BEFORE: OK, so I navigated my way through my first beer festival in three years, and it probably helped that it was in the same location as my last one, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. By "beer festival" I'm not talking about an underground sporting event like the one in the movie "Beerfest", or just a restaurant serving a lot of beer, it's more like a showcase, where the local brewers all come to hand out samples, they have new flavors or seasonal flavors they want everyone to try and (ultimately) buy, so they're willing to hand out 2 oz. samples to the heavy drink-fluencers and fans of the beverage. I wasn't sure if I'd be available for this, there was the possibility I'd be booked to work a screening, so I didn't buy a ticket right away, and the admission price went way up over time - BUT, I found a Groupon about a week ago, and ended up getting in for just $30, even with bus fare and food costs I think I still came out ahead. Food is a necessity at these events, I used to just drink and not eat, but then I would get super-drunk, I learned that eating any kind of sandwich or bread kept me more sober - makes sense, right? So yesterday I got there super early and had a bagel and coffee nearby, then ate a sausage sandwich about halfway through the event. I didn't break any drinking records, because I still needed to be sober enough to find the right bus after, get on the bus, and get off at a bus stop close to my house. I had a nap for a couple hours when I got home, and I was fine, no hangover, and I really drank a lot of different things - limoncello, hard seltzer, flavored whiskey, a Guinness coffee drink. And lots of flavors of beer, including a sour one made with pickle juice - variety is the spice of life, I suppose.
Idris Elba carries over from "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom", and that's it for him this Movie Year, I have to make a pivot now and move on to some animated films.
THE PLOT: A sniper on a mercenary assassination team in the Congo kills the minister of mines, but his successful kill shot forces him into hiding. Returning to the Congo years later, he becomes the target of a hit squad himself.
AFTER: Well, after "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom" I was dying for more action in a movie, and man, did I get it. Sean Penn seems a bit like an unlikely action star, I must admit, but this kind of worked. I guess be careful what you wish for, that's all I'm saying - I couldn't take Sean Penn seriously when I watched him in "This Must Be the Place", but I think that's because he was doing a riff on the lead singer of "The Cure" searching for the old Nazi who killed his father, umm, or something. Has Sean Penn made a lot of action movies? "Gangster Squad", maybe, or "The Thin Red Line", which was a war movie, and maybe "The Weight of Water", but it still feels weird to see him fighting hand to hand and doing spy stuff. Oh, yeah, "Casualties of War" and "U Turn" and "The Game", maybe he has done a bunch of action movies, I guess it's just me.
The first part of the film is about the assassination of a government official, which apparently is something that military contractors might be asked to do in a foreign nation, though, really, isn't this the CIA's job? We're farming this out now to freelancers? Maybe leave this to the professionals, because here the removal of the mining minister just leads to civil unrest and the collapse of the regime, so somehow the mining minister is the one that was holding everything together in the country? Anyway, there are three potential assassins, and none of them know which one's going to be asked to pull the trigger until the last second (Is this the last-minute drama Lee Harvey Oswald went through?)
What a shocker, the one who gets the nod is the guy who just happens to be in a love triangle with his commanding officer, and the trigger-man's going to have to leave the country, that's the deal. So there's a blatant conflict of interest here, it never should have come to this - based on the casting alone, the audience should really be suspect of the C.O.'s motives here. You just don't cast THAT actor unless you need a villain, a charming villain, sure, but still a villain. We kind of know what the situation's going to be before it's revealed here.
Sure enough, when Jim Terrier tracks down his commander, Felix, years later in Barcelona, that man is married to Jim's ex-girlfriend, who was an aid worker they were both assigned to protect, and they're close to adopting a child. Jim inserts himself back into the mix, and the love triangle is rekindled, very quickly. Felix doesn't seem concerned, because he's sure that Jim can't steal Annie away from him. Again, casting and the way movies work kind of determine how this is all going to go down. Felix calls in a hit squad, but doesn't realize that the squad is going to take down both men, because they were both involved in this operation that desperately needs to be covered up.
Jim ends up with Annie, that's the easy part, but they still have to figure out how to stop the hit squads, and who wants Jim dead for what he knows. To make matters worse, Jim gets diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome AND post-traumatic stress disorder, and he can't really tell the doctor how he got these conditions, because it's all top secret government stuff. The doctor tells him to avoid loud noises, stressful situations and strenuous exercise, but really, that's all that spy stuff really is. Sure, Jim tried to carve out a new career digging wells for the people of the Congo, to try and make up for killing their mining minister, I guess - but once he gets dragged back into the world of espionage, it's all explosions, hand-to-hand combat and SO much running, which are all the things the doctor told him he needs to avoid in the future.
We're so used to watching James Bond deal with all this stuff, and he never breaks a sweat, right? Or they would never give Bond a medical condition that would get in the way of him doing all his super-spy stuff, but maybe they should? I'm thinking back to a time years ago when DC comics re-booted Superman, and the new writer felt that maybe he was just a bit too powerful, and regular non-superhuman readers might not be able to relate. Watching Superman save the world on a daily basis has a tendency to get repetitive, so the compromise wasn't to take away any of his powers or make him weaker in any way, they decided to keep depicting him doing the same things, though they'd make it more of a struggle. He could still leap tall buildings and stop runaway trains, so nothing really changed in the end, but I guess we need to see fictional characters work harder to succeed, it creates a bigger payoff.
NITPICK POINT: The second half of the film is set in Barcelona, and the climax happens in a bullfighting ring, but there's a credit at the end of the film reminding everyone that Barcelona outlawed all bullfighting in 2011. Probably they couldn't depict this in the film without running a disclaimer, but then why set the action there? Why not just add a line of dialog that explains they had to follow the villain to the next city over? Am I overthinking this?
I had to wait a LONG time for Idris Elba to show up in this film - I was really starting to think that maybe I'd made a mistake, or the IMDB incorrectly listed him as being in the film. Finally about 90 minutes in, he showed up as an Interpol agent, thank God. The chain stays alive, and there are just 58 movies left in Movie Year 14, I still have to drop one film but I should still have a clear path to the end. I was worried about "Morbius" showing up on cable, I thought maybe I'd have to pay iTunes $5.99 for the privilege of watching it when I want to, but just the other day, it turned up on Netflix, so things are looking up.
Also starring Sean Penn (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "Cats"), Mark Rylance (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Peter Franzen (last seen in "Cleaner"), Mark Billingham, Daniel Adegboyega (last seen in "6 Underground"), Ade Oyefeso (last seen in "Lost in London"), Rachel Lascar, Sarah Moyle, Chris Wilson (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat")
RATING: 6 out of 10 rowdy soccer fans
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