The Flash

Year 15, Day 190 - 7/9/23 - Movie #4,489 - viewed on 6/27/23

BEFORE: Yeah, I'm under-employed so I had a chance to go see a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, which is the cheapest time to see a movie in Manhattan, once you figure in the matinee pricing and the "Discount Tuesday" promotion, I got a $19 ticket down to $7.  That's a good deal if you're short on cash but you still want to keep up with your summer blockbusters. And all I had to do was return to my previous place of employment - I bought popcorn and soda, when it would have been SO easy to sneak in snacks, so I'm at least that considerate. The older ticket ladies are still there, and one of my old managers, but I didn't see any ushers or concessionaires that I recognized - well, it has been two years and that's a job with a high turnover rate.  If my ex-co-workers all got out of there, good for them.

Michael Keaton carries over from "Worth".

THE PLOT: Barry Allen uses his super speed to change the past, but his attempt to save his family creates a world without super heroes, forcing him to race for his life in order to save the future. 

AFTER: SPOILER ALERT, this film is still playing in movie theaters - you know, the place you used to go to watch films before they all started streaming to your phone.  

I'm a bit down on myself because I'm under-employed for the next two months - I'm trying not to panic because I grabbed every shift I could during the two big festivals in May and June, so I worked so many hours that my paychecks in July were larger than normal, and I just let the bank balance build up a bit.  Will it be enough to get me through to August?  I'm not sure because I may not get paychecks from that job until late September, that's how the payroll works. So I still have to think about finding some temp work maybe, but I want to wait until after I serve on jury duty in mid-July. I just don't want to have to start something and then have to put it on hold.  And then there's also partial unemployment payments, I should qualify for that. 

Whatever - I can't fix my life in a day or a week, no matter what I want to do or try to do, so instead I'm taking baby steps each day to try and improve things.  Like I can watch a movie a day, and by the end of the year that's a huge list - so each day I'm trying to also check something off the to-do list or take a step on each bigger project so that even if I can't cross off something today, I've gotten a little bit closer to crossing that thing off, eventually.  (I know it's a poor excuse, but I do have jury duty coming up in July, if I took a new job then I'd very quickly have to ask for time off from that job, and then where would THAT get me?).  But fixing one's life is what "The Flash" is all about - 

This is really "Flash: No Way Home", and I did warn everybody that if they allowed that Spider-Man film last year to be really successful, that it would lead to more films set in the metaverse.  Sure, we got "Everything Everywhere All at Once", where an Asian woman had to learn from her counterparts in parallel universes to become a better mother (is that what happened?).  Anyway, that film won Best Picture, so I guess it was a success, but now we have the same concept in "The Flash", where Barry Allen has to travel the metaverse and interact with other versions of himself and other versions of the DC universe in order to become a better son?  Why can't he just be better without breaking the universe?

Also, just as "No Way Home" featured every actor who'd ever been Spider-Man, suggesting that each actor's movies took place in a different parallel universe - well, sure, by all means let's bring all the various villains from those universes TOGETHER in one place, how could that possibly go south?  Why, because Tom Holland's Spider-Man got exposed and Dr. Strange cast a spell?  Is that enough reason to cast Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield again?  And to say, "Oh, THIS is how the Spider-verse works?"  I'm still not sure, it still feels like such a cash grab, and an after-thought on how to keep the old Spider-Man movies still relevant. Now here comes the "Flash" movie to do the same damn thing with Batman - every Batman movie with a different actor apparently takes place in a different DC universe.  It's OK, there are at least 52 of them to spare at last count.  

It's a very cheeky way to not have to do an origin movie for the Flash - that would have made the most sense, maybe, but DC instead decided to hit the ground running and go forward, not back - although we do see how Flash got his super-powers, but we see it through one Barry Allen's eyes as he tries to give super-powers to an alt-universe Barry Allen.  It's a lot like how Marty McFly had to avoid the other version of himself in "Back to the Future II".  Which, the movie reminds us, was a movie that almost cast Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, and maybe did just that in an alternate version of our universe.  This somehow caused a ripple effect that meant Tom Cruise was not the star of "Top Gun" in that world. 

By interacting with another version of himself, Barry Allen comes to a few realizations about himself - he tends to talk fast, and not let other people finish their sentences.  OK, good to know, something for him to work on - self-realization can only help.  Younger Barry is also quick to leap into situations before being completely briefed on them - it must be hard asking the world's fastest man to just slow down, take a breath and make sure he fully understands the situation before leaping into it - but then again, in his defense, lives are on the line usually, so time is of the essence.  

Now, in the comic books, the Flash usually used a device called a cosmic treadmill to travel in time - but here he just has to run really fast, faster than the speed of light.  Oh, sure, that's simple, why didn't you just say so?  But don't the physicists tell us that nothing can BE faster than the speed of light?  What about the speed of dark, is that faster or slower?  Anyway, just keep running faster and I guess you'll get there - er, then. 

Flash means well, of course - his mother died when he was young and his father was accused of killing her, and is still in prison, so if he could only go back, and change one small thing without interacting with anybody, surely there can't be anything wrong with that, right?  RIGHT?  So he reasons that if only his mother had bought just ONE more can of tomatoes at the store, then his father wouldn't have gone to the store, and then he would have been at home to protect Barry's mom.  This is the seductive nature of time travel - but how does Barry know that his father wouldn't have died instead, or also?  NITPICK POINT: Why can't Barry just go back and not change anything, just SEE who killed his mother?  Like, take a picture, wouldn't that help without destroying the timeline?

That darn butterfly effect states, though, that you can't just change one thing and hope that everything after that goes smoothly - after all, it's Barry's mom's death that inspired him to get a job in the crime lab, and then also to become a superhero.  So if you take away that incident, don't you mess with Barry Allen becoming the Flash in the first place?  Similarly, if you save Batman's parents, don't you also kill Batman, or at least take away the NEED for Batman?  Well, the movie ends up dealing with all of these issues, eventually, it just takes its sweet time doing it. 

