BEFORE: OK, here we go, it's finally October and the Shocktoberfest Countdown is officially starting - I had one of those "soft opens" with "Muppets Haunted Mansion", "Last Night in Soho", "Morbius" and that film about Charlie Manson. I suppose if you count the "Purge" franchise as horror, rather than action - maybe it's both - then really, I've been watching mostly horror films for two weeks. Hey, sometimes the romance chain extends into March, so it's only fair that the horror chain starts in mid-September sometimes.
Mykelti Williamson carries over from "The Purge: Election Year". He's also in "Species II" with another of tonight's cast members, but I couldn't work that one in this time around. For that matter, Vince Vaughn from "Term Life" is also in "Freaky", which is on my list, and Thomasin McKenzie from "Last Night in Soho" is also in "Old", which I couldn't get to, either. There were numerous diverging paths to deal with, and I fall back on the excuse that I had to find the path that gets me to Thanksgiving and Christmas, and once I find that, I don't want to deviate from it. If horror films are a dark, scary forest then we want to stay on the path and not lose sight of the road that leads out of here, eventually. (Or, DOES IT? Mwah hah ha ha...)
THE PLOT: After a man's family dies in what appears to be a murder, he gets a phone call from one of the dead, his niece. He's not sure if she's a ghost or if he's going mad, but as it turns out, he's not.
AFTER: OK, this one isn't totally horror or even very Halloween-y, but we're going to get there. Films about witches and vampires and ghosts and monsters are on the way, I promise. I've just got to deal with a few serial killers and maybe some non-serials first, but they're scary, too, right? If anything this feels like it was based on the semi-time-travel film "Frequency", which itself was loosely based on the Polaroid seen in "Back to the Future". The theory is that if you can find a way to change the past, then you can change the present and the timeline will kind of just reset itself to something better. Then the dead can maybe be alive again, if you're lucky, but what's important is that the main character never stops trying to improve the world. Umm, I think? "Better" is subjective, after all, and we assume "alive" is better than dead, but what do we all really know in the end?
"Frequency" used the technique of ham radio, supposedly there was some kind of atmospheric phenomena that allowed a grown-up man to communicate with his dead father, who was on the other end of the radio connection, but thirty (?) years in the past. With the knowledge that his son had from his future, he was able to make changes in the timeline and figure out who killed his wife, and maybe - just maybe - undo the damage and fix the situation retroactively. Maybe I"m on a "Frequency" vibe because Elizabeth Mitchell was in it, and I just saw her in "The Purge: Election Year" - but nah, this has got to be the Black remake of "Frequency", or close to it, right?
Naturally, there are some differences - the communication device that crosses time here is a cell phone, not a ham radio. Maybe the lead character has that "Dead Friends & Family" plan. Or maybe it's something he turned on in the "Settings" panel and forgot to toggle off, but he gets a phone call from his niece from three days in the past, and the fact that he saw her body at the crime scene somehow doesn't cause him to hang up or treat it as a robocall. I wonder if "Potential Spam from the Afterlife" popped up on his phone. Anyway, he finds her cell phone at the scene, and it's as dead as she is, so there must be something else going on.
The rest of the film proceeds in two timelines, one is the present and one is three days in the past, and the events in both timelines are changeable, it turns out. It's a neat little device that Uncle Jack in the present has the information about the case to maybe save Ashley in the past, and the reverse is also true - she follows his leads and gets information, which turns out to be very relevant to the present, so they both kind of save each other. And the timeline resets, as in "Frequency", whenever a big change is made, those missing memories come flooding in, and suddenly Jack remembers what happened in the last three days, though now it's different, but then the question is, does he remember what happened in the previous timeline, or is that gone? There are a lot of extraneous details here, like why is the backpack wet, or what's the license plate of the car, and the movie sort of gets bogged down in these things, really the only important thing should be, who's the killer and how do we stop them?
Honestly, there aren't that many choices. Two, really, and either actor could have taken on the villain role, they're both capable of it. But it's not that hard to figure out whodunnit, in fact if you've seen "Frequency" you're WAY ahead of the game. I just wanted to skip to the end to see if I was right (I was) but that's cheating. I stuck it out even though this 103-minute movie felt like it was three hours long. Watching a teen girl try and fail, again and again, to ride a bicycle was sheer torture. Couldn't they cast an actress who could ride a bike, or, I don't know, teach this actress to ride one? From what I hear, it's not that difficult.
There's a fair amount of "cheating" here where the editing is concerned - it's become all too common now for directors to cut between the timelines, all willy-nilly, which implies that all of the events depicted are happening at the same time, when clearly they are NOT. But it's now part of the film language that we can just DO that, rules of time and space be damned, and so now we're all accustomed to that, and story-wise it feels like the ends justify the means. I'm just not sure that it SHOULD. We don't have this to fall back on in our daily lives - oh, something's not the way I want it to be, let me just change the past - so why should filmmakers get a pass and be able to just reset their stories? Who's to say there won't be implications by changing things so that THIS person who died is now alive again and THAT person who killed them is now dead? Who made us the de facto judge, jury and executioners of "bad people", in the interests of making things "better", whatever that means? What if that person who died and is now alive again grows up to start World War III thirty years down the road? Just saying.
One thing's for sure, I'm going to have a lot to say about time travel and multiverses at the end of the year, between "Dr. Strange 2", "Spider-Man: No Way Home", "The Adam Project", "The Tomorrow War", and even "Freejack", "Lightyear", "Last Night in Soho" and "Boss Level".
NITPICK POINT: Why is the lead character here, a homicide detective, allowed to work the case of his brother's murder? Wouldn't he be considered too close to the case to be impartial in that investigation? In the non-movie world, he would be instantly, automatically barred from pursuing any leads or coming in contact with any evidence on this matter. In this film, after a 5-minute interview with internal affairs, it's business as usual, and nobody seems to have a problem with that. Are they THAT short-staffed in that police department, that proper police procedure goes right out the window?
NITPICK POINT #2: Our hero falls for the old "let's drive out to the middle of nowhere and meet somebody to discuss the case" trick. Really? It's not his first day on the job, even I know you have to meet your informant in a public place, just to be on the safe side. Any fan of mob movies knows that you NEVER let anyone drive you to someplace remote that you don't know.
Also starring David Oyelowo (last seen in "The Midnight Sky"), Storm Reid (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Alfred Molina (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "Eternals"), Shinelle Azoroh, Byron Mann (last seen in "The Man With the Iron Fists"), April Grace (last seen in "Voyagers"), Ray Barnes.
RATING: 5 out of 10 colored gumballs in a jar
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