Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I am eager to get outside for a jog, yet nonetheless will heroically soldier on through this Week in Review. It’s actually been quite a productive week over here, as the return of my party’s rogue (well, first rogue – we’re a rogue-heavy bunch) from vacation instigated a rapid series of DnD sessions. Our party fought honey-cultivating bears, were harassed by a small nation of devils, and ultimately clashed with a leviathan made entirely of repeating, segmented hands, leaving them trapped in a temple at the ocean’s floor. I’ll probably let them out sometime in the next week, but until that report lands, let’s check in on the wild world of cinema. It’s time for the Week in Review!
First up this week was the recent Bollywood feature Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor as Ranvijay Singh, the son of successful business tycoon and factory-owner Balbir Singh. Though Ranvijay possesses an overwhelming love for his father, the two are estranged; Balbir never made time for his son early in life, and Ranvijay has grown from a violent adolescent to an equally destructive adult, making himself an unsuitable heir to his father’s fortune. However, when an assassination attempt leaves Balbir with two bullets in his chest, Ranvijay races to his father’s side, and begins a campaign of retribution that leaves nothing but ashes in its wake.
Animal is a fascinating disaster of a film, centered on a resolutely unlikable protagonist and seemingly uncertain of its own final moral calculus. Ranvijay establishes his nature early with the one-two punch of stealing a would-be bride by boasting about his “Alpha nature” and then spoiling his father’s birthday party, proving himself a belligerent misogynist with little capacity for reason or regret. And then the film just continues on in that mode for several hours, falling somewhere between a Scorsese mob drama and what philistines accuse Scorsese mob dramas of being, alternately celebrating its grotesque lead and revealing what his grotesqueries have made of the generous life he was afforded.
Through dramatic, at times incoherent shifts in tone and time period, we see both Ranvijay the Warrior and Ranvijay the Monster, how he sees himself and how the world sees him, each vision equally endorsed by director Sandeep Reddy Venga’s seemingly impartial eye. The film’s act two climax involves Ranvijay riding a minigun-mounted lawn mower and dismantling fifty men with axes; the subsequent scenes detail his slow, angry recovery from that sequence’s accumulated injuries, as he takes out the anger prompted by his diminished virility on his wife, and complains bitterly about the size of the urine bag attached to his injured bladder.
Ranjivay’s love for his father is sincere, but his love expresses itself through a toxic fanaticism that poisons everything in his life, a Scarface-esque paranoia and demand for control. And yet, even through the end, the camera never abandons him – while everyone important in his life eventually shudders at his approach, he continues to be shot like a conquering warlord, luscious slow-motion pans capturing every lurch and swing as he resolves some new self-inflicted conflict. A film too in love with its protagonist to begin interrogating his contradictions, but still fascinating in its portrayal of a terrible man on fire.
We then checked out Hatchet, a throwback slasher from ‘06 set in the swamps of New Orleans. A group of tourists sign up for a dubious late-night bayou tour in restricted swampland, and soon find themselves under attack by both hungry alligators and a mutated swamp man. A number of grisly deaths later, and all of them have learned an important lesson about proper vacation vetting and personal safety.
Hatchet is a straightforward exercise in old-fashioned brutality, an exemplar of mid-80s excess that likely felt quite refreshing during the horror doldrums of the mid-00s. Unlike many of the films it is evoking, it’s actually stacked with actors who can more or less sell their lines (a loose collection of largely TV stars), and directed with sufficient competency to sell its murky swamp setting without sacrificing visual clarity. Most notably, it also demonstrates a welcome creativity and dearth of good taste in its kill scenes; veteran character actor Richard Riehle is outright split in half, a belt sander is used in a way that surely voids its warranty, and the other victims meet similarly unfortunate ends. If you’re looking for a reasonably produced slasher that isn’t afraid of its own purpose, you could do a lot worse.
Our next screening was Freelance, a recent action-comedy featuring John Cena as a former soldier who can’t find peace in civilian life, and Alison Brie as a gossip reporter hoping to snag her legitimate break. The two meet up when Cena accepts a private contract to guard Brie on her journey to the South American nation of Paldonia, where she is to interview the local dictator Juan Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba). Along the way, all three will learn a great deal about each other, and maybe even something about themselves.
Sorry, I couldn’t help but get a little venomous at the end there. It’s just that Freelance is such a waste of talent! John Cena is a talented physical comedian, Alison Brie does a funny emotional breakdown like nobody’s business, and Juan Pablo Raba has an endless surplus of charisma, yet all three are let down by Freelance’s terrible script. There is no wit, no banter, no energy in the film’s dialogue – all of its strength must be derived from the inherent talents of its key players, who do their absolute best despite having basically nothing to work with.
Raba comes off the best of the three, often lighting up the screen with his irreverent optimism throughout the film’s explosive coup attempts. And there’s also a seed of something quite compelling in the film’s political perspective – Freelance understands that the United States waged a campaign of terror on South America for half a century, and there’s a great satisfaction in watching Cena go through his “wait, are we the baddies” arc regarding our extrajudicial operations. But with such a weak template of a script, it becomes difficult to buy the evolving bonds of the leads, and the film’s preposterous conclusion basically resolves its thoughts on PMCs into “but friendship!” An altogether disappointing waste of extremely likable actors.
Last up for the week was Subservience, a recent thriller starring Megan Fox as “Alice,” an AI-equipped robot who is purchased by construction foreman Nick (Michele Morrone) to help around the house, owing to his wife’s hospitalization due to a heart condition. While initially a help to the family, Alice soon begins to overstep her bounds, seemingly intent on “protecting” Nick even from the demands of his own wife and children. Things escalate further when Nick is implicated in the destruction of a fleet of construction robots, eventually leading to a violent confrontation between the will of flesh and power of steel.
Subservience is a fair enough pot boiler, if somewhat obvious in its structure and intentions. Most of its running time is dedicated to classic “the new nanny seems kinda unnerving” beats, but the film taps into something real and vital with its meditations on automation replacing workers, as well as the alienation of modern life, and ease with which we let time-saving conveniences replace the laborious yet essential practices of family. Morrone’s performance manages to maintain sympathy in spite of some seriously contemptible choices, and Fox is excellent, savvily exploiting her mannequin-esque features to the most uncanny possible effect. Far from an essential film, but a fine enough riff on our automated economic apocalypse.
