the Maverick universe but, hey ho, I guess the writers maybe imagined it was edgy or something.

The thing is, though, James Garner also plays a major role in the movie, as a Marshall called Zane Cooper, which I’m assuming is an homage to the two Western writers Zane Grey and James Fenimore Cooper. However, at the end of the film he is revealed to also be a Maverick, running an elaborate con with his son, Bret. Now, you can either take that as he’s playing Pappy (as he did once in the original show where he played both father and son in one episode) and Gibson is the original Bret or, like me, despite the lack of timing continuity between pretty much every iteration of the show in various forms, you can interpret it as he’s still playing Bret Maverick and also called his son the same name. Either way, this is a fairly affectionate nod to the original show (asides from the swearing) and is a nice addition to the original stories.

It has a stellar cast such as Jodie Foster as the main romantic lead (another con woman and this is not unusual for what would have been an episode of Maverick), Alfred Molina as a villain and James Coburn in another prominent role in the last third of the movie. There are also a lot of old time cowboy show (and Maverick show) cameo appearances by various actors such as Leo Gordon (Big Mike in the original show and also one of the original series' writers) and Doug McLure, not to mention lots of uncredited cameos too, including Garner’s brother turning up once again, plus some country and western singers too, for some reason.

One cameo moment is wonderful when Danny Glover, Gibson’s co-star from the Lethal Weapon movies, comes face to face with Gibson while robbing a bank... and the music suddenly goes into a dead-on parody of Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton’s score for the Lethal Weapon films. That’s very nicely done.

Another great uncredited cameo, larger but still short, is the inclusion of a character played by Margot Kidder. Of course, Kidder also played James Garner’s regular love interest in his post-Maverick TV show Nichols (which I reviewed here) and it’s nice to see the two sharing the screen together again (come to think of it, she also worked for this particular director in her most famous role as Lois Lane in Superman The Movie and its sequels).

And, getting back to the musical cameos... Randy Newman’s score for the film incorporates a heroic melody line for Gibson’s Bret character that is almost, but not quite, an instrumental version of the shows original theme and song. It’s like he’s been asked to do it straight but delete one note and change two others and I can’t quite understand why because, well, Warners would surely have owned the rights to the music from the original show. Maybe, going with the idea that this was actually the original Bret Maverick’s son, the composer decided to make it a variant, possibly intending to bring the full version of Garner’s theme back later for... the big reveal. That doesn’t happen but, it’s quite close and fans of the old show will certainly hear the old theme in it when Gibson does anything heroic here.

And it’s a nice film with some interesting scenes, nice action and a real suspenseful finish to the big poker game near the end of the movie. It’s also very humorous, in exactly the way the original show was although, certainly Gibson’s young Bret is more willing to pull his guns out, it seems, than the original character was. There’s a big problem with the film though... and I’m not just talking about the waterwheel on the ferry changing speeds between long shot and close up in one scene either...

I’m sure the various plot twists... Jodie Foster actually after Maverick’s money whenever she can thieve it, the James Garner reveal, the Indian who turns out to be an old pal of Bret... would have seemed fresh or at least unpredictable to the younger segment of the audience who were unfamiliar with any of the various versions of the show over the years. Old hands at Bret’s game though, through Garner’s always pitch perfect and immensely entertaining portrayal, will see a lot of the reveals coming way before they happen because they’ve become almost cliché by this point in the franchise. So, yeah, I think this movie appeals to two different audiences but, luckily, it holds it own quite well and at least meets the expectations of an older and more familiar crowd.

Maverick, the movie version, is a real hoot, to be sure and definitely one to watch. It doesn’t come close, it has to be said, to many of the earlier versions of the character but, that’s okay, Gibson does well in the part, as does Foster and they’re both helped out tremendously, in my opinion, by the presence of James Garner returning, effectively, to his roots here. A lovely, romantic Western flavoured with just a favourable dash of its powerful legacy of ingredients. One to watch.

The Dead Don't Die

Fourth Wall Of The Dead

The Dead Don't Die
USA/Sweden 2019 Directed by Jim Jarmusch
UK cinema release print

Warning: Some very slight spoilerage.

I’ve always liked Jim Jarmusch as a writer/director, since first seeing his early masterpiece Down By Law in the late 1980s. I’ve not seen all of his movies... there are a few gaps... but I have seen and enjoyed most of them. Every now and again he will make a movie that seems to be a complete side step from his usual fayre. The first time I noticed this was in his truly excellent Ghost Dog - The Way Of The Samurai but he also took me by surprise by making a ‘vampire movie’ a few years back called Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed by me here). Both of those films were much more commercially minded, it seems to me (either by design or by fluke) but each still transcended their genre trappings and held the key elements that I tend to associate with Jarmusch’s work over the years...

Those being: They were funny, poignant and highlighted the alienation of people sharing different languages and cultures even as they drew together.

So when it was announced that Jarmusch had made a zombie movie, I was interested... not just because I happen to like that sub-genre of horror movie anyway but because I knew, coming from Jarmusch, that it would be like no other zombie movie that ever came before it. Well... I got that right.

