Delayed Reaction: Bad Education

Premise: A revered school superintendent gets taking down by an embezzlement scandal.

I'll start with the good. Overall, this is a quality movie. It's a tier above the normal HBO movie. Probably the best one since Behind the Candelabra, which, I believe was the last HBO movie since Bad Education to receive a major film festival premiere with plans to actually release in theaters. The cast is superb. Hugh Jackman is at his best in sly huckster roles: guys who seem perfect on the surface but are keeping a secret. I'm in the small minority of people who thought he was wonderful in The Candidate. Bad Education is a similar character but with even more charisma. Allison Janney should always be the first choice when casting a grizzled administrator type. Top to bottom, the cast is great. Ray Romano is a master of underplaying and dry delivery. These days, his every punchline has a great hesitation, like he didn't really want to say it, but the director coaxed it out of him. Geraldine Viswanathan is toward the top of my "under 25 comedy people" list. I even loved Jimmy Tatro practically reprising his American Vandal role.

The movie is pretty wonderfully paced. It reveals the scandal slowly and methodically. At each turn, the revelations feel surprising yet inevitable. Like, I didn't know whether I was surprised because it was unexpected or because I couldn't figure out how it was able to get this far in the first place. Compared to some of the original movies Netflix has been churning out during this Covid-19 self-isolation, Bad Education is as good as you'll find.

However, I feel like I'm missing something. Leading up to this movie, the reviews I was reading for this were uniformly positive. I kept reading things like "Bad Education isn't just a great HBO movie. It's a great movie" or "Career best performance by Hugh Jackman". I wouldn't go that far. It's good, not great. The movie has a watered-down Election feel to it. The humor isn't quite as dry or dark as I expected. Ideally, there are two levels to a movie based on a true story. There's how interesting the real events are and there's the commentary the movie has on the events. Bad Education captures the absurdity of the scandal and how it was uncovered, but I'm not sure it has much interesting to say about the events.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Extraction

Premise: Man on Fire, but, India...India on Fire? Man in India?

Could you imagine what kind of movie star Chris Hemsworth would've been in 1990? He's built like Schwarzenegger, with the same love of comedy, but without the thick accent to overcome. He's got the Tom Cruise handsomeness and screen presence but in a bigger package. He is as charismatic as they come. Imagine if he was Crocodile Dundee. They'd still be making those movies.

Sure, he's a movie star today too. "God Damn Movie Stars" don't really exist anymore though. The only people who can open movies on their name alone are leftovers from an earlier era. It might only be Denzel on a tier by himself at this point. Take Chris Hemsworth's career without the Marvel movies. A cameo as Kirk's dad in Star Trek. An ensemble role in a cult horror movie (The Cabin in the Woods). In the Huntsman movies, he was overshadowed by costars like Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart. Neither movie was all that successful anyway. His attempts with awards-bait directors (Rush, Blackhat, In the Heart of the Sea) were pretty much ignored by everyone, even though he is pretty good in them. Most of the rest of the time, he's doing bit comedy parts. It's odd. The words "why does Chris Hemsworth have to be in this?" have never been uttered by anyone. On paper, he's about as sure a thing to be a "God Damn Movie Star" as you're ever going to find, but he's in the wrong era for that.

So, Extraction is worth a try. If he can't go back to 1995, he can just pretend that it's 1995. Because, you've seen this movie before. It's a "Dumb Action Movie". And that's a genre classification, not a dismissal of it. Hemsworth is a highly skilled maverick gun-for-hire with a strict moral code and a military background. His character is never in doubt. There's a kid around to humanize him. Hemsworth pretty much takes down an army of men through the course of the movie. I couldn't tell you a single detail from the movie even though I watched it just a couple days ago. The movie is a little more restrained than a Michael Bay movie and doesn't try to be as high-minded as even Triple Frontier. It's happy to sort of just exist. And Hemsworth shines in that model. I saw someone describe this as him making a Jason Statham movie. Yeah, that sounds about right, but with less winking at the camera.

I like the Indian setting. The international box office is so concerned with appeasing China that India is overlooked as a filming destination. They have a vibrant movie industry though and no shortage of interesting locations. It gave this movie a different flavor without doing anything special in the script.

While I appreciate how the very end toys with the audience, I don't see the point of it. Is that a play for a sequel? No offense, but, while Hemsworth works well in this role, he hasn't really crafted a unique character. There are dozens of screenplays that have already been written that could be repurposed as a sequel to this because it's that generic. Even the title, Extraction, is almost intentionally generic. This could be the biggest movie on Netflix for a month, and if they come out with an Extraction 2, people will ask "Which one was Extraction? Is it the Ben Affleck one or the Ryan Reynolds one?"

*The answer: Neither. You are thinking of Triple Frontier and 6 Underground.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: I Am Mother

Premise: A girl is raised by a robot in isolation for her entire life. Then, one day, another human shows up...

I love talking about the "Sundance movie" archetype. You know, a coming-of-age story about someone with a messed-up family life. Largely set in LA or New York. Starring prominent TV comedy actors or supporting movie actors looking for meatier, more dramatic roles. More generally, they have a short story feeling, like the movie doesn't have enough going on to be a novel.

I think it's about time to create another type. I'm calling it the Sundance SciFi movie. It has its own similar set of definitions. It's a not too distant future. There's a human who is isolated for some reason until another person or thing interrupts his/her situation. It involves limited locations and most of the tension revolves around who to trust. These are movies like Moon, Z for Zacharia, or I am Mother. Ex Machina is actually a South by Southwest premiere, but it's certainly a cousin of Sundance SciFi. I liked all these movies, but there is a familiarity to them. Watching I Am Mother, I kept feeling like I'd seen the movie before. I didn't predict how it was going to end (I'm quite bad at that guessing game). Instead, I was distinctly aware of all the ways the story could play out. It's like reading a choose-you-own-adventure book after you've already read through each page linearly.

So, no. Nothing about I Am Mother surprised me. That's fine. I still got to listen to the soothing sounds of Rose Byrne throughout. Clara Rugaard does a good job showing her curiosity winning out against her trust in Mother. Hilary Swank successfully stops short of ever letting the audience trust her. The occasional visual effects and simple but futuristic production design were well done. However, it would've been nice for them to find some weird turn like figuring out the closed loop in Predestination, Ava trapping Caleb in Ex Machina, or whatever the hell happens in Primer. I suppose the implication that Mother planned Hilary Swank's arrival is the closest thing to that. Even that was more of an "ok" than an "a-ha" though.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend