Delayed Reaction: The Young Victoria

Premise: It’s Queen Victoria…when she was young.

 

I’m having trouble mentally categorizing this film. Watching it feels like discovering a buried movie. I immediately want to treat it like a Wild Target, Lullaby for Pi, Creation, or The Guard, which I assure you are all movies from the same era with lots of people you’ve heard of, including people in The Young Victoria. These are “time filler” or “favor” movies people do because they’d rather keep working than dawdle or because a friend asked them to do it. It’s really not one of those though. It’s an Oscar nominee winner (for Costume Design). It was produced by Martin Scorsese among others. It was written by Julian Fellows (right before Downton Abbey) and directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (before Dallas Buyers Club). And obviously the cast is strong. It’s rather hard to make a period piece with a decent budget that can’t convince some good Brits to take part.

 

So, The Young Victoria is an accomplished movie that feels like a forgotten relic. That’s definitely my take on it. I have nothing against the movie. It’s just, kind of dull. I know that’s a lazy critique. It’s also an indicative one. “Dull” is what you call a movie when it doesn’t engage you. A movie isn’t actively dull. Dull is the result. Emily Blunt and some lovely costumes weren’t enough to overcome how disengaged I was throughout the movie. Even though I know who all the actors are, I still couldn’t keep track of who most of them were in relation to Victoria. I wasn’t invested in Victoria’s relationship with Rupert Friend’s Prince Albert. In fact, I definitely ducked away long enough to see if that Prince Albert had anything to do with another famous Prince Albert (Note: He does not, and I was not prepared for Wikipedia to have so much NSFW content).

 

I sound more negative on the movie than I really am. That’s the problem with neutral movies. I struggle to find much to say about them, so it turns into a rant about why I think they made no impression. This is certainly way to fill 1h45m.

 

Side Rant: That does remind me. Emily Blunt feels too old to be cast in this role, right? She was 25 or 26 at the time and being asked to play a teenager for some or most of the movie. There are many actors who play teens into their late 20s. A rare few can even pull it off into their 30s. Blunt just isn’t one of them. She has always been an adult. She has a perpetual 30-year-old look. Like, she could play the same roles now that she could in 2006, but they do read as older than young Victoria. This wasn’t that distracting in the movie. There were just a couple times when they mentioned her age that gave me pause.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Battle Royale

Premise: A group of children are put on an island to kill each other until there is only one left.

 

Can a dystopic competition ever just work? There are a lot of movies with a premise where a character gets put into a game (often deadly) that has been going on for a while and they are the one to finally break it. The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Escape Room. They’re all about the people who end the game. Why can’t it ever be about the thing working as intended? Don’t tell me it wouldn’t be compelling. These competitions are always designed as something that an entire population finds compelling year after year. The Hunger Games ratings are huge. Anything where there is only one winner is naturally captivating. I don’t watch a baseball movie to see Kevin Costner introduce a bat that never misses. I watch it to see him hit a home run to win the game. It’s gotten to the point where the only surprise move left in these movies is to see it all go according to plan.

 

Take Battle Royale for example. Being a 2001 movie, it did technically predate a lot of the movies I’m calling out, but it wasn’t the beginner of this trend. I watched Battle Royale, and I was already doing the math of which characters we unkillable. It never occurred to me that I’d be watching a movie where 3 characters I liked would have to fight to the death to survive. I assumed they would survive, which negates all the tension on the movie. There are plenty of other movies out there with only one survivor. There’s literally a movie called Lone Survivor. Or Free Fire ends with only one survivor, and that is a case where everyone is killing everyone else. You can do it. Presumably, the Battle Royale competition is well put together. People have tried to break the game before. Every competition has a clever person that figures something out but they still all end with the one survivor. If I don’t have any evidence that these characters are outlier special or lucky, then why should I expect them to do what no one else has done before?

 

Other than my demented “the bad guys should’ve won” take, I liked a lot about Battle Royale. With so many characters to follow and kill, there’s a lot of variation throughout the movie. It’s almost like watching a couple dozen related short films. For some reason I expected the violence to be much worse. I’d been holding off on seeing this for a while because if the violence gets too real, I’m not a fan. Yes, Battle Royale is violent and the violence is against children, but the killings weren’t Saw or Saving Private Ryan-level vivid and unsettling. So it was a much easier watch than I expected. It sands off fewer edged than The Hunger Games, which I appreciated, but it still does some sanding.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Spiderhead

Premise: Convicts agree to be in drug tests in a remote facility for a reduced sentence.