The film stars Bill Murray and Adam Driver, both regular collaborators with the director (check out Driver’s role in the directors last non-documentary movie Paterson, which I reviewed here) as two cops who are the main police presence in their small town of Centerville, along with the only other cop in town played by Chloë Sevigny. And they are all supported by a star studded cast, many of whom have worked with the director before, including Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, RZA, Selena Gomez, Iggy Pop and Caleb Landry Jones (in a wonderful turn as a petrol and film/comic book merchandise dealer who wears a Nosferatu t-shirt). And, as you would expect from a cast like this (or pretty much any cast under this director, actually), they are all pretty amazing. Between them, Murray and Driver keep the mood sombre with their perpetually downbeat expressions and this helps maintain the minimalistic, gloomy atmosphere of a town, one of many, which has suddenly been overrun with a plague of zombies.

Now, I think this film is going to really divide people and there’s an element that even I, while laughing out loud at a lot of the wonderful humour on display here, found somewhat annoying. I’ll get to just what that is in a minute but let me first look at what this film both shares and, often, doesn’t share with the zombie genre in general.

Well, the common traits are a marked goriness when the humans are attacked although, conversely, when older zombies are out walking there is just dust instead of blood, which is possibly more accurate (I’m not sure, not being an expert on the undead myself). There’s also... and this is quite blatant here and almost being done just to check off boxes, it seems... the comparison of zombies who, like their nearest on-screen antecedents in the George A. Romero zombie flicks, are a satire of various aspects of our culture. Indeed, Jarmusch almost goes over the top to prove a point here by comparing some of the zombies to mobile phone/social media users and demonstrating this while it’s already been established earlier on in the text of the film what the ‘wifi’ so desired by the walking dead has already failed in the town.

However, it does do a lot which the modern, post-Romero zombie movie doesn’t often do. For example, it gives us a pseudo-scientific reason for the outbreak of the undead (which somehow comes in two stages in its ressurectional properties and thus renders the narrative nonsensical anyway... possibly what Jarmusch wants here) whereas most modern zombie films don’t try to find a rationale behind the undead shenanigans, they just deliberately side step it and cut to the chase. Here, Jarmusch has introduced the concept of polar fracking throwing the earth off its axis and this somehow raising the dead. Honestly, though... I think this is just another excuse to heavy hand the various metaphors used within the genre and, in some ways poke fun of it.

And that’s where I have my main problem with this film... the lack of respect for the genre. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a director like Jarmusch seeming to say that films made in these kinds of genres are dumb and I’m more than happy for him to have a pop at them. However, the way in which he does it, with a blatant disregard for his own story mechanics where its later shown that... quite literally... anything goes (and if you’ve seen the movie I’m talking about both the final exit scene of Tilda Swinton’s character and the awareness of its non-feasibility in the script by Adam Driver’s character). And this is a big problem for me because, as I’ll get to in a minute, this kinda feels like the director is insulting the intelligence of the kinds of people who would turn out for a film like this... or at least that’s the way it felt to me, anyway.

Also, there’s a lot of referential, postmodernistic jokes in the main body of the film and while the director has done this just a little in the past, usually with a lot more of a story impact than the ‘thrown off’, almost Tarantino-esque way he does it here, I think this dumbs down the movie somewhat too. Again, don’t get me wrong because I had a little chuckle when I saw the late, great director Sam Fuller’s name on a tombstone but this film seems to be loaded with this sort of stuff and, outside of the obvious and loving references to Pittsburgh (where Romero plied his zombie trade), there seemed to be to be way too much of this kind of thing and it felt like the high calibre director was kind of slumming it, to some extent. Jarmusch is better than this, is what I kept thinking... it just seemed a little out of character for him.

Okay, so there were a few walk outs in the audience when I saw this (I’m pleased to say because, if someone like Jarmusch doesn’t get some walk outs then he’s almost failed) and I think this may be due to the quite blatant self awareness of some of the characters, Adam Driver’s in particular... and their inability or disinterest in helping themselves out in terms of where the script is taking them. So, yes, Adam Driver and Bill Murray’s characters both show, from very early in the film, that they are characters in a film and this kinda grates in the way it’s done. We’re not being asked to share in any peril or the particularly humourous modes of speech that the various characters explore (including cycles of repeat phrases which got me smiling quite a lot, it has to be said) because we can’t invest with them in any way as characters. In fact, we are being asked to interact with them on a more metatextual level, it seems but... only when it doesn’t get in the way of the on-screen action... which is a bit like the director is trying to ‘eat all the pies’ and not helpful in creating a film which holds together tonally, despite the minimalistic air of cynicism and acceptance that Jarmusch pulls from the air almost effortlessly.

Despite all these criticisms though, I personally really enjoyed The Dead Don't Die. It’s not ever going to make the top of my list in terms of favourite Jarmusch movies but it’s an entertaining piece and I think long time fans of the director shouldn’t have as much of a problem with it as a more commercially minded audience expecting to see a ‘cool zombie movie’ might have. Recommended to cineastes who are not worried about seeing what I think is personally too many directorial experiments thrown together into the same film. It’s interesting, funny and entertaining so, honestly, what more could you want from a night out at your local cinema?

