Berlin film reviews: War on Everyone, Midnight Special and Hail, Ceasar!

Midnight Special celebrates its world premiere in the competition of the Berlin Film Festival

War on Everyone is furiously fast and funny

The buddy cop comedy genre was given a welcome makeover with Paul Feig's The Heat three years back. It had two women, Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, leading from the front. John Michael McDonagh’s War on Everyone has the usual two men at the helm of affairs, but it’s a film that is equally interested in breaking conventions.

For one, the untried and unusual casting of Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Pena as a double-act is a gamble that pays off beautifully. They play Terry and Bob, the kind of cops who snort cocaine they have just confiscated and that too on a diaper-changing table. They are both bad cops, roaming the troubled streets of New Mexico, accepting bribes, beating up petty criminals, always hot on the heels of trouble.

Terry and Bob are the quintessential antiheroes in this very dark buddy cop comedy, which routinely plays with and breaks conventions, offering a thrilling ride that barely pauses for air. The film has something interesting to say about the misogyny often found in such films and characters, by creating two well rounded female characters for Stephanie Siegman and Tessa Thompson. Both sink their teeth into their respective roles and are very much part of the narrative.

The film doesn't really have a plot, as opposed to McDonagh's earlier films, such as The Guard and Calvary, but that's not a disadvantage at all. The dialogues and characters are written with such acerbic wit, that it's just fun watching the proceedings without really having to follow the paper-thin narrative.

Well here's an attempt anyway: Terry and Bob are two corrupt cops, who, with the help of their five-percenter informant Reggie X (Malcolm Barrett), try and follow the trail of a big amount of drug money they want to claim for themselves. Their first lead is Birdwell (Caleb Landry Jones), a Kubrickian bar owner who is a cross between Alex from A Clockwork Orange and Jack Torrance from The Shining. Birdwell’s boss has the money, a slimy businessman played with the right amount of charm and menace by Theo James.

Until our protagonists can reach the ‘bad guys’ they will come across all sorts of characters. At one point, in keeping with the politically incorrect tone throughout, there are Burqa-clad tennis players who beat Terry. Angered, he retorts, “no need for a Jihad”. Their growingly frustrated superior doesn’t know what to do with them and keeps issuing ultimatums.

Of course, with police brutality dominating the headlines for much of the past few years in America, it begs the question whether the film attempts to explore the issue. It does so, but because it’s a comedy, it cannot fully cover the terrain. There are slight nods here and there, such as Terry proclaiming “you can shoot without a reason, nobody can do a goddamn thing about it”, or Bob’s wife reading The Algiers Motel Incident, a book about a racially charged riot and the murder of three black civilians.

With the recent release of the lackluster Zoolander 2, it's worth re-evaluating Hollywood comedies and their sequels. Funnily, War on Everyone feels like – but obviously shouldn’t be turned into – a franchise. If Derek and Hansel from Zoolander wouldn't have been fashion models, they might well have been Terry and Bob. This is a great film, which is consistently funny and high on quotability.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

 

Midnight Special is a movie for an intelligent audience

Midnight Special, which celebrates its world premiere in the competition of the Berlin Film Festival, is an impressive sci-fi picture from Jeff Nichols. Its greatest virtue is how it never underestimates the audience by never for once insulting their intelligence. There is no spoon-feeding at all and when the closing credits roll, many questions have deliberately been left unanswered.

Of all directors, Nichols takes inspiration from Steven Spielberg. Narratively speaking, Midnight Special is reminiscent of E.T. The Extraterrestial, but in this reworking there is hardly any warmth. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as the film is a comment on the post-Snowden world that we live in and how the term ‘they are watching us’ is less a sci-fi idea than a scary reality for us on planet Earth. In a sense, Midnight Special is perhaps the film Spielberg would make today, fresh off his experiences with serious historical dramas like Lincoln or Bridge of Spies.

The film starts in a dimly lit motel room. A news bulletin on a TV is running, revealing that a young boy named Alton (Jaedan Lieberher) has been abducted by a man named Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon). Those two are in fact inside the same motel room, together with another man, Lucas (Joel Edgerton). Soon, ‘it’s time’ and the three of them flee the motel. The child is a strange sight, with his swimming goggles and his big flashlight for reading comics in the dark.