 

The problem with some movies is that I’ve seen other movies before. I’m sure after “Train Comes Toward the Screen” terrified people back in the 1890s, by the time they made “Train Comes Toward the Screen 2”, audiences knew the trick and were less amazed by it. And by the time “Train Comes Toward the Screen 3” came out, people saw the train in the distance, scoffed, and said “This is going to be another one of those ‘train comes at the screen movies, isn’t it?’”. Yet, some people continued to see all the “Train Comes Toward the Screen” movies because that’s a story that appeals to them. They no longer watch for the surprise of a train coming at the screen. Rather, they start appreciating the smaller elements like the type of engine or how many carts the train is carrying. At some point, whether you like it or not, you can see enough movies of a certain ilk that any new ones either have to step up the game or risk feeling overly familiar to all but the most diehard fans of the genre.

 

That’s the problem with Spiderhead. I’ve seen this movie before. Even if it wasn’t called Spiderhead and had a different variation of the plot, I’ve seen Spiderhead before. Ex Machina. Oblivion. The Island. Passengers. They’re all functionally the same thing. I’m awful at predicting twists, per se. For me, watching movies is a lot more like a master chess player who sees all the potential moves on the table. 15 minutes into Spiderhead, I’m aware of the 10 different variations of the plot they could choose. I don’t know which one they’ll choose, but none will feel surprising*. For better or worse, I tend to watch these movies with hope that there’s a play I’m not seeing. I love being genuinely tricked and I’m an easy mark. The only way I’m figuring a movie out is if I’ve seen the same story before. I’m not solving it on my own.

 

*Another way to think about it is how once you get old enough, you realize there’s no way you can ever lose Tic Tac Toe again. You’ve mastered the formula. You move up to Connect Four, but eventually that formula become clear too. On rare occasions though, someone will find a strategy that can actually work, and it’s thrilling and humbling. You feel a little embarrassed that you fell for the trick but also thrilled to actually be surprised by a move in this game you were sure you had mastered.  

 

For me at least, there are no surprises in Spiderhead. It’s about exactly what you think. The characters you shouldn’t trust are the exact ones you think. It plays outs exactly as you expect. Actually, I take that back. The most surprising thing about the movie is how straightforward the twists are. I was ready for Spiderhead to go a beat or two further than it did. Like, “Surely, they know we’ll expect this twist, so who is the character they want us to trust to then also be in on it?” I’m sorry to report though that the non-twist is not a twist. No one is tricking another player in basketball by shooting “granny style”. Spiderhead stops short of even the average appetite for twists.

 

More than anything, I finished Spiderhead unfulfilled. Chris Hemsworth is having a lot of fun, which is nice. He doesn’t read as threatening or conniving though. Miles Teller is a weirdly blank slate. I spent most of the movie thinking Jurnee Smollett would finally get to do something interesting after third act twists, but those never came. There needs to be a red herring-like term for someone like her: a character so boring that you assume they are saving them for a reveal later that never comes. The movie feels very “2020 COVID production” in the scale and isolation of it. I wanted it to be so much more interesting than it had any interest in being. Or, maybe they intended for this to appeal more to someone who has seen 1000 movies in their life rather than 4000. Occasionally, enjoying too many movies is a problem.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Wicker Park

Premise: A man ignores the rest of his life when he thinks he’s spotted his long-lost love.

 

I have trouble with the idea of “guilty pleasure” movies. People just need the courage to admit they like something unabashedly. The reason to like a movie doesn’t have to be logical. It could be tied to a good memory, a formative experience, a narrative conceit that appeals to you, or any number of things. Still, it can be hard to watch a movie that I know has a lot of problems but I’m enjoying it anyway. That in a nutshell is Wicker Park.

 

My enjoyment of Wicker Park is tied to a narrative conceit I have a weakness for. I like stories that play with perspective. How a story can change depending on who is seeing it. And I appreciate a story that needed a flow chart to write the screenplay. There’s the absolutely awful movie Dorm Daze that I respect the hell out of for going so fucking hard at overlapping stories and escalating misunderstandings. It’s a movie that has no business trying as hard as it does*.

 

*There is a fine line between contrivance and flow-chart storytelling. Modern Family is a good example of this. I fell off that show eventually because I started noticing the puppet strings too much. They got lazy and I could see them setting up for the punchlines in virtually every episode. A couple times a season though, they’d get ambitious with something like the Las Vegas episode where so much was going on that I had to be impressed. It’s the difference between juggling 2 balls and 10. When it’s two, I can see how the juggler does it. There’s time to pay attention to the few movements the juggler is making. Even though it’s fundamentally the same skill, when it’s 10 balls, even if the juggler looks physically strained doing it, I’m so distracted by all the balls in the air to notice.

