BEFORE: We're taking advantage of the pandemic by having our bathroom remodeled, so there goes our stimulus money, but since I'm still home two days a week and my wife has the opportunity to work from home, someone can be home on any given day to supervise the construction crew. Our bathroom stuff is piled in boxes in other rooms, and I have to brush my teeth at the kitchen sink, but we've absolutely hated that upstairs bathroom since we moved in, and now we can design a new one. But that also means during the demolition phase that I simply can't sleep past 9 am, so for three days now I've been up at 8 (Monday I had to catch the early train back from Boston). That means going to bed RIGHT after my movies, and thankfully they've been on the shorter side.
July is finally here, and we're waiting on word that it's safe to eat in restaurants again - while some other parts of the country are finding out their restaurants and bars have to close again. So a bit of a weird start for National Hot Dog Month and also National Ice Cream Month. Here's hoping we all get to celebrate soon. Independence Day is coming up, and perhaps that's never felt so ironic - though I can think of a couple groups of people through history who probably felt the irony of that day in the past.
Beyond the 4th of July, we've got the first-ever virtual San Diego Comic-Con coming up, and then later in the month I'm going to kick off my Summer Classic Rock Concert series, since right now there are no rock concerts, either. And my linking will focus on Mike Epps, Djimon Hounsou, Matthew McConaughey, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Sharon Stone, among others, before we get into the musical stuff.
For today, Tom Berenger carries over from "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball".
THE PLOT: An ex-con performs a series of apparently unrelated killings. He gets tracked by a veteran cop with secrets of his own and an egocentric hit man.
AFTER: This would have fit in nicely with my Dwayne Johnson chain last year - but then I would have been TWO films over for the year and not one, and I might not have gotten to a Christmas film. Carla Gugino's also in this, and she was also in two of the films with "The Rock" I watched last year. So in a way this one's a follow-up of sorts to "San Andreas" and "Race to Witch Mountain" from last September...only I wasn't really aware of it then, I just got this to fill up a DVD with "Fighting with My Family", and this was the quickest option airing on cable at that moment.
But damn if it doesn't fit right in here thematically, because this week's been all about hit-men/assassins, as seen in the "Smokin' Aces" films and, to a lesser extent, "The Last Thing He Wanted" and "State of Play". This film has three main characters, the "Driver", "Killer" and "Cop" and it's a slow build to a collision course between the three men. The film can't really be bothered to name anyone, since nearly every character in the credits is defined by their role - other notable characters include "Warden" (Tom Berenger, only in the film for the first two minutes or so, but that counts), but let's not forget "The Evangelist", "Mother", "Doctor", and "Old Guy". But then there's also "Marina" and "Baphomet", so what happened, did the writer in charge of naming characters suddenly get sick, or did he go on vacation? Did the production company fire him before he finished thinking of names, and did the Writer's Guild rules prevent anyone non-union from doing such a complex task?
I guess it's not important, we judge these stereotypical characters by their actions, not their names - plus a lot of the best names were perhaps already taken, like "John Wick" or "Jack Reacher". Right? Only the lack of names sort of highlights how generic and cookie-cutter some of these modern-action films really are - like the old westerns, which lead you to believe that the Wild West was neatly divided into "heroes" and "villains", which is a load of bull. Reality is usually a lot more complicated than that. Speaking of which, it feels like "Faster" is very complex in that sense, much like "The Next Three Days", which played that guilty/innocent card very late in the game, so I really wasn't sure if I was supposed to be rooting for the police or the (potential) murderer's husband. Or maybe "Baby Driver" is another good example of modern complex crime film - Baby is an anti-hero of sorts, he drives getaway cars for bank robbers, which is a bad thing, but he makes it look so good that we want to root for him. But should we?
Here we see "Driver" get released from prison and go for a nice leisurely marathon run across the desert to find his sportscar. Umm, I assume it's his, because he knew just where to find it, but the film is admittedly very lean on the details. Anyway, it's his after he finds it, and he knows just what to do with it, track down the members of the rival crew that took down HIS crew, back in the day. There's also the "Killer" who's been hired to kill Driver, only again, I didn't know that at first, so I thought that maybe they just bumped into each other randomly - did I miss something, or was there a detail about Killer being given this job that wasn't shown? And the third influential character is "Cop", who's trying to put the pieces together of why Driver's going around town, seemingly killing random people who aren't connected in any way - or are they?
There are flashbacks, sure, that eventually clue us in on some of the details of that original heist, how it went down pretty well, and then Driver's peculiar ability to drive backwards or directly into traffic somehow allowed the gang in the getaway car to elude the cops. But even this was somewhat confusing - like cops understand that sometimes cars go in reverse, they don't see a car moving backwards and make the mistake of thinking that the car is going forwards just because it's pointed that way. If this trick worked, then you could get into any rock concert for free just by walking in backwards through the exit. (Do not attempt.)
But what happened after the getaway was that a rival crew tracked down Driver's crew, which included Driver's brother (conveniently identified in the credits as "Driver's Brother", because if they said "Gary", I guess someone felt you'd have no idea who that was) or technically it's his half-brother, because they had the same mother but different fathers. (That's so weird, but that's been a common theme this week too, with the Tremor (half-)Brothers.) And the only reason that everybody knows this happened is that one of the rival crew members videotaped the whole thing, because he happens to make snuff films. Umm, what a weird, random convenient coincidence! This way the female police detective Cicero (one of the few characters here that has a name, maybe because "Lady Cop" was too obvious?) can play catch-up with what everybody else already seems to know.
I think this technique, however, of not supplying the audience with much exposition, as trendy as it is, seems a bit short-sighted. As a result, the first time you watch this film you'll know almost nothing, and then the next time (if there is a next time), you may feel you know TOO MUCH. But a film can only become a cult classic if fans are willing to watch it again and again - I think "Baby Driver" has that potential, which means maybe it found the right balance between mystery and exposition. One thing I missed was the identity of who originally betrayed the Driver's crew - at one point he thought it was his non-father, but the trip to see his mother (named "Mother") confirmed that it wasn't. So I missed the part where they said who it WAS, but I caught up with that fact via the synopsis on Wikipedia.
There are so many oft-used tropes in this one - the Cop is just 10 days from retirement, the Killer accepts only one dollar as payment for a hit - that's it's a bit hard to know if there's anything original here, or if it should be regarded as just a pastiche of commonly-used ideas from other action movies. If you put enough of those elements commonly seen in any film genre (Western, sci-fi, rom-com) together, can you create something new, or is the result merely an echo of the films that have gone before it? I'm not sure I know the answer to that - but it's worth discussing.
Certainly at just a few minutes over an hour-and-a-half, this film won't waste a lot of your time if you want to try and answer that question yourself. Since I had to get up early today for home remodeling (there's just no sleeping through someone tearing down your bathroom) I appreciated the short running time, which enabled me to fall asleep much earlier than usual.
Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "Fighting with My Family"), Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "Lemmy"), Carla Gugino (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Maggie Grace (last seen in "Taken 3"), Moon Bloodgood (last seen in "The Sessions"), Courtney Gains (last seen in "The 'Burbs"), John Cirigliano, Lester Speight, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (last seen in "Trumbo"), Mike Epps (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Xander Berkeley (last seen in "The Grifters"), Matt Gerald (last seen in "Rampage"), Annie Corley (last seen in "Monster"), Jennifer Carpenter, Michael Irby (last seen in "Flightplan"), Geraldine Kearns (last seen in "The Outlaw Josey Wales"), with cameos from Jack Wallace (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Sally Stevens.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Gospel Choir members
No comments:
Post a Comment