BEFORE: John Malkovich carries over again from "The Survivalist", this will be it for the Malkovich movies this year, but he was in a couple back in February and June so he should do all right in the year-end breakdown, which is getting closer, day by day.
And yet it's still technically summer, if you go by the solstices and such, the fall equinox is still a week away, so we should all be on a beach somewhere, maybe, it's still warm enough outside, but hopefully that will change. I need to start growing my mustache back, put the glass back in the front door and take the screen out, and get ready to switch from iced coffee to hot coffee and from beer to cider. Perhaps when I get to the film about high school football, that will be the best time to make all the change-overs - because then horror films will only be about a week away.
THE PLOT: A small team of elite American intelligence officers, part of a top-secret tactical command unit, try to smuggle a mysterious police officer with sensitive information out of Indonesia.
AFTER: Wow, this film really is quite the hot mess. There are action scenes, of course, but really the bare minimum of story to get us from one shoot-out to the other. It's like some screenwriter just couldn't be bothered with character development, plot twists, motivation for anyone to do anything, and not only is there no third act, there's barely even a second one. Well, the good news is that this underdeveloped movie won't waste too much of your time, just 90 minutes.
And really, we wouldn't want anybody to HURT themselves trying to explain anything here, just by all means, let it happen and then later we can all look up the storyline on Wiki and figure out what you were going for. Who are the mysterious man and woman who seem to be listening to every conversation? I couldn't tell if they were on our side, or their side or somebody else's. Then there's Mark Wahlberg's character, who is explaining everything that's happening AS it's happening, but who is he explaining it to? Certainly not us. Is he being interviewed later about how things went down? Because that's probably not a good sign. Or is he meeting with another party about the thing that he just authorized, does he have to meet with his higher-ups every 10 minutes and justify all of his actions? Or are we looking at a split-timeline thing and those are scenes from the future debriefing?
The rest of the film is as follows: shoot-out, then Mark Wahlberg yells for a bit. Next shoot-out, Mark Wahlberg yells some more. Then they go on the big move, to transport their informant from the embassy to the airport, only there's a shoot-out and it doesn't go well, so naturally Mark Wahlberg has to yell some more. Repeat as necessary until the ending, which isn't really an ending, it's more like a stoppage, but thank god for stopping, even if it's a bummer of an ending. Boy, characters played by John Malkovich are REALLY having a bad week, that's like four in a row, but who's keeping score? Oh, right, I am.
I didn't quite understand how this elite team functioned, at the start of the film they did an operation in some idyllic American suburb, but it was a house full of Russian agents, and Mark Wahlberg's character was the lead operative in the field and John Malkovich's character was the lead "man in the chair", the head of the team of operatives collecting information on their computers and relaying it to the field team. Then, all of a sudden on the next mission the team is in Indonesia? What? How? Why? And they're still being led by Malkovich and the same team of people with computers, but are THEY in Indonesia too? Or are they still in the U.S.? Because then there would be a data lag with the team being on the other side of the world, plus it would be day in one place when it's night in the other, and that just wouldn't really work, the computer team would have to work from like 9 pm to 9 am to support the team in Indonesia, right?
Then we have the low-level Indonesian cop who somehow has the information the team needs about where the 6 parts of missing radioactive cesium are, only he WON'T tell them until they put him on a plane to the U.S. Also, he's put the information behind some kind of code-wall and he won't give them the code, and time is running out, the information is also being destroyed, they only have a limited amount of time to agree to his demands, and that sounds like blackmail of a sort, and I thought that we don't negotiate with terrorists. I guess we do if they're also martial arts experts that the Indonesian government wants to kill, which makes absolutely no sense at all. I mean, we only trust this man because the enemy wants to kill him, but that by itself should not make him trustworthy, because the enemy of your enemy could also be working for another one of your enemies. You see what I'm getting at?
OK, so let's say you have to get this informant to the airport from the U.S. Embassy to the airport, where a plane is waiting, and it's a 22 mile trip. Do you put him in a black SUV (with U.S. license plates!) and your whole team with guns and drive him down the road, with your computer team messing with the traffic signals so you get all green lights? Hell, no! That's exactly what they'll be expecting you to do! No wonder the motorcade gets ambushed, it's the most obvious and obnoxious and American thing to do. Why not use a helicopter? You could have him there in five minutes, long before anybody who wants to kill him could find a bazooka to blow the copter out of the sky. Whatever you need to do, do it fast and DON'T tell anybody about it.
Or you could put the guy in a crate, label the crate "Warning: Dangerous Snakes Inside" and load the crate on the back of a truck and just ship him across town to the airport. It might take a little longer, but nobody would be expecting this. This is the same method they use to get Taylor Swift to the stage or to get Natalie Portman into Comic-Con, because you can't just walk these people to wear they need to be, not in this climate. If JFK had been shipped across Dallas in a crate he might still be alive, just saying. No, by all means put him in a convertible limo and keep the top down when everyone in Dallas hates his guts, you Secret Service morons.
Directed by Peter Berg (director of "Spenser Confidential")
Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Faye"), Lauren Cohan (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Iko Uwais (last seen in "The Expend4bles"), Ronda Rousey (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Carlo Alban (last seen in "Whip It'), Natasha Goubskaya, Lee Chae-rin, Sam Medina (last seen in "Snitch"), Keith Arthur Bolden (last seen in "Till"), Jenique Hendrix, Billy Smith (last seen in "Air"), Myke Holmes, Emily Skeggs (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Terry Kinney (last seen in "The Little Things"), Brandon Scales (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Poorna Jagannathan (last seen in "Carrie Pilby"), Peter Berg (last seen in "A Midnight Clear"), Elle Graham (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Nikolai Nikolaeff (last seen in "Bruised"), Ariel Felix (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Tom Astor (last seen in "News of the World"), Kate Rigg, Lourdes Perea, Tatiana Ronderos, David Garelik, Alla Greene, Vince Canlas (last seen in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Sean Avery (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Mark Freeman Schotz, Cedric Gervais (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Trevor Gretzky (last seen in "Cosmic Sin"), Rich Rutherford, Alessandra Gaia Williams (last seen in "Paul, Apostle of Christ"), with archive footage of Barack Obama (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Donald Trump (last seen in "Rather")
RATING: 3 out of 10 hard drives in a safe, for some reason (like, why not just password protect them?)
No comments:
Post a Comment