 

I had no idea what Wicker Park was going in. I watched it because I watch Rose Byrne movies. It’s what I do. The poster made me think it was some kind of thrilling romance movie. Like, maybe a story where Josh Harnett and Diane Kruger’s attraction is forbidden in some way. Honestly, I never even registered Rose Byrne in the poster to the side. Early on, I could tell something was off. The movie was really frantic, which I initially assumed was a sign that they had to try and save it in the editing room. They were cutting around people a lot. Like, I noticed early on when Hartnett pushed Byrne to the side in the store. I thought it was weird to cut Byrne like that in a shot. Eventually I realized the game of the movie. There were timelines they were playing with. Different characters had different parts of the story. That’s when the movie started hitting all my pleasure centers. “Yes, add one more complication, please!” And it’s all centered around a romance? Excellent. This is like a more convoluted Serendipity. That’s like giving me my popcorn then telling me there’s a buttering station over there. If I’m already eating empty calories, I might as well go for broke. And Wicker Park really goes for broke.

 

I do need to be clear. This movie has many, many problems. The story relies on many coincidences and bad timing. There are many plot holes that you may not notice at the time but will once you examine it for 3 seconds. I guess it’s adapted from a French movie which is loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s possible the original film did this more cleanly. The story inconsistency in this will be too much for a lot of people. Also, I hate to say it, but this is a bad Rose Byrne performance. Much of that is the writing, which does a poor job explaining her motivations and distinguishing between when she’s being real from when she’s being calculating. It doesn’t help that this is a movie that thinks it can put Rose Byrne in a lumpy sweater and pretend that she doesn’t look like Rose Byrne. Really, none of the characters get enough shading. The main reason I’m rooting for Josh Hartnett and Diane Kruger to end up together is because I’m a sucker for lost romance, not because I care specifically about that relationship. Oh, and this movie is set in a Chicago that feels like it’s inhabited by about 10 people. It’s a very small world, which to be fair, this movie kind of requires.

 

Dammit, I liked this movie though. I love seeing how the story unfolds. In the way that some people love discomfort comedy (which I don’t tend to care for), I love seeing two people miss each other because one of them ducks to tie their shoes when the other looks that direction to check the time. And that’s an attractive 2004 cast. There are many technically superior films I’m less likely to rewatch than Wicker Park.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Barbarosa

Premise: After accidentally killing his brother-in-law, a man on the run gets taken under the wing of a notorious bandit in the Wild West.

 

There is no reason to expect a western starring Gary Busey and Willie Nelson to be good. Not in a non-jokey way at least. Busey is mainly known now for being kind of crazy. Nelson is mainly known at this point for really liking weed. Both would fit best into a Scary Movie or some other parody movie these days. Yet, in 1982, they made a pretty great Western.

 

In Barbarosa, Busey is dialed down to a very human level. He was in his upper 30s at the time, but he feels a lot younger. Watching it, I just assumed he was a freakishly old looking 25-year-old. Busey is one of those people you can’t imagine ever being young. And Willie Nelson gives a movie star performance. This is only his 4^th movie but he’s excellent in it. That’s unexpected. These days, a lot of musicians are indistinguishable from actors. They are fame monsters who are looking for notoriety however they can get it and will follow whatever career gets them there*. That’s not Nelson. He’s a musician-first. There’s no reason to expect him to be any good on screen. Looking at his filmography of mostly TV Movies and cameos afterwards, maybe Barbarosa was lightning in a bottle. He makes this movie worth watching though. It helps that the film has a reasonable length and good direction.

 

*Check the receipts. I love a lot of these celebrities. That doesn’t make it untrue that they are performers-first who don’t care than much about the medium.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: A Simple Plan

Premise: Three men find a fortune and slowly unravel as they try to keep it hidden.

 

I thought I was prepared for how much this movie would feel like a Coen Brothers movie. I still wasn’t ready for how much Fargo 2 this was. That’s not a bad or surprising thing really. This is a Sam Rami film from his brief period of trying to make “normal” movies. So of course when he does that, it makes sense that he would look to his longtime friends, the Coens. Like, they were friends before any of them were famous. They were part of one of those cool friend groups Hollywood has sometimes. I think it’s also true that if anyone spends enough time around the Coens, the temptation to try the “Coen thing” is strong. Just ask George Clooney. They make their brand of hapless nihilism look so easy.