Time, as the Michael Keaton Batman tells us, is not linear like a piece of uncooked spaghetti - and when you change something, you don't just create a branch off into a new, slightly different reality.  A timeline is more like a piece of cooked spaghetti, it's curvy and it overlaps and touches the other pieces of spaghetti in the bowl and that's what the multiverse is. Once you add some pasta sauce it's all one giant mess, which, OK, seems about right for DC Comics - so every creator can tell the story THEY want to tell, and we'll just say it's a new timeline.  Timelines are twisty and messy and covered in parmesan cheese, if you like that sort of thing. And we know that this is the way the universe works because the writers tell us so - notice that real scientists don't weigh in on this, because there's really no such thing as the multiverse. Then there's the Alan Parsons theory, which states that time is "flowing like a river, to the sea, until it's gone forever."  That seems simple enough, but it's just too simple for comics and now movies. 

This was loosely based on the "Flashpoint" crossover in the DC Comics, which the writers used to alter the DC universe temporarily, then put it back together again with some upgrades and improvements.  But it's not the exact same story - in the comics Flash changes the past and finds himself in a world where Bruce Wayne was killed as a boy and Thomas Wayne, his father, became a much tougher Batman after losing his wife and son. And there was no Superman, because his spacecraft got intercepted by the guvmint and he was raised in a lab, with no sunlight or human contact.

But the film goes in a different direction - in the alt-reality that Flash created with his time-travel, there's no Superman at all, which becomes really bad news when General Zod comes to Earth (as he did during 2013's "Man of Steel) with his terraforming machines to turn the planet into New Krypton - Flash and the alt-Batman team up to track where the spaceship from Krypton landed, and bad news, it was in Russia (shades of the "Red Son" Elseworlds comic), and they go there to find not Superman, but an alt-version of Supergirl.  Well, I guess you take what you can get, so Supergirl and Batman and the two Flashes take on Zod and his crew, but in a world without Superman, Wonder Woman or Aquaman, they're hopelessly outmatched.  

The alt-Flash sees the solution, though - keep rewinding time and fighting the battle against Zod until they win.  Sure, that's what a young Flash would do - but the older Flash realizes that rewinding time was what started all the trouble in the first place, and they could replay the battle a thousand times and never come up with a good outcome.  So, inevitably, older Flash has to fix everything by going back to the divergence point and putting things back the way they were, so that the alternate reality never happens.  It's a good thing they put General Zod in the film, though, because otherwise there wouldn't have been a villain, except for The Flash himself, who broke the universe trying to fix one small detail and make his life better.  But he learns that you can't just change one thing without changing everything, and that's important not just for him, but for everyone who has regrets or has lost someone and wishes that things had happened differently - that's all wasted effort, for the most part, and it's a valuable lesson.  On the other hand, undoing everything that was done means that I spent two and a half hours watching a film that ultimately negated itself, so where do I get a refund?  

The opening sequence where Flash saves 10 babies, a nurse and a dog from a hospital wing collapse is, of course, very thrilling, and is a great display of what Flash can do with his powers, BUT the bad news is that we've seen this all before, when Quicksilver saved all of Xavier's students from an exploding building in "X-Men: Apocalypse".  Essentially, it's the same scene, so couldn't they have found a better way to show us what Flash could do without ripping off a Marvel movie?  Flash also has very bizarre ways of saving the falling babies, like he puts one inside a microwave (it's not plugged in, obvi) but this is a bad look, you shouldn't ever show a baby inside a microwave in a movie, it just gives people at home bad ideas.  Flash also has to stop and eat before saving everybody, because food is fuel and he's running low - I get that this is the way his powers work, but it's still a bad look, grabbing a bite to eat before saving somebody's life.  

We also get a look, late in the film, of the chaos that got caused, on a multiversal scale, by messing with the timestream.  All of Barry's over-fixing and traveling through time causes some kind of chain collapse, and so we see giant colored spheres representing the various timelines crashing into each other - but it's a visual representation of something that we should NOT be able to see, not even from the space between the timelines.  So gotta call a big NITPICK POINT on this one, because we as humans are tiny specks within the universe, we can barely see a mile in any direction, we can't see another planet without a telescope, so how the hell can we see one timeline crashing into another?  Also, you just got done telling me a timeline is shaped like a piece of spaghetti, and now, all of a sudden, they're spherical?  Would you please make up your mind?  

Another big NITPICK POINT is that we never find out who DID kill Barry's mom.  Sure, we knew it wasn't his dad, but then, who did it?  Flash went through all of this and broke the universe and put it back together again, and he STILL doesn't know?  Bogus. 

Maybe another NITPICK POINT with Flash's powers, where getting hit by a second bolt of lightning takes away his speed powers, requiring a THIRD bolt of lightning to turn them on again.  Really, his powers are THAT simple and binary, that's it's like an off/on switch?  Have you tried unplugging your Flash and plugging him back in again?  

Wait, wait, another NITPICK POINT that's Flash-power related.  I get why Barry Allen is always late for work, because there's a building collapse or he has to do some Justice League thing at the most inconvenient time.  But why is he always BEHIND in his police work?  The film states that he wants to be thorough in his work at the crime lab, because he's ultra-careful that he gets the evidence right and no innocent person gets proven guilty.  But he's STILL the Flash, he should STILL be able to do his work at super-speed and be thorough at the same time.  He could do every test three times and still process everything faster than anyone else, so how does this even make sense?  Can't he also think at super-speed if he can do everything else at super speed?  

And then there's the irony that "The Flash" took so long to make - they first planned to release a film about the Flash in 2016, but then "Justice League" came out in 2017 so they moved the date of "The Flash" to 2018.  Then there were re-writes and scheduling conflicts and personnel changes, and in the end 45 different writers worked on this film at various times.  So the original plan was for this film to fit in with "Aquaman" and "Wonder Woman" and "Justice League", but the process took so long that it almost seems apt, that this film about multiversal collapse ended up being released just as DC/Warner decided to tear its movie universe down and start over with a new set of interlocking films.  So maybe this "Flashpoint" storyline can be useful in justifying that scorched-Earth policy and the cleaning of the slate?  Not sure. 

