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The Huntsman: Winter’s War: Mini-review

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Chris Hemsworth

Chris Hemsworth is a large part of the problem with The Huntsman: Winter’s War

C-Between the spring of 2012, when Snow White and the Huntsman became a modest theatrical hit, and this year’s arrival of its follow-up, The Huntsman: Winter’s War arrives, we have witnessed Frozen, Brave, and three Hobbit movies. All of these latter films were more successful, both critically and financially, than Snow White was, so it’s not surprising that the current film’s screenwriters have tried to shoehorn in as many plot elements as possible from the later movies. It’s also not surprising that the result is somewhat of a bloated mess.

The Huntsman: Winter’s War attempts to be both a prequel and sequel to Snow White. In the film’s first half hour, viewers learn that evil queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) has a younger, nicer sister Freya (Emily Blunt). But a family tragedy makes Freya as cruel as Ravenna and gives the her ability to freeze people and other objects. After Snow White defeats Ravenna, Freya tries to get the power of Ravenna’s magic mirror for herself, and only Eric, the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), formerly one of Ravenna’s warriors, and another former warrior, Sara (Jessica Chastain), stand in her way.

Any movie fan seeing the current Huntsman will realize in a minute that Ravenna and Freya are far more sinister versions of Anna and Elsa in Frozen, red-headed Sara is a live action Merida from Brave, and that Eric’s quest for the mirror, accompanied by a band of dwarves, is a variant on the treasure hunt in the Hobbit films. Unfortunately, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is entirely bereft of any of the wit or magic of those other films. Instead, Huntsman relies on its title character, as played by the rather leaden Hemsworth, and struggles to fit all its disparate plot elements in a two-hour movie. At least, Theron has fun as an over-the-top villain (who is too seldom on screen), and she and Blunt look great in a variety of dazzling costumes. The movie’s visual effects are good, especially in the final action sequence, but the overall pace of the film is too slow and the mood too gloomy. Freya’s ice kingdom is the perfect setting for The Huntsman: Winter’s War; the movie is as frozen as the setting.
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In the Heart of the Sea: Mini-review

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Chris Hemsworth

Chris Hemsworth on dry land, not In the Heart of the Sea

C+At the heart of Ron Howard‘s In the Heart of the Sea is an often breathtaking, well-made film about 19th century whaling, nautical disaster, and survival under harrowing conditions. For some reason, however, Howard has seen fit to overload his cinematic vessel with numerous weak subplots and factual inaccuracies and, to top it off, a leaden performance by woefully miscast leading man Chris Hemsworth. As a result, the movie adds far too much baggage and nearly founders.

Heart of the Sea, based on an acclaimed non-fiction best seller by Nathaniel Philbrick, purports to be the story of the whaling ship Essex, which sank in the Galapagos Islands in 1820 after being rammed by a white sperm whale. A handful of survivors, including Captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and First Mate Owen Chase (Hemsworth), were rescued from the ship’s whaling boats after spending over three months adrift. Chase’s account of the voyage inspired Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick. 

The actual story of the voyage of the Essex and its aftermath (only a portion of which Heart of the Sea recounts) is so fascinating that Howard had no need to embellish it. Indeed, his depiction of life on the whaler is quite powerful, especially the thrilling CGI effects work. Howard captures the excitement, danger, and cruelty of whaling, as the crew risks their lives in flimsy whaleboats trying to harpoon and slaughter the giant animals for the oil that can be obtained from their blubber. Despite having more than a single movie’s worth of great source material, Charles Leavitt‘s screenplay adds as much fiction to the tale as Melville did, but not nearly as well. Heart of the Sea  begins with and periodically returns to the historically inaccurate and completely unnecessary framing device of Herman Melville ( Ben Whishaw) persuading the supposed last survivor of the Essex, cabin boy Thomas Nickerson (played by Tom Holland during the voyage and Brendan Gleeson as an older man), to tell his story. Later, the movie adds, then conveniently drops, a bitter disagreement over seamanship between Chase and Pollard and a cover-up by the ship’s owners of what actually occurred on the voyage. These extraneous subplots merely serve as time-consuming distractions and highlight Chris Hemsworth’s lame attempts at both a New England accent and serious acting. Watch In the Heart of the Sea for its first-rate action sequences; if you want a first-rate dramatic treatment of the same source material, read Moby Dick instead.  
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Vacation: Mini-review