 

I don’t want to make this sound like a lazy rip off though. I see the Coen-comparisons in this, but it’s absolutely a Sam Rami movie too. His crazy camera shows up. His penchant for almost comic violence is there. The characters can be broad but none of them are that funny.

A Simple Plan is a frustrating morality tale. Intentionally frustrating, mind you. Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brent Briscoe find $4 million and continue to make one bad decision after another until it all falls apart with a really pathetic end. It’s quite enjoyable. It’s got a deep bench of familiar faces. Billy Bob Thornton in particular walks a very delicate line of playing an idiot brother without moving into Sling Blade territory. Maybe there’s a beat or two of the story that feels more forced than necessary, but nothing too crazy. This is the kind of movie that starts with the idea “how do so many lottery winners go bankrupt?” and works backwards effectively. Not my favorite Sam Rami movie, but certainly an entertaining detour in his filmography.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Hustle

Premise: An NBA scout discovers a Spanish talent and tries to get him drafted.

 

If I break things down very broadly, I have two major interests: tv/movies and basketball. I’ll try some others out like music or soccer, but when it comes to time spent and depth of knowledge, those are the big 2. When you start to break those down into sub interests, things like the NBA draft, Adam Sandler comebacks, and inspirational sport movies bubble to the top. In other words, Hustle is ridiculously on brand for me. It overlaps my interests so much that it almost felt wrong. I shouldn’t get the thrill seeing Jay Wright in the middle of a movie. It’s like when the serious drama movie In the Bedroom talks about Disney World Fastpasses. I’m not ready for those two worlds to collide.

 

So, Hustle was an absolute blast. Everything about it worked for me. All the basketball throughout the movie made me wonder if this is how someone who speaks two languages feels when both are used on a movie. There’s just so much in this movie that I know non-basketball fans missed, but it works regardless. A lot of that is Adam Sandler. I think we’ve finally found Adam Sandler’s next populist form. He spent way too long holding onto the man-child thing. He’ll occasionally pop up in a prestige movie with some side we’ve never seen before. I think he’s ready to just be a mentor. That’s been a skill of his for a while. Most of Big Daddy over two decades ago was the same basic character type as Hustle. Hell, that’s even a lot of Billy Madison. Basically, it’s the simple shift from the character who should know better to the character who does know better, and a lot of the anger and surliness can stay. I think it helps a lot that Sandler really loves basketball and wanted to take this seriously. I’m not holding out hope that this is a permanent transition for him, but it’s at least an option now, moving forward.

 

I’m also so impressed by Juancho Hernangomez in this. Apparently a lot of non-basketball fans are surprised to realize he’s actually an NBA player, and I get it. He’s really polished in this movie. I’ll credit a lot of that too to Sandler, since many scenes are basically Hernangomez trying not to laugh at a comment Sandler made. And of course Hernangomez pulls off the physical stuff. The basketball fan in me thinks it’s really cool to be reminded how good even an average NBA player is. Hernangomez looks great doing all the drills and plays in this movie, yet I know that he’s never sniffing an All-Star team in real life.

 

It’s impossible for me to say how much I enjoyed this movie because it’s fun to see Moe Wagner play an NBA Draft flop as opposed to because it’s just a good sports movie. I get the sense that it’s an effective crowd pleaser all around only made even better if you know the game within the game.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers

Premise: Chip ‘n Dale live in the modern day as washed-up actors who get pulled into a real adventure.

 

Sometimes I worry that a part of my brain is broken where I don’t have affection for things I watched before a certain age. I absolutely have nostalgia blinders but they don’t seem to kick in for a number of years. I was born in 1987 and I have a pretty limited set of shows or movies I’m nostalgic for in my early years. I’ll defend the early Nicktoons (Doug, Rugrats), Power Rangers, Saved by the Bell, and 90s themed stuff in general. A lot of really young kid stuff I don’t carry with me. I don’t care about Wishbone, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, or Mr. Rodgers’ Neighborhood. I struggle to find a Space Jam, Hook, Goonies, or Goofy Movie that I’ll ride or die for. The same goes for these Disney Animated Series that make comebacks. I have no desire to see the new Duck Tales, no matter how many voice actors they get who I like. Similarly, just hearing that there’s a new Chip ‘n Dale movie does nothing for me.