Proud Mary

A Mary’d Woman

Proud Mary
2018 USA Directed by Babak Najafi
UK cinema release print.

Okay, so this film seems to have had no publicity to speak of... at least over here in the UK. In fact, the first I’d heard of it was when it showed up in the listings at my local cinema last week. A quick look at the trailer showed that it seemed to be going for a stylistic flashback to those great female-centric blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. You know... those really cool pics like Coffy, Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. However, a hasty scan of the user reviews on the IMDB showed that this was not a well liked movie, for the most part. In the end I decided to throw caution to the wind and give this one a go anyway and, you know what? I’m glad I did because I’m here to tell you now that it’s actually a nice little shoot ‘em up movie.

The plot of Proud Mary is a very slight twist on an old storyline. It’s basically John Cassavete’s Gloria in sheeps clothing, so to speak. That doesn’t make it any less valid as being worth an hour and a half of your time, though and the plot goes something like this. Mary, played absolutely brilliantly by an actress I’m not all that familiar with called Taraji P. Henson, is a ‘hit-woman’ for an organised crime family run by Benny (as played by Danny Glover) and his son, her ex squeeze, Tommy (played by Billy Brown). After an opening credits sequence, which I’ll get to in a minute, she carries out a ‘contract’ on a small time bookmaker but, when she investigates who else is in the house after shooting him, she sees (without him knowing it), the bookie’s young son Danny (played extremely well by Jahi Di'Allo Winston). She doesn't kill kids so she leaves him be but keeps tabs on him and, one year later, finds he is enslaved, badly beaten and doing drug runs for an arm of the same organisation she works for. She ‘rescues him’, bumps off his abusers and takes Danny in, without letting on to her boss what’s going on. However, this incident, which she doesn’t own up to, is the touch paper for a gang territory war and it’s a film about the lengths Mary goes to keeping her and Danny safe from, mostly, her own people.

So yeah, a clichéd plot but it’s done with a certain sense of style and a lot of competent film making so I really can’t see why a lot of people didn’t click with this one. There’s plenty of action and a nice look to it which is consistent all the way through. The suspense level is high throughout... although that may be because I personally find gangster films very uncomfortable to watch and, unless they were shot in the 1930s, I try to avoid them whenever I can. I think that goes back to my grammar school education as a kid because, frankly, I found school to be a training ground for hoodlums, thugs and crooks and I find the people walking the planet in real life these days much more threatening than anything you’d find in a horror movie (which, ironically, I find much more comfortable to watch).

I think the problem on this one for a certain section of the audience may be the tone of the piece. The trailer definitely has an early 1970s blaxploitation vibe and, when you get to the film itself, it also pushes that comparison when it comes to the wonderful opening credits sequence. It’s a basic ‘hot lady gets tooled up for an assignment’ style scene but with blazing seventies typography and an opening needle dropped song that practically screams the style of those bold pictures in no uncertain terms. However, after the opening titles, that kind of vibe only comes back with a few, well placed songs and it’s pretty much absent for the rest of the movie. Fil Eisler’s score is actually pretty good but it never really tries to catch those kinds of tones and I suspect that kind of musical doorway into the past was not part of the scoring brief, so to speak. Unfortunately, the score is only available on download as a stand alone listen... not as a proper CD... so it’s not something I’m likely to get to appraise properly in the near future.

That being said, the film is, mostly, not trying to be a 1970s homage but, perhaps, it is trying to re-establish that ‘strong black female lead’ style film for a modern marketplace and I’m all for that. Henson absolutely kills it as Mary and she has the kind of on screen personality and star quality to make this movie shine. She’s not trying to be Pam Grier or Tamara Dobson or anyone else in that kind of genre canon... but she is quite naturally wearing the mantle of their cinematic legacy without even trying. The result is an anti-hero you can root for and a character you can really believe in. Her chemistry with the kid is especially engaging and neither her nor the young feller in question have any problems with getting into some seriously emotional scenes during the course of the movie.

The film does pretty much all you could ask for and it has some great stuff going on visually here too (well... okay... I would like to have seen a little more of the main lead in a more sexploitative way but... yeah... ignore I said that, it would be politically incorrect of me to highlight that element of its visual heritage, surely?). It is a little less realistic in its portrayal of the ‘mob style’ shenanigans, however, in that it seems to be taking place in some kind of Hollywood la-la-land where no matter how much noisy shooting and bodies a character leaves behind, there is never any police presence in the film whatsoever. I mean, although a lot of the kills in this film are shown with various gunmen using silencers, a fair proportion of them also aren’t but, strangely, you never once hear so much as a siren throughout the course of the movie. So... yeah, that was a little weird.

Ultimately though, Proud Mary isn’t trying to be a close match to reality and the film exists in that special place where so many action thrillers like to dwell. It’s no big deal and the film is way more entertaining than some of the IMDB reviewers seem to be saying. Definitely a good time at the cinema if you’ve got nothing else on this week and probably something which would do quite well on the Blu Ray and DVD market too. Check this one out because, although I didn’t understand the title and its relevance to the character, it’s a well made action thriller when so many these days aren’t quite up to scratch.