I (sort of) met Michael Shannon last month - he directed a film that was in the Tribeca Film Festival, and came to the theater where I work to speak to the audience after the screening.  I had just watched "Bullet Train" two weeks before, so I tried very hard not to freak out when he came out of the theater and asked me where the men's room was. It's a common enough question that's only weird because it came from General Zod.

Also starring Ezra Miller (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore"), Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Ron Livingston (last heard in "The Tender Bar"), Maribel Verdu (last seen in "Pan's Labyrinth"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Dope"), Antje Traue (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Ben Affleck (last seen in "The Tender Bar"), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Temuera Morrison (last seen in "Aquaman"), Gal Gadot (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Rudy Mancuso, Luke Brandon Field (last seen in "Jojo Rabbit"), Sanjeev Bhaskar (last seen in "Yesterday"), Sean Rogers, Kieran Hodgson (last seen in "See How They Run"), Ian Loh, Karl Collins, Andoni Gracia, Bastian Antonio Fuentes (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), Rosie Ede, Andy Muschietti (last seen in "It Chapter Two"), Lynn Farleigh (last seen in "Miss Potter"), 

with cameos from Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Val"), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (also last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Christopher Reeve, George Reeves, Helen Slater (last seen in "The Secret of My Success"), Adam West (last heard in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), REDACTED (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), ALSO REDACTED (last seen in "Sweet Girl")

RATING: 6 out of 10 candy bars from the vending machine

Worth

Year 15, Day 189 - 7/8/23 - Movie #4,488

BEFORE: I thought about saving this movie for September, but the linking is putting it here, between two movies with Michael Keaton, and who am I to tell the linking that it's wrong?  I've got a chain worked out for September, though, and I don't see a way to move this one there and work it in, there's just not enough of a connection.  So here it remains, on a boring Saturday afternoon when it's too hot to go anywhere, and anyways, I've got no place I need to be. 

Michael Keaton carries over from "The Protégé". 

THE PLOT: An attorney in Washington D.C. battles against cynicism, bureaucracy and politics to help the victims of 9/11. 

AFTER: My first thought on this film, when I heard about it, was "How is this a movie?"  I just didn't get how the subject matter would be able to hold anyone's attention for nearly two hours.  Now that I've seen it, I'm wondering, "How is this a movie?"  Or, perhaps more accurately, WHY is this a movie?  Sure, I watched it until the end, but I'm a professional - I don't see a casual viewer sticking with it, there's just no real action to it. 

I guess they made movies out of every other aspect of 9/11, and the compensation fund was the only thing left?  That can't be how movies work, though.  I just don't see how people filing claims for benefits after could possibly constitute a movie plot, even after watching it.  This should not exist, in a way, but then again, in a weird way it does.  Yes, it's true that Kenneth Feinberg was appointed as the Special Master of the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.  And yes, it's true that there was some reluctance on the part of the eligible victims to file claims, because.... well, for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was maybe that to collect money, they had to waive their right to sue the airlines or the government, and maybe people were getting legal advice from shady lawyers that one should never DO that. 

Other people may have considered the fund "blood money" or perhaps misunderstood the implications of filing a claim, or maybe there were some people who just didn't trust the government, no matter what.  Still others may have still been dealing with their grief, and felt that once they received compensation, the grieving process would be over, and they weren't ready for that.  The point is that there were maybe a lot of reasons why the eligible victims of 9/11 didn't file at first, and Feinberg and his deputy, Camille Biros, and the other people at their law firm needed to find out WHY - because if they didn't reach a certain threshold of a percentage of eligible people filing, it meant that the non-filers could get together in a class-action lawsuit that still had the power to bankrupt the airline industry and/or put a serious hurt on the U.S. economy.  

According to this film, there was also a formula that the fund managers used to calculate the worth of a human being, and that formula took income into consideration, however that may have been a mistake, because in essence the formula then places a larger value on the life of a CEO than on the life of a janitor or dishwasher.  Some people took offense at this, most likely the families of the janitors and dishwashers.  The actuarial tables, in other words, couldn't possibly keep track of variables that mattered to victims and their families, ones that were more intangible.  

Just about two years ago (July 17, 2021) my wife and I went to the 9/11 museum, after avoiding it for a fair number of years.  We bought tickets online but then almost went to the wrong one, there's a shady, unofficial 9/11 museum a few blocks south, and we got off the subway near it and mistook it for the real one.  The fact that there were no lines to enter should have been the tip-off - anyway I heard this shady one closed down recently.  But then we walked a few more blocks north to the REAL 9/11 Museum, and after a while we were sort of unprepared for how it made us feel.  OK, it's one thing to marvel at a half-melted fire engine on display, or to see other debris like pieces of the old radio antenna that used to be on top of the Twin Towers - but then when we saw the large displays of shoes, purses and other personal effects of the victims, it started to feel a lot more creepy.  I remember there was also a video monitor that replayed the plane crashing into one of the towers - and it was on a loop, so you could see it happen again and again, every 15 seconds or so.  Then in the footprint of the towers, they had marked the spot where, 1/4 up above, the plane struck the tower - that was all a bit too much for us, and that's when we decided to leave.  I'm sure the people who run the museum have good intentions, and it's all in the name of history and getting the facts right, but I don't think I'll be back to visit the museum again, if it's OK with you.  I lived through that day once and I'd rather not relive it.  

I got a bit confused watching "Worth" because the legislation authorizing the victim compensation was championed by Senator Kennedy, and based on the actor playing this senator, I thought he was supposed to be Sen. John Neely Kennedy, from Louisiana.  No, this bill was supported by Sen. Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, they just apparently couldn't find an actor who looked very much like him.  I forgot that "Ted" Kennedy was still alive and a senator in 2001, and he was very involved with the legislation that provided counseling and healthcare benefits for the families of the 9/11 victims, and he was the one who recommended his former chief of staff, Kenneth Feinberg, for the position of the Special Master for the fund.  Ted Kennedy also spoke with all of the Massachusetts families who lost members in the attacks.  Jeez, we think back on Ted Kennedy and we think about his drinking problem and maybe even Chappaquiddick, but maybe we should remember this about him before all that. 

