BEFORE: Ugh, subway troubles like you wouldn't BELIEVE. I live on one of the most trouble-plagued subway lines, or maybe it just feels that way lately because there's always a train somewhere on the line with mechanical problems, or one that got its emergency brakes activated and is stuck, which stops the whole line in both directions for some reason. I've concluded there are so many problems that there MUST be someone actively sabotaging trains randomly, because it's every damn day now. I have the NYC mass transit apps and I signed up to receive alerts for this line, so maybe it's a perception problem - perhaps these problems are constant but I'm just finding out about them more frequently now. Last night, no lie, it took me two hours to get home instead of the usual 45 minutes, as there was a power outage that shut down the whole line, and I was just sitting at a station in Manhattan, waiting for an update that never came. Usually I can wait these things out, and get home before the people who ditched and set out to find an alternate route home. But this time was different, after 30 minutes I had to concede that a repair wasn't going to be announced in the near future, and thankfully I was at a station that accessed the "A" train, and I was able to take that through Brooklyn and link up with my regular line past my usual stop, and just take it five stops back.
This morning, of course I needed to leave the house by noon to get to work at 1 pm, and there was an alert at 11 am that someone had been hit by a subway train, of course, on the line I take. So I either had to hope things could be cleaned up and back in order by noonish, or else leave earlier and walk to another subway line, at least a 10 or 15 minute walk away. I walked by my usual stop, though, and technically trains were running again, though one took another 20 minutes to arrive, at least I could confirm it was on the way. Still made it to work on time, but only because the train skipped stops.
Tilda Swinton carries over from "Three Thousand Years of Longing".
THE PLOT: After a fateful near-miss, an assassin battles his employers and himself on an international manhunt he insists isn't personal.
AFTER: This is kind of not your typical assassin movie, since it comes from David Fincher, who directed "Fight Club", which wasn't your typical umm, fighting movie. You can expect this to be a think-piece, if you choose to look at it that way. It's going to get inside the mind of an assassin, what are his motivations, his aspirations, his justifications for doing what he does. How does he pass the time? What does he think about? What are the rules that he lives by? Look, I'll admit that sounds a little boring, and I'll admit that I fell asleep at some point - but to be fair, I was exhausted, since it took me two hours to get home last night, and the subway ride is usually 45 minutes, tops. We ordered a big meal of Chinese food, that also wasn't helpful, and then even though I had some Mountain Dew handy and some cookies, I crashed as soon as the sugar wore off and the film got a little slow.
I perservered, though - the rules are that if I fall asleep I need to rewind to the last thing I remember and try again, but if this keeps happening then I'm allowed to call it at some point. But I did wake up at 4 am and the movie was over, I did go back and finish the film, which then took me until 5 am. I would like to think that a movie about an assassin would be thrilling and exciting enough so that I wouldn't fall asleep at all, but that's just not where we find ourselves, and there are a lot of long quiet stretches between the killings, a lot of internal monologuing, sure our nameless Killer works his way up the chain within his own organization, as you would expect, to find the location of the two other assassins who attacked his girlfriend, and then the client who might still be upset with him for botching the job.
For the record, it's not a "near-miss", because a near-miss would be a hit. Usually this is a misnomer, like two planes that almost collide, we incorrectly call that a "near-miss" when it's a miss, and according to George Carlin, we should call that a "near-hit". But maybe "near-miss" is the correct term here, because the Killer does shoot someone, it's just the wrong someone. He lines up the shot from the building across the plaza from the hotel, but the target isn't alone in the hotel suite, there's a dominatrix in there with him, and she moves at the last second and gets in the way of the bullet. So the target survives, and it's not the kind of profession where you can say, "Oh, well, these things happen..." and apparently there are repercussions.
So in a fashion similar to "Proud Mary", the Killer's only recourse is to keep on killing, even the people in his own organization, until he's sure that everyone who is aware of his mistake is dead and the client is not holding him responsible for the error. This is somehow justified because the organization might be trying to kill HIM as either retaliation for his mistake, or to cover it up. You'd like to think, however, that all this killing might be bad for his reputation, but the mental justification is there, it's all "Trust no one" and "Kill them before they kill you." But it still seems like it might be a funky way of doing business - everyone's so secretive that there's no direct link of communication so he can check on his own job security. Maybe if he didn't keep breaking his cell phones after every contact he'd have a better idea where he stands, but I get it, someone could be tracking his location or learning information from listening in on his calls.
For a fun game, see if you can name all of the classic TV shows where the Killer got his aliases from - every time he flies there's a different name on the plane ticket, starting with Felix Unger and Archibald Bunker, and going from there...
Also starring Michael Fassbender (last seen in "Slow West"), Charles Parnell (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Arliss Howard (last seen in "Mank"), Kerry O'Malley (last seen in "Side Effects"), Sophie Charlotte, Emiliano Pernia, Gabriel Polanco, Sala Baker (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Endre Hules (last seen in "8 Heads in a Duffel Bag"), Monique Ganderton (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse"), Daran Norris (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Nikki Dixon, Ilyssa Fradin (last seen in "Captive State"), Jack Kesy (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Eric Tolzmann, Kev Morris Sr., Andre Bellos, Lacey Dover.
RATING: 6 out of 10 packages shipped to an Amazon locker
No comments:
Post a Comment