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Triple 9: Mini-review

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Woody Harrleson

Woody Harrelson is one of many wasting their time and talent in Triple 9

C-In police lingo, a Code 999 means “Officer down – urgent help needed.” The makers of the new action thriller Triple 9 might well have sent out a Code 999 of their own. For, despite an excellent cast and two dazzling set pieces, Triple 9‘s script needed some urgent rewriting help that never arrived.

The movie starts with a bang as a highly trained crew of crooked cops and ex-military criminals led by Michael Atwood (Chiwetel Ejiofor) pull off an elaborate daylight bank robbery. As cover for an even more dangerous second robbery, the team decide to kill Chris Allen (Casey Affleck), the new partner of Marcus Belmont (Anthony Mackie), one of the crooked cops in the crew. However, Chris’s uncle, Jeffrey (Woody Harrelson) just happens to be the detective investigating the first robbery.

Director John Hillcoat has a cornucopia of acting talent at his disposal in Triple 9, including Kate Winslet as a Russian mobster’s wife calling the shots for the robbers and Aaron Paul and Norman Reedus as two more crew members. In addition, Hillcoat brilliantly stages both the bank robbery and a shootout at an apartment complex (shown in the clip below). These sequences bring to mind the bank robbery scene in Michael Mann‘s Heat, a film that Triple 9 screenwriter Matt Cook undoubtedly tried to emulate. However, Cook’s script is hopelessly muddled as he tries and repeatedly fails to depict the morally ambiguous nature of almost every character in the movie. Triple 9 simply has too many characters competing for too little screen time. Chiewetel Ejiofor is top billed, but in two hours, virtually the only thing the audience learns about him is that he has a son that the Russians are keeping away from him. The plot has the expected twists and double crosses, but the audience will probably be too weary from trying to keep up with the characters to pay much attention. With a script this lackluster and confusing, it’s no surprise that Woody Harrelson comes off best here, livening up nearly every scene with zingers and one-liners. When Harrelson is onscreen or the action is going down, Triple 9 comes alive, but otherwise, it’s a cinematic Code 10—off duty.
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Steve Jobs: Mini-review

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Michael Fassbender

Michael Fassbender gets into the head of Steve Jobs

B+At the time of his death, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was perhaps the most admired business person in America by those who loved and appreciated the products Apple developed. He was also widely considered an arrogant jerk by many of the people who made those same products. Three talented artists, actor Michael Fassbender, director Danny Boyle, and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, explore these seemingly incompatible aspects of Jobs’s personality in the new film Steve Jobs.

Unlike conventional biopics, Steve Jobs is structured like a three-act play (it could easily be adapted for the stage), focusing on the backstage dramatics immediately before three seminal product launches in Jobs’s career, in 1984, 1988, and 1998 respectively. Each time, he interacts with the same people, including his business partner Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), former Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), and his longtime assistant Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet).

Those trying to find out who Steve Jobs was and why people reacted to him as they did will get a good idea from the movie. Jobs was clearly a visionary, a marketing genius who created products for people, not engineers. On the other hand, he was cold, arrogant, and obsessive, sometimes changing moods in a sentence or two. Most tellingly, he was usually at a loss how to react to his own daughter Lisa (played by three different actresses). Fassbender is brilliant at portraying these moods, and he gets good support from laid back, nuanced performances by Rogen and Daniels. Best of all is Winslet as Jobs’s “work wife,” the only person who stood up to him, sometimes successfully. Director Boyle tries to keep things low-key, focusing on Aaron Sorkin’s often pointed (and sure to be Oscar-nominated) dialogue. Those expecting a moment of self-realization and mellowing will be disappointed in Steve Jobs however. For the most part, Jobs remains the same person throughout the movie, and an attempt at the end to reconcile his strained relationship with Lisa feels forced. More important, there’s no real explanation of why he acted as he did. As a result, watching Steve Jobs is much like interacting with the man himself, sometimes frustrating but always fascinating. 
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Insurgent: Mini-Review

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Shailene Woodley

Shailene Woodley channels her inner Jennifer Lawrence

C-The best praise I can give  Insurgent, the sequel to last year’s modest YA science fiction success, Divergent, is to note that it doesn’t merely recycle the same plot points as its predecessor. Unfortunately, the producers seem to have exhausted their store of fresh ideas in the first movie and are reduced to ripping off other movies like The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Hellraiser instead. 

The storyline of Insurgent picks up a few months after Divergent ended. In a dystopian future, residents of what’s left of Chicago live behind massive walls and are divided into five factions based on their predispositions. However, a few, like Tris (Shailene Woodley), are “divergents,” possessing aptitudes for multiple factions. The de facto ruler of the society, Jeanine (Kate Winslet), is trying to hunt down Tris and the other divergents. In the meantime, Tris and her boyfriend Four (Theo James) form an uneasy alliance with Four’s mother Evelyn (Naomi Watts), leader of the homeless Factionless, who wants to bring down Jeanine.

YA science fiction concepts generally aren’t all that complex to begin with, and Insurgent abandons most of the intricacies found in Divergent. Instead, what emerges is yet another story of a fascistic ruling élite and their storm trooper lackies putting their ideas of racial superiority and purification in place. And, for all of Kate Winslet’s acting skills, she’s not nearly as good at playing the big bad as Donald Sutherland is in the similar role in the Hunger Games movies. The first half hour of Insurgent contains plenty of action, much of it well staged, but, after that, the movie goes downhill quickly. Woodley does her best, but she struggles in a role that requires her to spend most of the movie blaming herself for everything that’s gone wrong in her world. The only character who seems to be having fun is the duplicitous Peter (Miles Teller), whose loyalties go back and forth as the plot demands. The movie culminates in the last of many dream sequences Tris endures, all of which seem like outtakes from The Matrix. However, it’s the audience that really has to endure these sequences to get through Insurgent.
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