Also starring Amy Ryan (last seen in "Jack Goes Boating"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Tate Donovan (last seen in "Respect"), Shunori Ramanatham (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Talia Balsam (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Laura Benanti (last seen in "Here Today"), Chris Tardio, Ato Blankson-Wood (last seen in "The Kindergarten Teacher"), Carolyn Mignini, Victor Slezak (last seen in "The Land of Steady Habits"), Alfredo Narciso (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Jason Kravits (last seen in "Sweet November"), Clifton Samuels, Ian Blackman (last seen in "The First Purge"), Connie Ray (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Steve Vinovich (last seen in "Shirley"), Bill Winkler (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Jeff Biehl (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Stephanie Heitman, Deborah Hedwell (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Tom Bruno, David Fierro, Lynne Wintersteller, Jon Wenc, Wass Stevens (last seen in "Reprisal"), Zuzanna Szadkowski, Gayle Rankin (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Catherine Curtin (last seen in "The Half of It"), Shernita Anderson, Andy Schneeflock, Brandon Hernandez, E.R. Ruiz, Johanna Day (last seen in "The Post"), Joseph Ragno, Miriam Morales, James Ciccone, Anthoula Katsimatides (last seen in "The Family"), Logan Hart, Vihaan Samat, Laura Sohn, Rebeca Martinez and the voice of Marc Maron (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets") with archive footage of Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over")

RATING: 4 out of 10 Fedex deliveries

The Protégé

Year 15, Day 188 - 7/7/23 - Movie #4,487

BEFORE: OK, a few days off and I'm back at it - on the days I'm not watching movies I'm still chipping away at my "to-do" list, but jeez, it's hot.  Too hot to do any physical work around the house, and we had one air conditioner quit already, and we can't get it replaced until Monday.  So it's going to be a LONG weekend, my wife's been sleeping in the living room, which is often MY thing after a late movie.  I'm trying to watch as many movies on the computer as I can so I don't keep her from getting her sleep.  I can sleep any time, I'm flexible. 

Michael Keaton carries over from "American Assassin". 

THE PLOT: Rescued as a child by the legendary assassin Moody, Anna is the world's most skilled contract killer.  However, when Moody is brutally killed, she vows revenge for the man who taught her everything she knows. 

AFTER: Yep, another assassin-based movie - this seems to be quite the year for them.  I'm sure there will be a few more coming up this summer after this one, too.  Let's see if this one sticks to the same formula as the others.  Let's see, we've got: 

1. Lead attractive female assassin in tight clothing (Barely Lethal, Kate, Domino, The 355)

2. Samuel L. Jackson in the mentor role (Barely Lethal)

3. Michael Keaton as the seen-it-all, world-weary older guy (American Assassin) 

4. A notable torture scene (The Man from Toronto, American Assassin, Barely Lethal)

5. An assassin character who was an orphan or lost a loved one (umm, all of them)

Well, I said that I didn't mind a formulaic plot as long as the movie put forth a good story, or exemplified the BEST use of the formula.  Well, I lied.  This one just feels kind of tacked together, maybe because now I know how it was put together, I can see where the seams are.  OK, we'll take an orphaned girl in Vietnam and connect her with the expert assassin, and the rest will just fall into place from there, she'll grow up and become the best in her business, because she's got nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.  There's always a choice, however, she didn't HAVE to become an assassin, did she?  It's a fait accompli, really, because that's what the screenwriter wanted to write about.  

I'm shocked that these films haven't all been written by the same person or people, but come on, doesn't it sort of FEEL that way?  I guess maybe the action screenwriters have story conferences where they get together and they workshop new ideas to tack on to the old ones so that somehow the screenplay will feel original and fresh, when it's clearly not.  "Hey, did you guys ever write one where the hot female assassin is also flirting with the lead bad guy at the same time?  No?  OK, I'm gonna try that one out and see if it works."

Yeah, so the lead female assassin, Anna, gets totally propositioned by Rembrandt, the older, world-weary semi-villain (?) before he lets on that he knows she's an assassin whose cover is that she works in a rare bookstore.  And she doesn't say no, she's clearly into it, but then, she doesn't know yet that he's going to end up working for the guy she's trying to take down.  What a conundrum - even when the mark gets taken down, these two don't know whether to kill each other or sleep together.  Well, who knows, maybe both, the night is still young after all - but they better make sure they do these two things in the right order, because if they kill each other, it might be hard to sleep together.  Right?  OK, sleep together, then if it doesn't work out, try to kill each other, that's where all married couples end up eventually anyway, right? 

The story's a little wonky across the board - Moody, the mentor, asks Anna, the assassin, to track down someone named Lucas Hayes.  Not kill him, just find him.  After she starts her search she gets that visit from Rembrandt at her bookstore, then she finds both Moody and her main researcher/finder guy killed.  So clearly somebody didn't want this guy to be found.  Anna can only tell that Lucas's father was a past target of Moody's, and she uses her connection to a biker gang in Vietnam to get close to that target's former business partner, just to ask a few questions.  But then the business partner gets killed, and the real mastermind behind everything (?) is revealed - too late, though, Anna's been captured and they torture her to find out why she's looking for this guy.  

Oh, there's more to the story, but I'd pretty much given up caring about the search for this guy by this point.  It's more exciting to see Anna have to escape from prison, and then go up against Rembrandt in one of several exciting combat scenes.  It's just that most combat scenes don't end this way, with the characters deciding to call it off to see if they'd be better lovers than enemies.  There's something just a bit - icky - about that, like maybe keep your romance subplot out of my action movie, OK?  Some screenwriter meant well because they wanted to keep the audience guessing, but this just isn't the way to do that, OK?  Like I don't think you should date somebody you work with, but call me old-fashioned, I guess. 

