Molly's Game

Tech The Walls
At House Of Molly

Molly's Game
2017 China/USA Directed by Aaron Sorkin
2018 UK cinema release print.

Well that’s the first movie of my year done and dusted. Molly’s Game opened on New Years Day here in the UK and I knew it would probably be a pretty good one, based on the trailer and the one reason I wanted to see this... Jessica Chastain.

I’ve liked this actress since I first saw her in the excellent horror movie Mama (reviewed here) and my fondness was compounded by seeing her in other fantasy roles such as her excellent turn as the lead villain in Crimson Peak (reviewed by me here). However, it was her true powerhouse of a performance in last year’s absolutely astonishing Miss Sloane (reviewed here) which made me realise just what an actress for the ages she really is. If you want someone who can carry a film with a performance of someone who can demonstrate a confident sense of power while simultaneously showing the vulnerability of a character’s facade shining through, then Jessica Chastain is the actress for you.

And she relly does carry the movie on her shoulders, along with some very able support from the always watchable Idris Elba as her attorney and some nice work from Kevin Costner as her dad, which gives him some of the better dialogue of his career to work with, as far as I’m concerned.

The film tells the real life story of Molly Bloom (who wanted Chastain to play her in this film iteration of her, apparently) and is based on her book of the same title. In it she tells the story of how, after dropping out of being an olympic skiing champion after an accident which cost her a lot of her spine, she became embroiled in running gambling games for her awful boss, before setting up and running her own, ‘mostly legal’  gambling dens which were then raided by the FBI who arrested her for connections to the Russian mob, amongst others (people who she did not know were connected in any way to a criminal organisation, by all accounts).

The film is interesting in that the structure is all over the place, flashing back to childhood versions of the character and also to different points in her adult life whenever it needs to but one of the strengths of the great writing from the director here is that this jumping around never feels chaotic. Instead, it informs the steadily unfolding story of Molly’s problematic career choice in a way that it slowly reveals certain key aspects of her character and her relation to those around her in an intelligent and, luckily for the audience, entertaining manner.

The film’s biggest strengths are the quality of Sorkin’s dialogue and the incredible performances of all concerned here. Even the minor characters seem well acted and add value to the whole. There are a couple of points I’d have to be a little critical of, however.

One of the disappointing aspects of this movie, I felt, was that the shot design is merely extremely competent, rather than outstanding. Sure, the film is dominated by interior sets and the director sometimes makes use of the vertical, rectangular blocks to cut out a pleasing composition on occasion but... nothing that really stood out in the same way that, for instance, the aforementioned Miss Sloane shone in terms of the visual aspect of the picture. That being said, it’s probable that the director made the decision to steer clear of allowing the compositions to draw attention to themselves, perhaps assuming that this would be a barrier to the smooth running of the film. Personally, though, I don’t think that would necessarily be a valid choice (if, indeed, it was the direction he went with here) and I think films like this one, which are mostly all about the dialogue plus the information given to us on the ‘voice over’ narrative, can benefit from a more overt, visually arresting style.

The only other bad thing I could see here was that I was thrown into absolute confusion by the fact that the lawyer played by Elba was able to read Molly Bloom’s real life published book while, simultaneously, she’s still looking for a publisher for it. I was not clear as to whether they were talking about a second book or something else. The IMDB cleared that up for me when I saw that, yes, the book wasn’t published yet in real life at the time of the events depicted in the movie and that, somehow, we were being asked to believe that the book was somehow, like Shrödinger’s Cat, in two possible states of being at the same time... already published while at the same time, unpublished. I don’t know why we are expected not to question this but it was very clearly something which confused the heck out of me and I don’t know why the writer/director did that.

The amazing Daniel Pemberton’s score is, sadly, not that evident in the mix and didn’t make much of an impression on me during the course of the film. However, there is a CD being released for this in four days time and I might have a listen to the samples once they’re up to see (or hear) if it’s something that would reveal a more rewarding experience away from the movie if I bought a copy. As it stands, though, it certainly doesn’t jar with the on visuals or general tone of the piece and it is, at the very least, an appropriate score for the movie. So there’s that.

As for everything else about Molly’s Game, though... pitch perfect and the good stuff here more than outweighs the problems I had with it. Certainly a good one to start the year off with and I have already started recommending it to my friends to take a look at. I can only keep my fingers crossed that they’re all at least as good as this one in the coming months.

Three Days To Kill

Running Up That Kill

Three Days To Kill

2014 USA/France/Greece/Russia

Directed by McG

Playing at UK cinemas now.

Three months ago my cousin, who lives in Australia these days, saw Three Days To Kill at his local cinema and told me to go see it. To be honest, that’s the only reason I went because the trailers for films of this nature tend to look dire, whether the movie’s good or not, and the marketing on this one was no exception. I wondered why it had such a delay getting a release over here but now I’ve got a flavour of some of the reviews I’ve skimmed I see that... well, it’s not a very well thought of movie. Even Mark Kermode had a lot of bad things to say about both the film and its director which... well... this kind of reaction explains the delayed release to some extent, I guess.

One of my goals in writing this review is to partially dispel some of those ideas because, frankly, like my cousin, I had a fun time with this film.

Okay, so I much prefer Luc Besson when he’s sitting in the director's chair but, over the last ten years or so, he’s turned his hand more to writing action stories and then producing them for other directors, for the most part. He’s had a string of hits with these and I have to admit, although they are pretty much exclusively big, dumb action movies, they are almost all done extremely well and, as long as you go into the auditorium knowing the kind of film you’re going to see up front, you’ll probably have a fair time with the majority of the films he’s produced in this fashion.