 

However, if you tell me that the new Chip ‘n Dale movie is a way for the Lonely Island guys to make their own Who Framed Roger Rabbit, then I’m in. The best way I can describe the appeal is: if getting Paula Abdul in for a cameo to dance in the background with MC Skat Kat for a couple or seconds is something you’d enjoy, then this is the movie for you. Or if repeated jokes about the Sonic redesign work for you, you’ll like this movie.

 

I don’t have a lot to say other than this is the good version of this movie. All the people involved clearly have an affection for the Chip ‘n Dale animated series. Even better, it’s a group of people who know exactly how to play within studio lines. This movie makes fun of virtually all studio animation and takes pointed shots at Disney characters. It all stays dulled just enough for Disney to allow it though. I don’t know if this makes sense, but if they had pushed for 5% more they would’ve gotten away with 10% less.

 

Look, the movie isn’t perfect. Like most comedies, the joke-to-plot ratio could be better in the third act. Kiki Layne as the main human character never seems like she’s talking to anything but a golf ball hanging from a stick (or whatever they used to get the eye lines right). The story is pretty familiar too. There’s just way more stuff I liked about it though. John Mullaney and Andy Samberg are perfect choices for Chip ‘n Dale. The voice cast is deep with funny people. The jokes are sharp. The execution and world building are really solid. This is such a treat to drop on Disney+.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Run Lola Run

Premise: Lola runs and runs again and again.

 

This movie…is cool. It’s hard to come up with another way to say it. It’s a cool movie. In the US we had Fight Club. In England we had Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. In Germany, we had Run Lola Run. This movie is a thunder jolt of life on screen. Lola (Franka Potente) has 20 minutes to get a shit ton of money and get it to her boyfriend across town, so she runs. She gets three tries for some reason. I don’t know why. The movie doesn’t really know why. No one cares. We’re all fine with it. And the movie clocks in at 80 minutes. Beautiful!

 

I love how frantic yet playful the movie is. We get to see quick cuts of the way people’s lives change based on minor interactions each time. There are strange running gags like Lola screaming loud enough to break glass. I haven’t seen most of director Tom Tykwer’s movies, just his collaboration with the Wachowskis on Cloud Atlas and now this. I get why he worked with the Wachowski’s though. This movie has a lot of the same weird energy.

 

I like when a director makes a movie with the understanding that this is mostly a film exercise. Run Lola Run is thin in a lot of places, and that’s intentional. It’s Tykwer challenging himself to make a lean movie that’s nothing but “Go!”. And it succeeds at that. I doubt this will turn into one of my favorite movies of all time, but I can’t think of a reason why anyone shouldn’t watch this.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Fire Island

Premise: Five friends go on their yearly vacation for a week to Fire Island.

 

I have disappointingly little to say about this movie. It’s a good movie. I liked it. It’s a traditional RomCom about the gay community which is historically underserved by the genre. It hit all the right RomCom beats. I could certainly get into a larger discussion about the history of how hard it’s been to get LGBTQ+ movies made on a studio level with non-straight stars, but, well, there are people who could speak to that a lot better. And I’d rather focus on how nice it was to watch a movie that’s not about the potential traumas of being gay. It’s not a coming out story. It’s not an AIDS story. It’s a pretty joyful movie about friend and finding love. I like that.

 

This movie is really funny, often in clever ways. While I like the bigger jokes like the recurring bit where the same houseguest keeps forgetting who Joel Kim Booster is when he visits, the jokes that worked the best for me were often stray lines or super specific bits. The Marissa Tomei joke destroyed me.

 

I like the cast of actors who I recognized more than I knew. Of course Bowen Yang is excellent and I know him from SNL. Other than Margaret Cho in a supporting role, I really didn’t know anyone else. I was familiar with Joel Kim Booster as a Twitter presence but I don’t recall the roles I’ve seen him in before. Most of the cast has at least one thing I’ve seen them in before, but it’s often something like seeing Matt Rogers in a Search Party episode playing the role “Gay Man”. So, I’m happy to see them all get more substantial roles. They’re all quite funny.

 

My only issue with the movie was that Booster’s narration was a little intrusive at times. I do appreciate it at times for shorthand like giving some character backstories or giving some context for an activity at Fire Island. It’s hard to find the balance between being helpful and hand-holding. It’s a little redundant in places though.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: American Gigolo

Premise: A gigolo gets framed for a murder.

 

The reputation of this movie precedes it and kind of ruins it. My impression of this movie was that it was a sexy story of a gigolo who either finds a new relationship that makes him question his work or looks for meaning in his carnal existence. I imagined something moralistic, because that’s how I’ve been trained. I really didn’t expect this to be a crime thriller that just happens to center around a gigolo. In that respect, I was pretty underwhelmed. None of the most interesting parts had to do with Gere trying to prove his innocence. The more the movie leaned into that, the less engaged I was.