Quick, how old is Samuel L. Jackson?  He's 74, and he's still making action movies.  More power to him - black don't crack, baby.  OK, maybe he was 72 or 73 when this was filmed, but still - he's also in "Secret Invasion" which just came out, and he's kicking Skrull butt and taking names and really, he doesn't look a day over 55.  OK, with the beard, maybe 60.  Keep working as long as you can, I guess. 

Also starring Maggie Q (last seen in "Fantasy Island"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Reasonable Doubt"), David Rintoul (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), Patrick Malahide (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Ray Fearon (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast" (2017)), Ori Pfeffer (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Robert Patrick (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Florin Piersic Jr., Tudor Chirila, Velizar Binev, George Pistereanu (last seen in "The Contractor"), Eva Nguyen Thorsen, Alexandru Bordea, Tanja Keller, Taj Atwal, Caroline Loncg, Gamba Cole, Phong Giang, Richenda Carey, Dimitar Nikolov, David Sterne (last seen in "Never Let Me Go"), Jack Derges, Stefan Ivanov (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Lili Rich, Ekaterina Baker (last seen in "The Card Counter"), Cosmin Dominte, Don Michael Paul. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 cigars in a box

American Assassin

Year 15, Day 185 - 7/4/23 - Movie #4,486

BEFORE: Well, around our house July 4 is definitely a day where we do NOT leave the house unless we have to.  It's just too dangerous out there, between the illegal fireworks and everyone celebrating their freedoms by blowing stuff up. It seems there were a number of mass shootings around the country too, so I feel like our plan was justified.  Hey, what's more American than mass shootings?

So we just stayed inside and made matzoh ball soup, I watched a few old episodes of "Chopped" and then this movie. And we're down one air conditioner, so my wife's been sleeping in the living room, and I slept in the bedroom with the windows open.  Hopefully somebody can come tomorrow and fix the A.C. to make the bedroom cool again for sleepy-time.  

Khalid Laith carries over from "The Devil's Double". 

THE PLOT: After the death of his girlfriend at the hands of terrorists, Mitch Rapp is drawn into the world of counterterrorism, mentored by tough-as-nails former U.S. Navy S.E.A.L. Stan Hurley.

AFTER: Well, the parade of this year's assassin and/or hit-men movies continues, and even though I'm going to take a couple days off after this, my next movie is ANOTHER assassin-based movie that ALSO stars Michael Keaton.  Go figure, huh?  And it's also got Samuel L. Jackson, so really, there were a couple ways to get there. It would be kind of weird if Samuel L. Jackson DIDN'T turn up at least four times during any given Movie Year. 

I have now watched enough of them, this year alone, to really start noticing the similarities, the plot points that are common to all of them, or at least to MOST of them.  There's the young lead who has to go through a tough training process - and they've lost a family member or a loved one, which justifies the path that they're on, devoid of all personal attachments (ideally).  Then there's the tough mentor who puts them through the training - could be the world-weary type who's seen it all, but he (or she) also KNOWS all.  The Yoda-meets-Mace Windu type.  Then there could also be the former student of the mentor, who followed a different path and is now working for the other side, they resent the young lead who's following in their footsteps, and they're now an extremely dangerous force for evil.  That's basically the plot of both this film AND "Barely Lethal", the latter just added the high-school setting for the sake of comedy.  (But yeah, also "Domino" and "Hanna" and "The 355", they all followed this formula pretty closely, only with slight variations...)

No comedy in this one, though - this is serious stuff, like infiltrating Muslim sleeper cells and learning how to stab enemies in the throat.  But it's all in the name of finding out who's got the enriched plutonium that recently sold on the black market, and what that person or government intends to do with it.  We've got a treaty with Iran that prevents them from taking any steps toward building a nuclear device - so that means it's probably Iran, right? 

Mitch Rapp was vacationing on Ibiza with his girlfriend, and he had JUST popped the question - ooh, bad thing to do in an action movie, you might as well be just two weeks from retirement or show a picture of your girlfriend back home to a fellow soldier.  The terrorists strike, and Mitch gets shot, and his girlfriend gets killed (not a spoiler, it's right there in the synopsis...).  This sets him on a path to train vigorously and study the Muslim religion so he can pretend to be a regular teenager trying to betray his American homeland, and once he's infiltrated the terrorist cell, he plans to take it down from the inside.  

Before he can act, however, the U.S Special Forces detail is on the scene, and they take the cell down for him.  The CIA Deputy Director holds Mitch in custody for 30 days, then after debriefing him she offers him a chance to join a black ops unit called Orion, which is so super-secret that even the people in charge of it have never heard of it.  (I have a bottle of Brooklyn Black Ops Stout tucked away in my beer fridge, and it says right on the label "Brooklyn Black Ops Stout does not exist." One of these days, I've got to crack it open and check for myself.)

The training is tough, and we assume that most of the recruits wash out, or maybe they don't survive the training, I'm not sure.  Oh, yeah, that's the best part of all of these assassin films, the training montage...  The few that remain in the program get tasked with a mission to Turkey to intercept the prospective buyer of the plutonium.  And to see if the man caught on camera trying to sell it is really who the mentor thinks he is...  Nah, but that's impossible, he couldn't still be alive, could he?  Of course he is. I saw this same sort of thing in "The November Man", the animosity between trainer and trainee, they were once on the same side, but now all bets are off, because one of them might be working for the other side.  I also saw this sort of thing in "The Gray Man", back in January, with the psychopathic ex-agent.

Well, at least in "American Assassin" you know who the bad guys are - it's the non-Americans, plus the one psychopathic ex-agent who's got a grudge against his old mentor and the young buck who replaced him.  It's a little by-the-numbers for me by now, but damn, the formula still works.  Oh, yeah, one more thing that's become a staple in these films, it's the torture scene to get important information - totes classic.  "The Man From Toronto" was all about this sort of thing, but it also popped up in "Barely Lethal" and I think in "Kate" and "The Rhythm Section" too.  This one puts a twist on things by having the BAD GUY need some important information from the mentor, so he tortures the mentor character to get it.  

