Carriers

Trip Tease

Carriers
USA 2009
Directed by David and Àlex Pastor
Paramount Pictures

Warning: Spoilers may infect all readers and,
also, it’s an extremely short review... sorry about that.

Sometimes you just want to watch a movie, any movie, which reflects the current times in which you are living. So, for me, any kind of post-apocalyptic viral infection movie is game right now, to remind me that we are all in the same boat and, you know, as something I can get hints and tips from on how to survive because, if my own government keeps reacting to this stupid Coronavirus disaster in a way which makes it more protracted and less reversible, we might all be in the same situation the characters in films like this find themselves in at some point very, very soon.

So Carriers stars Chris Pine as Brian, Piper Perabo as his girlfriend Bobby, Lou Taylor Pucci as his brother Danny and Emily VanCamp as Danny’s friend Kate (that's Sharon Carter to all you MCU fans). They live in a world were a lot of the population has already died out from an unnamed virus and we join them, already on the road, in a stolen car as they are on a cross country road trip for a few days, to get them to a beach that Brian and Danny used to love as kids. Now, to me, this sounds like a bad idea to begin with. I mean, what do you do for petrol if you need it? Well, the answer seems to be you get lucky (or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint of how various things go down here) and steal it by force from other travellers who you, somehow, might meet on the way. Which seems pretty silly, especially when you realise just how bad things have gotten.

It’s gotten so terrible by the point that we join the four travellers that they’ve made up a set of rules to get them by, which are roughly summed up as follows:

1. Avoid the infected at all costs, their breath is highly contagious. 

2. Disinfect anything that they’ve touched within 24 hours. 

3. The sick are already dead, they can’t be saved.

So, yeah, a road trip to a favourite beach seems fraught with peril, if you ask me.

And the film does what it does, hitting all the expected points along the way. Chris Pine plays his character as an absolutely angry, low intelligence idiot. Literally the last person you would ever want to be stuck with if you were trying to survive the leftovers of a pandemic. The other three seem mostly level headed but this doesn’t stop them from occasionally, often inadvertently, breaking their own rules and getting heaps of trouble piled on them. And on their road trip, they reluctantly find themselves in a position to try and help a father (played by Christopher Meloni) and his dying, infected little girl get to a hospital which is ‘supposed’ to have some miracle cure (yeah, you can guess how that one pans out), come across a bunch of aggressive survivalists, hide from groups of people who hunt others and so on and so forth. They also kill innocent people to further their cause for the next full tank of gasoline and, inevitably, leave their own companions behind at the first sign that any of them are infected, putting them in a position at some point where one brother has to kill another so the pointless road trip can be continued.

The actors are all good and, while not remarkable, the film is competently put together and I had no complaints. There are also some nice little nods to science fiction movies from the past such as Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior and A L I E N, among others I’m sure I didn’t pick up so, yeah, it’s an okay watch. The only real problem the film has is that, by the time two of the travellers finally make it to the beach, the objective of the trip has lost all meaning and there’s a point in the last ten minutes of the film where you really wonder why the characters are trying to fulfil that story arc at this point. So, by the end of the film, it all seems pretty pointless and downbeat. And, I get that this is kind of the point anyway but, you know, I already got that vibe from the start of the movie. It feels like there was never any progression to the story for the characters to be let down by at the end. I think there needed to be more of a point to their quest because, really, the disappointment voiced by one of the characters at the finish could easily be met by the audience with a collective shrug and the response... well yeah, what did you expect?

And with that... I don’t really have that much more to say about Carriers. As post apocalyptic movies go, it just feels kinda empty and undeveloped in many ways. It’s not something that’s going to haunt me at any point or even linger in my memory for much longer than me writing this review, I suspect. But, it is entertaining enough to the point that it held my interest for the short running time so, yeah, it’s certainly not a total loss. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to watch it but I’m not giving up on finding another post-virus apocalypse movie that I can recommend. The hunt continues.