 

The good parts are Gere’s laconic performance and the overall vibe of the movie. Paul Schrader is good at this seedy underworld stuff. Centering it on a high-class gigolo creates a nice contrast. He’s very illegal but in a very respectable way. It’s a much more nuanced look at the profession than you get even now.

 

Look, I know I need to give some consideration for the era, but it was distracting how much this used the f-slur. For a movie that’s so progressive about sex work in general, it’s strikingly homophobic. That’s especially interesting given the gay subtext of the movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Bird Box

Premise: There’s this disease or something that causes you to kill yourself if you open your eyes.

 

That’s it? That’s the movie that became a phenomenon in December 2018? I expected something more. Not something better necessarily. Just more. Maybe more playing with the blindness. Maybe some camp. I’m not sure. Just something to explain why this movie hit so hard.

 

To be fair, I didn’t come to this movie as open to being won over as I could’ve been. I waited this long to see it after all. At the time it was blowing up, I got annoyed by it and opted out*. Where most Netflix movie I approach with unjudging curiosity, I came to Bird Box expecting it to show me something. That’s not a great way to watch anything.

 

*Also, mid-December I was already busy catching up on other year-end movies.

 

Where I land with Bird Box is that it’s a pretty decent movie although I still don’t get why it blew up. Like, why did TikTok pick up on Bird Box but not See? It’s a mystery. Probably just comes down to timing. Netflix is good at producing a zeitgeist hit around Christmas. Making a Murderer in 2015, Bird Box in 2018, and Birdgerton in 2020 all come to mind.

 

The cast in this is pretty strong. Sandra Bullock is always good. I like when she gets to play a sterner role, like she does around the kids in particular. It’s a surprisingly deep roster of familiar actors with a lot of variety. The actual apocalypse scenes are well done. While the entities or whatever that cause the killing are pretty silly and weakly defined, the end effect is pretty cool. Coming 8 months after A Quiet Place, I will say Bird Box doesn’t catch the visceral terror as much. You can use sound for tension a lot easier than sight. Bird Box doesn’t master the horror of having to do things when you can’t see or the challenge of resisting the urge to sneak a peek. It all seems a little too easy.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: RRR

Premise: A fictionalized account of what radicalized two Indian revolutionaries.

 

Indian cinema is too large a topic for me to even scratch the surface of in a Reaction like this. I’m just starting to get into it. When I saw that RRR was turning into a legitimate hit on Netflix stateside, I was happy to join in to check it out. RRR is a lot of movie. It’s an unrelenting action movie with song, dance, and subterfuge. It’s going to be hard to find another movie this year that activates the part of my brain attracted to bright objects on a screen as much as this. RRR is the best movie I can imagine if you just want to see what a blockbuster from India looks like.

 

It’s a tough movie to assess. It’s profoundly stupid from a plot level. The humor is pretty broad. I don’t even have the words for how over the top the action is. I have some difficulty translating this through an American viewing lens though. The crazy American blockbusters give the appearance of feasibility. Superheroes have superpowers. John Wick has stunt choreography that’s on the screen. Tom Cruise really jumps out of planes. RRR is dressed up like a period piece with regular guys who inexplicable break physics. If Michael Bay attempted the same thing, it wouldn’t be as accepted. “But Alex,” you ask, “What about the Fast and Furious movies?” I’m glad you asked. First of all, while successful in the US, it’s the international box office that has made them hits. They tap into the RRR mentality more. The divide there is in the critical response. I checked Metacritic. This highest rated F&F movie so far is Furious 7, on the back of Paul Walker’s farewell. That topped out at 67. RRR on the other hand is 88 on there. I’m getting the feeling that people are pulling their punches more than normal with RRR out of excitement for an Indian movie finally breaking through. I suspect that if Baahubali: The Beginning had been received as well as RRR, then RRR would be considered more middling than it has been. I don’t know the point I’m trying to make. It’s just something I’m thinking through.

 

The fun of RRR is that it gleefully ignores restraint. It’s the kind of movie that only works because of how hard it commits to the tone. If it was 1% more restrained, it would be 20% worse. The closest American comparison I can come up with is Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story in that it’s technically about real people but it’s a wildly “lionized” account of their lives. As much as I enjoyed the very long movie, I did have to enjoy it on their rules.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend