BEFORE: We're getting very close to the start of February now, which means I'll transition over to romance-based films, from Feb. 1 until, uhh, the middle of March. This topic tends to run long, the last two years I've allowed the chain to play itself out until there are no more connections to be made among the films on my list - both times I ended up with a perfect chain for the year, so I can't really argue with the process if it ends in success like that. So the chain tells me when it's over, if that makes any sense. Approximately March 14 or 15 this year, I haven't resorted to using a calendar page to block it all out.
But what then? A quick diagram of the possible paths branching off from that last film quickly devolves into chaos, or more specifically, too many paths, too many choices. Each film links to three or four (or more) others, so once I get a few steps from any starting point, the choices have grown exponentially, how do I decide? My trick the last couple of years (again, perfect chains, at least after the fact) has been to set benchmarks, picking a holiday (Easter's always good, so are Mother's Day or July 4) and then assigning a film that's on topic to that day, and then seeing if I can get there.
I've got one Irish-themed film, so St. Patrick's Day is a possible benchmark, but the film I want to program has a fairly obscure cast, so it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Perhaps it's better to pick a film I really want to see, like "Wonder Woman 1984", and see if I can get there. I placed the last film in the romance chain up in one corner of a blank piece of paper, and "Wonder Woman" down in the opposite corner, and then mapped out connections with circles and arrows until I found a path that worked. It turned out to be just three steps - that's the short route. I could get there via a longer method, but why would I want to do that? The year isn't close to being filled up, plus since there's more than one way to get there, I can circle back after "Wonder Woman" and pick up some of the films that were part of the longer route. It's like a car trip when I want to be in a certain city on a certain day - best to head directly there, and then take the more scenic route on the way home. Or to the next benchmark, whatever. So that's the plan right now, unless something changes - and I've learned that the longer I program ahead, the greater the chance of me needing to tear it down and change it all around. Best to stick to two months at a time, it seems.
Toni Collette carries over from "I'm Thinking of Ending Things", for the last time this time, but this makes five in a row for her. I think she may be back in early March for one romance-based film.
THE PLOT: A CIA interrogator is lured into a ruse that puts London at risk of a biological attack.
AFTER: Have you noticed more virus-based and pandemic-based movies running on the cable premium channels? I keep catching bits of "12 Monkeys" late at night, one of my favorite movies and I think over the last two weeks I've basically re-watched it in pieces, usually I come in somewhere in the middle and then watch it until the end, or at least until the part I came in it again a couple nights before. Though stopping a pandemic through time travel now feels a bit like cheating. I'm sure some channel's running "Contagion" and "Outbreak" in high rotation, and you don't need to rewatch "I Am Legend" when you can walk through midtown Manhattan and basically get the same exact feeling. There's probably a dozen other minor pandemic films running on cable, and you'd better believe that a hundred more are in development right now. I think CBS All Access has a new version of "The Stand" as a mini-series, that seems a bit prophetic too.
"Unlocked" is a thriller about a weaponized virus, the screenwriters made a mental projection into the future after the Ebola scare of 2014-2016 and naturally assumed that the next big virus might come hand-in-hand with Islamic terrorism. Oh, sorry, so close. No screenwriters really bet on "exotic meat market in Wuhan, China" in the pool - though I think now even the meat market story is under review, but still nobody has suggested an alternate origin.
You might need a scorecard here to keep track of all the different factions, the CIA. (operating on British soil somehow), the MI5 (UK Intelligence), the Islamic terrorists, and then there are the people who say they're one thing, but actually they're something else. (No spoilers here.) Our heroine here, Alice Racine, is caught in the middle - she's a Brit who previously worked for the CIA, but she also has contacts in MI5, and she's been working at a community center in London ever since she collected intel about a terrorist attack in Paris, but it wasn't delivered in enough time to prevent the attack. But is she still CIA and working undercover in the community center, or did she leave the agency after her failure and take a job where she could help people on a different level? This is a tiny bit unclear.
But it's still a good twisty story as she bounces between contacts with the various agencies, and each one seems to send agents to her location to bring her in. Even her (presumed) allies want to bring her in by force, because they're not sure if she's gone rogue or been turned to the other side, so it's probably best not to take any chances, given what she's capable of. She's another one of those characters that have become popular lately, like Batman or The Equalizer, who can "read the room" and then take on ten guys in a row, using her enemies as human shields in a melée battle, or turning one enemy's gun around to shoot three others. This was a noted trend in the action genre that probably peaked with the Ben Affleck Batman and has been sort of on the decline lately. Then again, "John Wick 3" was pretty recent.
The climax is set at Wembley Stadium, where an exhibition game of American football is set to take place, between the Portland football team and the Oklahoma team. Right, only those aren't actual NFL teams, so what gives? Was this movie's production company too cheap to pay the NFL for the use of two real team names? Or was this arena football or some other kind? Expansion teams that haven't been created yet? Did somebody think we wouldn't notice this? The plan was to set off the virus bombs, and then the fans from Portland and Oklahoma would travel back to the U.S. and infect others. Umm, OK, but NITPICK POINT, wouldn't the point of having an American exhibition football game in the U.K. be to expose the BRITISH fans to American football? Why would a fan of the Portland unnamed football team travel all the way to the U.K. to watch a game, when they could see one just by remaining in Portland? This really made no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Also, the goal of the evil mastermind here wasn't just to infect and kill people, it was to cause a political reaction so that the U.S. government would take the NEXT biological threat seriously. That's a little bit of clunky reasoning, like a thief stealing money from a bank so they'll increase security in the future, making it harder to steal from the bank. It's counter-productive, plus it's like doing the wrong thing for the right reason - but doing the thing itself is still wrong. Also, DO NOT let Donald Trump see this movie, or he'll claim that he did nothing to fight the COVID-19 pandemic because he wanted people to die so the survivors would take the next virus threat more seriously.
Also starring Noomi Rapace (last seen in "Stockholm"), Orlando Bloom (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), John Malkovich (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Brian Caspe (last seen in "Jojo Rabbit"), Matthew Marsh (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Michael Epp, Philip Brodie, Tosin Cole (last seen in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"), Jessica Boone, Adelayo Adedayo, Makram Khoury, Raffaello Degruttola, Kevin Shen, Aymen Hamdouchi (last seen in "War Machine"), Rami Nasr (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Farsi translators
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