Angel Has Fallen

No Drone Unburned

Angel Has Fallen
2019 USA Directed by Ric Roman Waugh
UK cinema release print.
Well here we are again with Angel Has Fallen, which finds Gerard Butler reprising his role as ‘bodyguard to the president’ Mike Banning from the previous two installments Olympus Has Fallen (reviewed here) and London Has Fallen (reviewed here). Rejoining him for this movie in reprising a character from the last two is Morgan Freeman, this time promoted to President of the United States after Aaron Eckhart turned down a third shot in the role. In fact, Butler and Freeman seem to be the only two people reprising their roles in this one and even the brilliant Radha Mitchell, who played Banning’s wife in the last two, has been replaced with Piper Perabo here. I dunno, maybe all the others read a copy of the script before signing on for this one.

That isn’t to say the news is all bad here folks. Angel Has Fallen is an okayish kinda action movie but, it has to be said, it’s a pale shadow of the previous two films and I think they could have cooked up something a little better for the third one here, especially with the trajectory of the main character who is leading up to taking a desk job in his near future.

There are also a couple of really good actors new to the franchise jumping on here... namely everyone’s favourite bad guy Danny Huston playing... um... the bad guy and Nick Nolte playing Banning’s ‘estranged father who bonds with his son so he can save him at a certain point in the film’ before going in like the cavalry to aid Banning’s wife and child near the end of the story.

This one seems a little disconnected from the previous two films in the series because Banning’s obvious penchant for randomly stabbing bad guys in the head with a big knife seems to have gone dormant (admittedly, at least in the first movie, it was a necessary stealth tactic to kill people silently). So that viciousness to the character is less obvious and, honestly, that in itself is not a bad thing but, like I said, gives it a bit of a disconnect.

Another thing which lets it down, at least in terms of keeping some sort of stylistic continuity to the previous films, is that the action sequences don’t seem as brutal or over the top as the last two either. Especially in terms of the blaze of destruction as the bad guys wiped out most of London in the second movie. In this one, when a huge building is selected, almost arbitrarily, for complete destruction in the third act of the movie, you kind of get the feeling the studio heads are trying to pitch it back into that direction but, honestly, one building doesn’t cut it in the wake of that last film.

Okay... so one of the good points is that at least Banning has a little more depth to his, still fairly shallow, character. Being that he’s suffering from some kind of vague and unidentified illness which seems to be both something to do with his spinal column but somehow also something which causes almost narcoleptic episodes at unexpected moments. He is warned not to punish his body anymore and, while this character build up is nice, it’s also one of the reasons the credibility is shot to hell right from the start after we see him at both an outrageously realistically staged training session and, a little later, save the president, somehow, from an assassination attempt by a fleet of suicidal, exploding drones which kill everyone else but then, when both Banning and the president are found unconscious in the water afterwards, makes you wonder why the villains didn’t stay and finish the job. Also, I think Banning is in about three vehicular crashes in this one so... after the vague as mist diagnosis we heard earlier in the movie, things don’t really stay that credible for very long.

On the other hand, there are some nicely done things here too. After an interminable time which sets up Danny Huston’s character as a long standing friend and former war buddy of Banning... so you just know he’s going to be the villain straight away, as you’ll very quickly identify who his ‘partner in evil’ is going to turn out to be very early on in the film... Huston’s villain comes across as someone who has a lot of time and respect for Banning. Even in his inevitable death at the end, there is a certain dignity in the way his character is both portrayed by Huston and written by the writers that you don’t get in most of the movie villains on film (maybe Marvel's Thanos recently but, not that many).

The story, such as it is, is purely focused on Banning clearing his name after he’s framed for trying to kill the president (even while he is saving him) and also involves the FBI trying to figure out what the heck is going on. However, as great as Huston’s character is written, everyone else tends to be pretty thinly drawn and it must have been a real challenge to some of the actors here to add some flesh to their lines. For instance, Jada Pinkett Smith plays the top FBI agent in charge of tracking down Banning and she really has a good, powerful presence in the role actually. However, when she gets close to the truth of what’s really going on, she does something so dumb, with the expected consequences, that you have to wonder how she was even let into the FBI in the first place.

So, yeah... the action is nice, the score is appropriate and holds its own against the foley, for most of the time but, ultimately, Angel Has Fallen is not something I could see myself watching again (whereas I am tempted to go back and have a look at the first two again, at some point). It holds its own against some of the other action movies doing the rounds but it’s nowhere near as special as it might have been and just seems very dumbed down from its predecessors. So not much more to say... if you ike action movies then you may want to give this one some of your time. If not then... probably best to steer clear, I think.