WOW, but Michael Keaton really did well here, it reminded me of him in the 1989 "Batman" film when he faced off against the Joker and said, "You wanna get nuts?  Let's get NUTS!"  Or, you, know, some of the scenes in "Birdman" too, Keaton's great in nearly everything he does. At that point I don't really care if an action film is following a formula or not, as long as it's putting out the BEST version it can of those formulaic things.  

This film is based on the prequel book from a series of 21 books, all written by Vincent Flynn, who died in 2013. But the intent was probably to make Mitch Rapp the next James Bond-type character, or at least the next Jack Ryan.  This still could happen, but this film didn't do as well at the box office as hoped, so who knows.  I'd watch a sequel, though.  Pre-production on "American Assassin" began in 2012, they had to start film production by 2016 or the rights to the book would revert back to the author's estate.  Looks like they made it, but now who knows if this can be a viable franchise? 

Also starring Dylan O'Brien (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Michael Keaton (last seen in "Morbius"), Sanaa Lathan (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Shiva Negar, Taylor Kitsch (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), David Suchet (last seen in "Effie Gray"), Navid Negahban (last seen in "Aladdin" (2019)), Scott Adkins (last seen in "Criminal"), Alaa Safi (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Mohammad Bakri, Charlotte Vega (last seen in "The Bookshop"), Shahid Ahmed (last seen in "28 Weeks Later"), Yousef Sweid, Trevor White (last seen in "Jason Bourne"), Joseph Long, Gjevat Kelmendi, Tolga Safer, Bruno Bilotta, Vladimir Friedman (last seen in "The Operative"), Sydney White, Andrew Pleavin (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Matt Rippy (last seen in "Eddie the Eagle"), Luing Andrews (last seen in "The Heat"), Dacio Caballero, Jake Mann, Zachary Momoh (last seen in "Harriet").

RATING: 7 out of 10 targets at the shooting range

The Devil's Double

Year 15, Day 185 - 7/4/23 - Movie #4,485

BEFORE: Made it to the Fourth of July - this isn't the movie that I really chose as my holiday destination, but I crammed my schedule just a bit by adding "Hercules".  I can make up for it, I'll just count the next film as the "official" July 4 film and double-up.  But then I'm REALLY taking a couple days off, I swear. There's no reason to hurry the chain along at this point, I need to extend it and find other ways to pass the time. 

Dominic Cooper carries over from "Reasonable Doubt".

THE PLOT: The world of Saddam Hussein comes to life through the eyes of the man who was given a choice - either be the double for Saddam's sadistic son, or die. 

AFTER: Ugh, what a terrible movie.  What a terrible IDEA for a movie, who the heck thought this would be a good idea?  So it's based on a true story, so what?  So some of this maybe really happened to somebody, so what?  Do we all want to be reminded about Gulf War I, or Operation: Desert Storm or whatever we called it back then?  Saddam Hussein and his terrible sons, who just bullied the people of Iraq around, among other things?  And his son who was a violent unhinged maniac, probably a serial rapist, too?  Why would anybody devote any more time to these people by watching a movie about them?

Interesting?  Maybe at first, but then this all kind of devolves into nonsense or parody, and tone is kind of about everything at some point.  Yeah, I'm sure maybe Uday Hussein had a look-alike, Saddam did so we never really knew if we were seeing images of the real one or the fake one, and just in case anybody tried to assassinate him, or his sons, they probably all had decoys.  But what are the odds that Uday went to school with his double?  That seems beyond all possible odds - and it reminds me of that episode of "The Brady Bunch" where Peter realized that a classmate looked just like him, only he wore glasses.  Then they spent the whole episode doing split screen work, where the two teens were always on opposite sides of the TV screen, and pretending to interact with each other.  But even as a kid, I had to figure out how the special effects were done, and I noticed that the two halves didn't COMPLETELY line up right.  So unless Christopher Knight had a twin brother who was also an actor, I knew how they did it.

Of course, before that there was "The Patty Duke Show", which introduced the world to the concept of "identical cousins" - or perhaps some really complicated family affairs.  And before that there was "The Prince and the Pauper", a novel by Mark Twain where a prince swaps places with a poor boy that he encounters, who looks exactly like him.  "The Devil's Double" can't hold a candle to "The Prince and the Pauper", or even an episode of "The Brady Bunch".  The character of Uday Hussein was so cartoonish that it reminded me more of the Jerry Lewis film "The Nutty Professor", if Professor Kelp and Buddy Love somehow were able to interact with each other.  And if Buddy Love were a psychopath - and who's to say he wasn't? 

I'm not sure what it meant if Uday enjoying boxing with his body double, or whipping him when he tried to escape.  Normally that would suggest some kind of symbolic inner self-loathing, but I think that's giving him too much credit.  I also wonder if Dominic Cooper tried for that Freddie Mercury role in "Bohemian Rhapsody", but lost it when Rami Malek came on the scene. 

A reading of the subject's Wikipedia page confirms that none of Latif Yahia's claims regarding being Uday's body double can really be corroborated, and notable CIA personnel and doctors who treated the Hussein family in Iraq claim no knowledge of Yahia.  So his story is suspect to begin with, and then of course Saddam's sons were both killed by an American task force in 2003, so really, there's no way we'll ever know.  We do know that Uday was the head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee and the Iraq Football Association and was fond of torturing the athletes who didn't measure up to his standards.  Sure, that'll motivate them, if they survive the torture.  Why don't more coaches around the world try this? 

The more I read about what really went down in Uday's life in Iraq, the worse it makes me feel, so I'm going to just stop.  I wish that the filmmakers here had taken the same approach - the guy's dead, it's over, let's all just forget about him, OK?  I'm going to just take the fact that this is tangentially about a war that involved America and I'm watching it on July 4 as an OK coincidence, and I'm going to try to move on and forget about all of this.  Oh, there's also archive footage of a U.S. President and a future Vice-President, so I guess there's that.  It's not much, but it's something I suppose. 

Also starring Ludivine Sagnier (last seen in "Paris, je t'aime"), Raad Rawi (last seen in "Mona Lisa"), Philip Quast (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Mimoun Oaissa, Khalid Laith (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Dar Salim (last seen in "Exodus: Gods and Kings"), Nasser Memarzia (last seen in "The Rhythm Section"), Mem Ferda, Pano Masti, Akin Gazi,  Amrita Acharia (last heard in "Missing Link"), Amber Rose Revah, Selva Rasalingam (last seen in "The Mummy" (2017)), Sarah-Lee Zammit, Frank Tanti, Jamie Harding (last seen in "United 93"), Marcelle Theuma, Tiziana Azzopardi, Pierre Stafrace, Frida Cauchi (last seen in "13 Hours"), Marama Corlett, Oona Chaplin (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Rachel Fabri, Stasys Baltakis, Michael Arddt, with archive footage of George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Dick Cheney (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Saddam Hussein (last seen in "What's My Name; Muhammad Ali"), Norman Schwarzkopf. 

RATING: 2 out of 10 nightclub patrons forced to strip

Reasonable Doubt

Year 15, Day 184 - 7/3/23 - Movie #4,484

BEFORE: These last few films have all been about setting myself up for an appropriate film for July 4 - then I've got the rest of July planned out, with no real benchmarks until October, except for the four films that I want to go see in the theater.  Those are like the signposts that will be letting me know I'm on the right track, if I can see all of those films before they disappear from theaters, and I can see them all while I have some down time, before I go back to work at the second job. Which, quite ironically, is in a movie theater, but it's not the kind that plays the first-run hits, not most of the time, anyway. 

Samuel L. Jackson carries over from "Barely Lethal". 

THE PLOT:  A district attorney has his life turned upside down when he's involved in a hit and run and another man is arrested for his crime and charged with murder. 

AFTER: I've got a little legal thriller tonight, which is fine because "Law & Order" is off for the summer, as usual - but we really don't know when the writer's strike is going to end, do we?  So who knows if we'll have new episodes of network TV shows when September rolls around.  I don't know how far in advance the network production companies buy scripts, like do they stockpile them or is it more of a pay-as-you-go kind of system?  I guess we'll find out in a few weeks. But then there's talk of the actors union going on strike, too - so really, nobody knows what's going to happen, least of all me.  Maybe the premium cable channels will dig up every old movie that I haven't seen yet, and I'll get a chance to really catch up, like I'm doing now with "Chopped" episodes.  Every day now I watch an episode of "Jeopardy!" and an episode of "Chopped", who knows, maybe by September I'll be all caught up and I can finally watch "Lost". I've been trying to do that for YEARS.

Anyway, "Reasonable Doubt" is a legal drama set in the very small town of Chicago - I say it's a small town because here everybody seems to know each other, and coincidences abound.  The D.A. who accidentally runs a man over while driving home drunk gets called on to represent the man who gets charged with his murder, creating a legal conundrum.  Yes, of course the attorney should have owned up to his mistake right away, but he didn't, because a DUI would have jeopardized his career.  Right off the bat, the D.A. has broken the law and won't admit it - yeah, that sounds like Chicago all right.  Weren't the last governor of Illinois and ALL the Chicago mayors ever in some kind of legal trouble?  Jeez, maybe the D.A. SHOULD have admitted he was driving drunk, that sounds like the fasttrack to a successful political career in Chicagoland.

Anyway, Mitch Brockden, the district attorney is SUPPOSED to now prosecute Clinton Davis for the man's murder - when Davis claims he was just being a Good Samaritan and giving the injured man a ride to the hospital when the ambulance didn't show up.  Brockden KNOWS that Davis is innocent of murder, because he HIMSELF is the guy that hit the man with his car.  But he can't say that in court, not without implicating himself, and anyway, his job is to prosecute him based on the evidence presented, not clear him based on outside information he learned outside the court.  Right?  Again, the decent thing to do would be for Brockden to admit his crime AND his mistake in not reporting it, but this film's not about doing the decent thing.  

Oh, also Brockden has a reputation - he never loses a case.  But he knows the accused is innocent, so the right thing to do would be to half-ass it and lose the case.  But then he'd surrender his "never lost a case" status - oh, it's quite a pickle. What to do?  Some tech guys go to work on the 911 call that Brockden made, and they think they've found a match, based on the available technology of the time (2014) and this points them to - wait for it - Brockden's dirtbag ex-con step-brother, who's like a 90% voice match.  Gotta call a big NITPICK POINT here, because it's stated that Mitch and his step-brother, Jimmy Logan, are not related by blood, their parents just had a common-law marriage.  So why would their voices sound the same?  Simple answer - they wouldn't.

But, that's enough to get the accused declared not guilty - hence the title of the film.  OK, that's that, problem solved, we can all get on with our lives.  Wait, wait, there's more, because the police forensics team thinks that maybe the man was hurt before he was struck by a car, his wounds were consistent with vehicular manslaughter, but also possibly consistent with something else.  So maybe the "innocent" man isn't so innocent, maybe he was targeting certain people and hurting them, but if so, why?  And if he injured the man before he was struck by the D.A.'s car, he's already been found innocent of that crime, and he can't be tried again because of the double jeopardy laws, under which the point values on the board are twice as much.  No, wait, that can't be right....

Anyway, the whole thing might be more complex than it initially appeared, but no more spoilers here.  The D.A. has to decide how far he wants to go into this case, even after he kind of got like a free pass for driving drunk and a hit-and-run.  You know, maybe he should have just taken the win and left well enough alone - but you just know he's not going to do that, right?  I don't know, this one was good and twisty and scratched my legal drama itch, but I have a feeling that six months from now, I'm not even going to remember this movie.  Kind of like "The Whole Truth" from late 2021, or "Broken City" or "A Most Wanted Man" or "The Operative".  Look, I can only remember so many movies at once, and the new ones keep pushing the old ones out the back.  Sorry. 

Also starring Dominic Cooper (last seen in "An Education"), Gloria Reuben (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Ryan Robbins (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Erin Karpluk, Dylan Taylor (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Karl Thordarson, Dean Harder, Carson Nattrass, John B. Lowe (last seen in "Flag Day"), Philippe Brenninkmeyer (last seen in "The Slammin' Salmon"), Jessica Burleson, Kelly Wolfman, Darren Wall, Lane Styles, Lance Cartwright, Thanya Romero, Chris Witkowski II, Verity Marks. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 business cards

Barely Lethal

Year 15, Day 183 - 7/2/23 - Movie #4,483

BEFORE: Jaime King carries over from "Bulletproof Monk".  She's just in the first few seconds of this film, but that's OK, that counts.  I know that Samuel L. Jackson plays the head of a spy agency in this one - geez, did he get typecast or what?  I've got some time this weekend so I think I'm going to start watching "Secret Invasion", in which he plays the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., the spy agency in the Marvel Universe.  It's the same damn character, right? 

THE PLOT: A teenage special ops agent coveting a "normal" adolescence fakes her own death and enrolls in a suburban high school.  She quickly learns that surviving the treacherous waters of school is more challenging than international espionage. 

AFTER: Yeah, it's another female assassin-based movie - now I'm starting to think that this is some Hollywood executive's sick fetish or something.  "Domino", "Kate", "The Rhythm Section, "Hanna", "Ava" and "The 355".  I think at least one place that women have achieved gender equality is in spy or assassin movies - I'm not sure if they've achieved this in the real-life spy game.  Also, do female assassins get paid less than male ones?  Something we should look into, maybe.   

Who trains little girls to drive cars and deactivate explosives, though?  Just asking - oh I guess that's what Samuel L. Jackson's character, Hardman, is all about.  He's a "hard man", get it?  I'm hoping that symbolically refers to his demeanor and training regimens, not something else.  As I said, I think this film counts as some kind of porn for a certain kind of person, who digs watching women fight each other and shoot guns and drive during car chases.  Hey, whatever floats your boat, I suppose. Maybe you can trace all of this back to "Charlie's Angels" in the 1970's. 

But even though the Prescott Academy took in these orphaned (?) girls very young, a few of them can't help but wonder what a "normal" life would be like.  Sure, all they know is living at the academy and training with weapons and martial arts, but Agent 83 has managed to get hold of some teen magazines, and on her last assignment she tracked down some DVDs of famous teen movies set in high school, so that's the life that she wants to experience, at least for a while.  So after battling an arms dealer (who turns out to be a former graduate of Prescott herself), 83 jumps from her helicopter pick-up and just doesn't report in, leading Hardman to consider her a casualty in the field.  (There's no later report of a mysterious body found, so sooner or later he's going to figure out she's gone AWOL.)

Agent 83 poses an exchange student from Canada, and tries to figure out the dynamic of a high school, which is no easy feat if you've never been to a public school before.  Sometimes she's a little TOO cautious, because she naturally assumes that the cheerleaders are going to prank her when they invite her to sit with them at lunch.  Maybe they were just trying to be nice - but I'm with 83, you can't trust cheerleaders.  "Megan" also falls for a trick from two girls who also like Cash, the most popular boy in school, and they tell her she can get his attention by trying out to be the school mascot.  She's got the moves, thanks to her martial arts training - but it's weird that the pep squad coach picks her because she's the only one who wants the job, and doesn't even pay attention when she makes her choice. (It's a weird joke that goes nowhere...)

Once the rival high school's pep squad tries to "kidnap" Newton High's mascot, Megan's training kicks in and she fights them off with her rubber mascot axe and a handy trombone borrowed from the band.  A video of her defending herself gets posted and goes viral, which is a good thing because she's suddenly popular at school, but a bad thing because Hardman sees the video and then real secret agents move in to abduct her for real, and Hardman assumes she's now a double agent, and demands to know who else she's working for.  He can't even fathom that someone would long for a normal life instead of the assassin path that they've been placed on...

Then there are the harder social skills Megan has to learn, like party etiquette, and getting a date for homecoming.  NITPICK POINT: Megan is supposedly aware of all the standard high-school movie clichés, because she's watched "Mean Girls" and "Ten Things I Hate About You" and other films.  So why isn't she aware at first about the classic love triangle, where the girl falls for the hot dumb guy who's in a band and nearly ignores the smart, sensitive guy that she's placed in the friend zone?

Well, at least she ends up with the right guy - and she forms a friendship with the high-school girl in the family she's staying with.  NITPICK POINT #2: I participated in an exchange program in high-school, I went to Germany during break and I think it lasted two weeks.  Do other exchange programs last longer?  I'm not sure, but the one here seems very open-ended, just because Megan wants to experience all of senior year.  Wouldn't somebody say, "Don't you need to go back to Canada at some point?"  I mean, homecoming takes place in late October, right?  That's two months since the start of the school year.

This film must have really underperformed at the box office, because it left itself open for a sequel, and then one never came. Eight years later, still no word.  Yep, IMDB confirms, the budget for the film was $15 million and it made back less than $1 million.  Ouch. I didn't think it was THAT bad. 

Also starring Hailee Steinfeld (last seen in "Term Life"), Sophie Turner (last seen in "Time Freak"), Jessica Alba (last seen in "Good Luck Chuck"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Dove Cameron (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Thomas Mann (last seen in "The Land of Steady Habits"), Rob Huebel (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Toby Sebastian, Gabriel Basso (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Rachael Harris (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Jason Drucker, Alexandra Krosney, Emma Holzer (last seen in "Spring Breakers"), Dan Fogler (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Finesse Mitchell (last seen in "The Comebacks"), Christopher Nathan Miller (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Steve-O (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Bruno Gunn (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire"), Autumn Dial, Tarek Bishara (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Lo Bishop, Annie Park, Kathrine Herzer, Kate Kneeland (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp"), Cameron Fuller (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Nina Dobrev (last seen in "Crash Pad"), Daniel Spink (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Madeleine Stack, Eva G. Cooper

RATING: 6 out of 10 tequila shots while sitting in a bathtub