Eddie the Eagle review

It’s not necessarily a terrible thing when a movie perfectly exemplifies the genre it’s working in. Such is the case with “Eddie the Eagle” -  a wholesome, underdog sports movie that ticks every box expected in that kind of narrative. There’s nothing new or surprising about the way the plot develops but it’s confidently told and competently made, and sometimes that’s just enough effort to keep an audience satisfied. Despite the training montages, the corny humor, and and gee-golly innocents it exudes, “Eddie the Eagle” is a very satisfying movie. 

Matthew Vaughn, director of genre defying, post-modern send-ups like “Stardust,” “Kick-Ass” and last year’s gleefully subversive teen-spy movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” somehow produced this sincere throwback, based on the true story of an unskilled English underclassman who finagled his way into the 1988 Olympics. Kingsman’s Taron Egerton plays Eddie, an enthusiastic Brit with ambitions to compete, despite never receiving any formal training or encouragement to do so. His father would rather his son learn a useful trade while his mother politely indulged Eddie’s fantasies. After trying sports and failing to master them, Eddie learns that nobody has competed on behalf of England in the field of competitive ski-jumping, thus sending him to Norway to learn the skill well enough to qualify within a short window of time. There he meets Bronson Peary (Hugh Jackman), a drunk groundskeeper who just happened to be an ex-Olympian who ski-jumped for America in the 1970s. 

As previously warned, this movie hits every sports movie cliche;  the young ambitious underdog meets a world-weary and damaged pro and in working together the novice athlete learns the value of sportsmanship and victory while the older man rediscovers his original love of the game. It’s all there. We also have period-specific 80s pop-music and broad victory metaphors that are called back to repeatedly. And yet, every one of these paint-by-numbers elements are perfectly realized and actually pay off in the way they were originally intended.

What elevates the storytelling is the wonderful character choices by Egerton, that include many physical affectations and an unusual mumble-through-his-teeth accent, without the character becoming too cartoonish or losing credibility as a real person. Egerton and Jackman have great screen chemistry and the juxtaposition between Eddie’s acceptance to compete without contending and Peary’s frustration in Eddie’s resolve to likely finish in last place speaks to how the British class system differs from the American exceptionalism. 

Director Dexter Fletcher made this film with a lot heart and it manages to beat through familiar plot mechanics. Plots, overall, are not that important as long as they make sense within the context of the story. A movie’s success usually has more to do with how well film portrays a  character’s emotional state than it does with the ways a script decides to get them from act-1 to act-3. “Eddie the Eagle” is an unabashedly traditional film without a shred of self-referential cynicism and ultimately the warmth and confidence in that choice becomes the film's most unique quality. 

Grade: B

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2016

Listen to more discussion about "Eddie the Eagle" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

Chappie review

                 Neill Blomkamp flew out the gates with a distinct style and voice, mixing familiar sci-fi tropes with his brand of south-African cultural specificity.  His 2009 alien Apartheid allegory “District 9” earned him an Oscar nomination for best picture, but after his 2013 follow up “Elysium” failed to live up to the hype, people began to wonder if he was the real-dea or just a lucky one-hit-wonder. Now, with luke-warm response to his latest robo-Pinocchio story “Chappie,” Blomkamp’s reputation continues to diminish, but while this film might not reach the levels of intrigue and thoughtfulness as his politically taught first feature, “Chappie” is still made with a tangible sense of energy and cinematic curiosity.

               In the near future the American government tests a fleet robot police droids that are programmed to take down criminals within the slums of Johannesburg Africa. The lead technician Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) wants to advance this technology to the point where the robots can think, learn and feel like a developing human being, but when the corporate buzzkills (Sigourney Weaver) put the kibosh on his plans he is forced to test his theories alone in his apartment. After successfully getting a test-droid to gain consciousness with a toddler’s emotional capacity, Deon is high-jacked by a small gang of city urchins who want to train the robot to help them with a heist. All the while, a rival technician finds out about the rogue experiment and comes up with a plan to sabotage Deon to replace the police droids with mind-controlled military drones.

              Like all of Blomkamp’s grungy science-fiction, there’s a lot of ideas that he wants to investigate and most of them get sidelined by action movie commitments that overwhelm the plot. When the gangsters (played by the founding members of the South African electronic hip-hop group Die Antwoord) kick out Patel’s character and begin to train the innocent Chappie themselves, a new family structure is formed. Here it seems like the movie wants explore how morals and the complexities of value-systems are shaped by an individual’s cultural and economic circumstances. When the android figures out that his internal battery is low and wonders why his creator would give him such a limited life, the themes then begin to drift into more spiritual territories, but both of these interesting ideas are nearly squashed by a shoot-em-up third act that unfortunately rushes the film to a less than satisfying conclusion.