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Ed Helms

Fortunately, Ed Helms is not on vacation here

CAlbert Einstein supposedly defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” By that token, John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein are certifiably insane, because they tell the same tasteless, unfunny jokes in Vacation, which they wrote and directed, over and over, sometimes in the very next line of dialogue, and somehow think these jokes will eventually become funny. 

Vacation is a sequel or reboot of sorts of 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, the saga of Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) and his family, on a vacation from Hell. It’s now the present day, and Clark’s son Rusty (Ed Helms), who has fond memories of the original trip, wants to take his own family on a similar bonding trip. As in the original, Rusty, wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) head to fabled amusement park Walley World in Los Angeles, but this time around, instead of Cousin Eddie, they encounter toxic waste dumps, drunken sorority sisters, motels that not even roaches would inhabit, a demented white water rafting guide (Charlie Day), a possibly demented trucker, interrupted sexual encounters, and a ridiculously well-endowed brother-in-law (Chris Hemsworth).

National Lampoon’s Vacation  was written by John Hughes and directed by Harold Ramis. In their place, we get the guys who wrote Horrible Bosses. The new movie has its fair share of exceedingly crude but often funny jokes, but it has just as many that simply fall flat. To make matters worse, Daley and Goldstein don’t seem to know when enough is enough, repeating those same bad jokes over and over. A prime example occurs about ten minutes into the movie (in the scene shown below), when Rusty’s younger son Kevin (Steele Stebbins) refers to his older brother James (Skyler Gisondo) as a “vagina.” By the time the scene is over, every member of the family has “accidentally” called James the same thing about a dozen times. And, as that scene indicates, the movie is more mean-spirited than the original as well, with Ed Helms’s cluelessness considerably less endearing than Chevy Chase’s was. Travel misadventures and dysfunctional families will always be good for laughs, as Vacation demonstrates on several occasions, but they’re much funnier when someone when related by someone who knows how, and how often, to tell a joke.
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Blackhat: Mini-Review

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Chris Hemsworth

Chris Hemsworth is the world’s buffest and least credible hacker.

CDirector Michael Mann faced two big challenges in his latest film, Blackhat. First, he had to make the acts of typing in and reading computer code interesting to mainstream audiences. Second, he had to convince them that Chris Hemsworth was actually the world’s best hacker. He wasn’t successful on either count. To make matters worse, he overdirected the actions scenes in the movie so that they were even less interesting that the scenes featuring Hemsworth hammering away at his keyboard.

Blackhat is the code name for a hacker who, in short order, sabotages a Chinese nuclear reactor and wreaks havoc with the U.S. commodities markets. China and the United States (represented by FBI agent Viola Davis) join forces to catch the hacker. The Chinese computer expert persuades Davis to release Hemsworth from prison to aid in the effort. The villain’s plot is actually rather clever, and the detective work involved in tracking him down is interesting and easy to follow. To overcome computer programming’s inherent lack of visual interest, Mann tries to jazz up the movie with his trademark dazzling visuals (the nighttime shots of Hong Kong are spectacular), and several action sequences.

Ultimately, however, Blackhat feels like an entertaining one-hour television episode blown up to a lumbering two hours. The action scenes in particular lack Mann’s usual energy. The picture and sound quality in these sequences felt amateurish, and they needed much tighter editing. Add in the wooden performances by Hemsworth and his love interest, Chinese actress Wei Tang, and the result is a movie that’s never more than mildly interesting.
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