While escaping, it becomes clear that Roy is Alton’s father. Ever since learning that his son has some kind of special powers, he’s been on the run with him. They have escaped from the ranch they were living on, home to a sect led by Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard). Lucas is Roy’s childhood friend, helping them find Alton’s mother Sarah (Kirsten Dunst).

The powers of Alton are not kept under wraps from the audience. We see them on several occasions and they provide some of the more arresting moments in the narrative. One outstanding sequence sees Alton summon fireballs from the sky, decimating a filling station. After the bear-mauling sequence of The Revenant, this brief scene is another truly astounding work of CGI in cinema. Then there’s also him frequently shooting psychedelic and blinding blue light beams out of his eyes.

When we learn that Alton’s powers are in direct conflict with the interests of the FBI and the NSA, things get more interesting. Those weren’t just random fireballs falling from the sky, but satellites. Alton doesn’t just rattle off a sequence of random numbers, but state secrets. A young NSA officer entertainingly played by Adam Driver wants to get to the bottom of this and when he starts interviewing members of Calvin’s sect, who believe Alton to be some kind of messiah, the film becomes even more interesting. Also, it gains a topical note. Are there things that, if you would like them to remain a secret, they can remain a secret? Are there any limits to what intelligence organisations can or cannot do? Is surveillance even possible at all times?

We live in a strange world. We live in a world where such a basic things like privacy aren’t a sure thing anymore. Nichols seems to understand the problems that ail the world we live in and how complex they are. Midnight Special therefore doesn’t necessarily offer any solutions nor has all the answers, but it’s a film that comments on points that are worth discussing.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

 

Coen Brothers’ ‘Hail, Caesar!’ is a farce with no force

There is a scene midway through Coen Brothers’ latest picture Hail, Caesar! where a group of leftist writers cannot complete a puzzle, the last piece doesn't fit into the whole. Essentially, that's what watching Hail, Caesar! feels like too; the movie was a lot of fun to watch, but when it's over there remains a feeling of having watched something incomplete.

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a Hollywood fixer, whose job is to sort out the problems of other people. Hollywood is witnessing its Golden Age and Mannix has his hands full. There's the diva DeeAnna Moran, played by Scarlett Johansson, who is pregnant out of wedlock. There's Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), who is unable to say his lines properly when he makes the switch from cowboy action films to melodramas, much to the annoyance of British auteur Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). And finally there's Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the daft star of the titular Hail, Caesar! playing a Roman general in a film-within-a-film.

The aforementioned group of Communists, which calls itself The Future, is fighting for writers to get a bigger financial cut and has abducted Whitlock. The studio needs him to return at any cost and here’s where Mannix comes in.

Hail, Caesar! is not a bad picture at all, but it's also not a film that one will be able to remember a few years down the line. Save for a couple of standout sequences that were sadly revealed in the trailers beforehand, Hail, Caesar! is quite ordinary. One of the highlights though is Fiennes’ scene with Ehrenreich, where he attempts to make the latter say “would it were that simple” trippingly.

Another sequence, which is flawlessly directed and performed, is Channing Tatum’s tap dance number 'No Dames'. In general, out of the entire ensemble, Tatum is the real scene-stealer, properly shining whenever he appears on screen. Another funny cameo, or rather cameos, is by Tilda Swinton, cast here as twin journalists competing against each other for scoops on Hollywood’s latest gossip.

There is no doubt that Hail, Caesar! is, as expected from the Coen Brothers, a film with many layers. Sadly, in this instance, they just don't mesh well together. There are a lot of references to American film history, especially through the wide array of characters and lives, all supposedly inspired by real-life people and real-life situations. But for those not in the know, too many of these obscure references might be too much, especially when they don’t have that much of screen time. One would have liked to see more of Ralph Fiennes, or even Alison Pill as Mannix’s wife.

The film can be read as a critique of the studio system or as a celebration of Hollywood's star system - that's how bizarre it is, being open to interpretations on opposite sides of the spectrum. It attempts to hold still and recreate a particular time and place in the history of Hollywood and says a lot about the politics of the time. What a shame then that while it’s a watchable film for once, it has no timeless appeal.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars