Tag: russell crowe

Dub’s Take: Kraven The Hunter (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

Remember in “Back to the Future”, when Marty is auditioning for the Battle of the Bands and Huey Lewis tells him he’s “too darn loud?” So quiet & subdued 80% of “Kraven The Hunter” was, that I could clearly hear the shakey leg of the phobic teenager sitting in the row behind me with their 10-person family entourage. They wanted to be anywhere else, too.

Let’s draw the same comparisons every other review is: between this & Chris Nolan’s “Batman Begins”. While their narrative direction differs, Batman’s opening salvo is tightly edited, dynamically paced, and Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack effectively ‘mickey-mouses’ every scene.

After Kraven’s prologue (freely-available to view on YouTube), there’s a twenty-minute passage with no music, no action, and non-stop dialogue. Aaron Taylor-Johnson eventually bites someone’s cheek off in a fountain of CGI gore, but it segues to another long section with tedious exposition, and Aaron’s incessant fourth-wall mugging.

Legacy director Quentin Tarantino says there are no more movie stars in modern Hollywood, and Aaron is a good thesis. He’s handsome, charismatic, and clearly committed to the role (physically-speaking), but the self-awareness of his line readings betrays the serious tone of the rest of the picture – particularly in Russell Crowe & Alessandro Nivola’s sobering villains. A dozen buffalo are graphically killed by poachers, but all Aaron has for them are poster quips.

Kraven betrays its audience in more overt ways than merely contemptuous acting & a lack of trust. Poor pacing may be covered-up in post-production, but bad timing is entirely a director’s fault, and J.C. Chandor (“A Most Violent Year”) has no clue how to stage action for the mainstream. At one point, a phase-shifting antagonist appears behind someone to shoot them, but when we cut to the reveal, it’s a full beat before the trigger is pulled. Why wait so long? Why is a ten-second throwaway bar shootout halfway through framed clearer than a climactic scene in a monastery? Why is a CGI cutaway of Aaron jumping out a thirty-floor window the most exciting single sequence?

Kraven’s two hours are only passingly engaging, no one looks like they’re having a good time except Aaron (and at the viewer’s expense), and Chandor is more concerned with pretentious drama than Christmas entertainment for the masses. I wanted to like it, but Kraven is lifeless, and not loud enough.

Movie poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you glad the Sony-verse of Spider-Man villain origin stories are over, for now? Do you think Aaron’s smugness will play better should he be hired as the next James Bond? Did you like Kraven’s CGI fuzz (including a tank of a lion, an inquisitive eagle, and a very hairy Russian bear) as much as my wife & I did? Leave your comments below, and Happy Holidays!

Posted on by wd 0

Dub’s Take: The Exorcism (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

For “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”, I wrote it was this movie season’s poster child for needing an apathetic studio executive to mercifully cut 45 minutes off the overlong film like amputating gangrene. Today’s “The Exorcism” is what happens when you cut too much: it’s abrupt; obfuscating; and, frankly, embarrassing.

The whole time I was trying to put my finger on exactly what wasn’t working: some lousy dialogue and CGI. But I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece: surely a one-star review cheesy lines & VFX does not make?

Nevertheless, events in The Exorcism transpire almost transitionlessly: Russell Crowe’s disgraced actor Tony Miller goes from recovering alcoholic to back on the bottle, and possessed, all in the first act; Samantha Mathis shows up for less than a minute as the executive for the comeback film Miller is working on, and ditto for Sam Worthington as his co-star; and the less said about the slapdash finale with a wasted David Hyde Pierce, the better.

There seemed to be enough working ingredients that either the story should have been told as drama (concentrating on the strained relationship between Miller and his estranged daughter in-and-around environments non-conducive to healing, like a movie set) or as a harder version of what we got here. For instance, Miller isn’t fired from the meta-film for almost three weeks, and by then he’s so far gone that he’s full-on contorting. Why wasn’t he let go sooner? This could have been solved by having a scene with Mathis saying they’re “over-budget and over-schedule” and another delay would kill the film, but it’s not here.

The Exorcism reeks of being hacked to pieces in post-production, when someone in a suit told the editors to concentrate on the horror instead of the plot. I’m not saying that a longer version actually exists, or that it would be better than what we got in the end: movies lose scenes in the filmmaking process all the time, and the public isn’t always privileged to the DVD leftovers. But I imagine another movie ten-times better lost in a warehouse somewhere: an allegory about moviemaking and how the script becomes its own monster and feasts on the egos of those involved, with Adam Goldberg (doing great work here as the meta-film’s director) the Machiavellian ringmaster.

There’s a more interesting film here that’s had its textured ends removed like calf testicles.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Were you also confused by The Exorcism’s humdrum poster & marketing? Did you, too, consider that it could be a sequel to Crowe’s other horror project from last year “The Pope’s Exorcist”? Is Russell Crowe still enough of a draw for you now that he’s in his career’s third act, that you’ll see a new movie of his based on his huge mug dominating the ads? Do you agree that Hyde Pierce’s amazing performance in 2010’s “The Perfect Host” means he could’ve, should’ve done a more convincing job here? Leave a comment below!

Posted on by wd 0

Jay’s Take: Unhinged

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

unhinged

The biggest piece of criticism I can level at “Unhinged” – the Russell Crowe-vehicle that has the dissimilitude of being one of the first major releases after the Coronavirus lockdown – was that there simply was not enough screaming from its cast. Or yelling. Or raised voices at all, really. When I was still in my early-1s (10 or 11), I would lay prone at the top of the stairs that separated the second-and-third floors of our family’s home and listen to the movies that my parents would be watching downstairs while I was supposed to be in-bed sleeping. If you went by my word then, I would have thought all they ever watched were horror movies, because all I heard from my perch was 90% screaming. I don’t even know why I bothered: the volume was never loud enough to actually discern any dialogue, so I would literally only ever be hearing swelling music cues, gunshots, and screaming. I’m blown away just thinking about how many nights I would be there, through how many movies, fascinated by the idea of what they could be watching. And screaming always sounds more painful when it’s out-of-context.

Continue reading →
Posted on by wd 0