             The Hugh Jackman subplot only serve as an engine for the action set-pieces, and, while shot with convincing special effects and staged with effective thrills, they derail the loftier aims of the narrative. More problematic, Petal’s character is often sidelined to make room.  Jackman plays an Aussie alfa-male with an un-ironic mullet and Weaver seems to be more pant-suit than human, and both of them are critically underdeveloped and unconvincingly motivated characters. Ninja and Yolandi of Die Antwoord play heightened versions of their hip-hop personas, and while they aren’t the best actors and their line-delivery sometimes falls flat, their general eccentricity has an untrained, naive appeal that keeps their scenes alive.

         Despite a messy ending where all the stakes in the plot are raised only to conclude in a deflating dues ex machine, I’m still willing to give Blomkamp a pass for his ambition and his passion as a filmmaker. The robot Chappie, voiced by actor Sharlto Copley, has a real arch as a special-effect character, and like Andy Sirkis’ Caesar in the new “Planet of the Apes” franchise, you believe in and relate to him on an emotional level.  That goes a long way, and while I definitely see the seams of the movie tearing around edges, I appreciate Blomkamp’s earnest attempt to keep science-fiction weird and meaningful.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/March-2015

X-Men: Days of Future Past review

After essentially kick-starting the cinematic superhero renaissance fifteen years ago, the X-Men movie series has undergone many drastic creative shifts, including confusing continuity tangles and some exceedingly bad press surrounding one of its directors. Following two especially disappointing sequels in “X-Men: The Last Standm” by substitute director Brett Ratner and the unforgivably dreadful spin-off “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” a few years later, the franchise was partially revitalized in 2011 with the ‘60s cold-war installment “X-Men: First Class," starring Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. James Mangold’s “The Wolverine” was also watchable but mostly forgettable in the long run. Now, in an attempt to clean the slate, original director Bryan Singer has the unfortunate job of tying all of these films together and bridging their plot-holes with his newest entry, a time-travel thriller called “X-Men: Days of Future Past”, staring key players from both timelines.

Not only is there very high stakes for the cautiously optimistic fans who have endured and celebrated previously great and awful X-films, “Days of Future Past” has many tasks to carefully maneuver for itself. It must be reasonably faithful to the beloved comic story in which it takes its name, it has to tie together two timelines that are just different enough to makes things complicated, and it has to ret-con the mistakes of the previous sequels. Surprisingly, while not home-run success, it manages to do so with only a few notable discrepancies.

The plot immediately drops us into the near future of 2023, in a post-apocalypse where most of the X-Men have been killed by giant self-regenerating robots called the Sentinels who patrol the earth to terminate all of mutant kind. Aged Professor, Charles Xavier (Patrick Stuart) sends Wolverine’s consciousness back into his younger body during the ‘70s where he must inspire the recently jaded and crippled Professor (James McAvoy) to let out his imprisoned enemy Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to stop a misguided Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating the engineer responsible for starting the newly-formed Sentinel program. Jumping back and forth from these two events in time, we watch the future X-Men try as hard as they can to hold their defense, while Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has to prevent all the pawns of their eventual destruction from falling into place.

While I'm more than aware of the narrative heavy-lifting this plot has to do before we can even get into the main points of its story, unfortunately the first third of the film gets to a wobbly start with achingly stilted, tech-jabber dialogue and blunt introductions to the characters and their vague future-world, all of which are too brief and glossed over to effectively build to an appropriate emotional connection. But once Jackman gets zapped into the 70s and we get the 411 on where our "First Class" heroes have been since the last movie, the pieces start to come together, slowly building towards a grand climax that’s just as good or even better than anything we've previously seen from the series.

While “Days of Future Past” occasionally feels pieced together from hunks of scripts that were torn from different drafts, rewritten by committee and reshaped in the editing room, about half of its movie-parts contain genuinely original superhero moments; most notably some great comedic action sequences with X-newbie Quicksilver (Evan Peters), where his speed powers are portrayed by showing us how he moves normally in the slowed-down world around him. X-Men mainstays such as Lawrence, Fassbender, McAvoy, and Jackman are just as reliable as we have come to expect and newcomers like Peter Dinklage,  who plays the mutant-phobic scientist Bolivar Trask, are given their own scenes to steal as well. Most of all, by the end of the film, however rocky it was to get there, it’s very gratifying to see the fruits bared from the franchise’s willingness to apologize for its past mediocrities.

Grade: B -
Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/June-2014