This one is put together by a director who seems to have fallen from grace in his native Hollywood in recent years but he’s an artist who I happen to like a lot. McG is perhaps best defined by two action movies which, for me, ticked all the right boxes, Charlie’s Angels and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (and if you’re going to watch that second one right, watch the US unrated extended edition rather than the toned down version we got in the cinemas). These were both absolute masterpieces and if you’ve never seen either of them and you’re a fan of colourful, escapist fair with no hint of realism clogging up the story and getting in the way, then you really should make an effort to go see those two. Similarly, and I know this is going to be an unpopular statement, I think his Terminator: Salvation is about the only decent sequel to James Cameron’s original movie... there, I’ve said it, think what you will.

One of the reasons I like this director, and I see it here again on this film, is that I think he’s ahead of his time (or possibly just in tune more with his time) than a lot of people who go to modern action films tend to expect or make allowances for in the current cinematic climate. And I am talking about technique here rather than anything else because, you see, Three Days To Kill follows exactly the same path as all the previous Besson written and produced films... it’s big... it’s dumb... and in addition it has a fair few shortcomings in scripting, or at least what ended up there on the screen. It is, however, contrary to a review of it I quickly glanced at prior to seeing this myself, far from dreary or boring.

It has a thriller plot which is fairly standard. Ex-husband and estranged father to his teenage daughter... Ethan Renner, played very competently and amusingly by Kevin Costner, is a CIA hit man who is forced to leave the service after a big job goes sour and it’s found he’s dying of a rare disease. So he tries to make peace with his past errors and reintroduce himself into his daughter and ex-wife's life just when, as will always happen in movie land, he is given an experimental new drug which could get rid of his death sentence in exchange for one last mission for the CIA... a mission run by the lovely Amber Heard, as the improbable but sexily cool creation Vivi Delay (no I’m not making this up and this should tip you off to the kind of movie this is). Laughs and action then ensue as Ethan kills and interrogates his way to the one man he’s after while fighting off weird hallucinogenic side effects of the drug he’s on and trying to keep everything secret from his ex-wife and daughter. 

Now there are some problems with this movie. My main issues were as follows... 

There are a fair few too many “quality time” montages in here. It’s like there’s some extra padding in the movie when it really doesn’t need it. It seems to be pretty good doing its own thing without these extended kinds of sessions... at least that’s how it looked to me. Also, the timelines don’t quite add up. The movie uses the season of Christmas at the end to illustrate certain things about the main character in a shorthand kind of way but... it doesn’t quite tie in with the fact that the main character needs yet another syringe full of life extending drug. Not quite sure what message the writers wanted me to take away from that last bit, to be honest.

One last thing is that it is very predictable but... that’s not so much of a problem with this kind of film. Big dumb movie, remember? On the other hand, there are some very interesting components to the narrative flow which I’m guessing may be what is bothering some people but in reality probably shouldn’t.

The pacing and tone of certain characters and scenes aren’t quite a match for each other. For instance, Vivi Delay is basically coming on like an aggressive diva in full femme fatale mode and that’s kind of at odds with all the other characters and, incidentally, with how she is presented in the pre-credits sequence. However, that being said, this is the way real life works sometimes and I found myself enjoying the juxtaposition of these elements. They didn’t really make anything work less for me. I can see how some people might have found the unexpected contrast as something they’re just not used to having to deal with in a cinematic context, however.

The other thing that might have annoyed some critics/audience members, is the fact that it looks like McG is trying to push the editing a little further in terms of the use of scenes and sounds bleeding into each other. In this case, he carries on conversations while flicking between the scene where the conversation is taking place and a scene in the near past or future, backwards and forwards, and some people may find this hard to take on board, is my guess. It’s actually a natural progression, if you think about it, to the kind of overlapping dialogue techniques that Soderbergh was experimenting with in his excellent movie The Limey, in most respects. McG is just pushing the language of film a little more in, I suspect, an equally experimental manner to see if this kind of editing style can be made to cover more ground and give more insight to things on screen in a faster manner. 

When it first began to happen in this movie I was a little disoriented  for a few seconds because I thought the lip synch was out... in fact, I noticed somebody has added it on the Internet Movie Database in the “goofs” section when, in fact, it’s just the opening salvo in this specific style of syntax the director is playing with. All I can say is... cut him some slack because he actually is achieving a purpose in some of these scenes with this style of working and once your mind quickly trains itself to keep up with the perceived anomalies and process them as a new way of reading the visuals and soundtrack, then it actually proves itself to be a legitimate technique to add to the tool box for film... in a not entirely dissimilar way that dropping a number of frames out of a film to jump characters a little way forward may have been first perceived as a dangerously distracting idea when it comes to editing. 

So there’s that.

Also, it has to be said, the film is not dull, the fight and chase scene choreography is often quite interesting and this is the first film I’ve seen in a long while (or ever maybe?) where guns routinely run out of bullets and have to be reloaded quickly without the director trying to make a big dramatic thing out of that. So that was kinda refreshing actually. Added to this are some of McG’s trademark colourfully lit sets and dream-like shot designs, used to highlight a lot of the Vivi Delay scenes to good effect and in contrast with the slightly more grittier, down to earth, lighting style of Ethan’s standard on-the-job environments. Coupled with some pretty great performances by much of the cast, including a solid job by Kevin Costner, an actor who I kinda lost my way with but am quite impressed with again now, because of his performance here, and you have a cracking little action movie which a lot of people would enjoy if they gave it a chance. I know the audience I saw it with were laughing and making “thrilled” noises in all the intended places at any rate. 

So, in conclusion, a big dumb action movie which works well on its own terms and also has a go at pushing the semiotics of the visual and aural elements of filmmaking. Not the best movie out there by a long chalk but certainly a respectable and, frankly, highly entertaining entry into the form of the modern, kinetic motion picture. Maybe take a look sometime?