By Jon Kissel

Michael Mann's one of my favorite directors and has made more than enough classics to earn him the benefit of the doubt, but hacker thriller Blackhat is not Mann anywhere near his best.  The script is packed with cliches, and the film is cast with actors utterly lacking in chemistry.  Expertly staged action scenes, a Mann staple, are present in spades, but when the characters taking part in them make such little impact, those scenes aren't enough to save the film. 
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In an effective opening sequence, Mann starts in the upper atmosphere, suggesting a limitless breadth of targets, before zooming in on a Chinese nuclear plant.  His camera zooms in further to a single microchip, which is directed to fail, and the plant suffers a meltdown.  Upon investigation, young Chinese military officer Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) recognizes the foundation of the hacker's handiwork as something he crafted with a college roommate in the US, and he sets out to recruit that former roommate to help them catch the cyber terrorist.  The only problem is... he's in jail.  Chris Hemsworth stars as the jailed hacker Nicholas Hathaway, sprung by the FBI to team up with Chen and the FBI to track down the terrorist before he can strike again. 

The bland characters hamstring Blackhat.  There just isn't anyone to really grab onto.  Hathaway's a loose cannon, frustrated after so many years in jail, but Hemsworth isn't the frayed nerve that he might have been.  Instead, he's so competent at every task thrown at him, that he never approaches vulnerability.  For old friends, it sure seems like Hathaway and Chen have never met before.  To make matters worse, Chen brings his engineer sister to tag along, offering help and the possibility of a romantic object for Hathaway, who can now have no chemistry with two characters instead of one.  The typically strong Viola Davis plays the overseer of the operation, but there's very little opportunity to make an impact.  Tragically, she's also given an awful character reveal pertaining to 9/11 that hopefully suggests a sell-by date of that particular backstory builder.  If Chris Christie looks silly every time he invokes it, so do screenwriters and the characters forced to recite their words.  The only standout character is Richie Coster playing a dead-eyed henchman.  After his series-stealing turn in True Detective as a perpetually drunk and corrupt mayor, Coster's 2015 has been dedicated to being the one shining character in otherwise-disappointing works.

Mann has dealt in cop-criminal tropes to fantastic effect in Heat.  In that far better film, it was easy to overlook some of the more hackneyed aspects of the plot due to the indelible portrayals of much of the cast.  Alas, Hemsworth is no de Niro.  The general lack of likable characters makes the lazy short cuts stick out that much more.  Hathaway is a character who supposedly made his bones in front of a computer screen, but is now asked, and is somehow prepared, to participate in shoot-outs and high-pressure stalking scenarios.  In a pretty dire miscasting, he also looks like someone who could pass for a Norse thunder god.  Davis's character is there to first put limits on Hathaway, and then take them off when her higher-ups become too cautious.  In a laughable late moment, while Hathaway is deducing the villain's plan, Mann borrows the most laughable lines from his three-decades-earlier film Manhunter.  Blackhat tries to suggest a tenuous new world, but it has one foot firmly in the old cinematic one.

There is a good movie buried in here somewhere, because Mann is incapable of making something that looks bad.  All $70 million of the budget makes it onto the screen, resulting in the interesting locales of a Bond film.  Hathaway et al criss-cross Southeast Asia, hopping from Hong Kong to Malaysia to Jakarta, and the set pieces that take place in these locations have a never-boring flair.  The climactic showdown in Jakarta, amidst a parade of red-shirted men bearing torches, suggests the tense and beautiful film that could've been.  Mann, who cowrote the script with Morgan Davis Foehl, might've had too much control on this one.  Though it visually impresses, Blackhat needed several more passes and punch-ups to reach Mann's considerable upper echelon.  As is, Blackhat might be his nadir.  C-

First Review: Drew
Thirty plus years in the waiting and we got a remake with more questions than answers. Those ingredients usually make a terrible film but under the direction of JJ Abrams, however, it was fantastically done.

Abrams made a new generation of Star Wars fans with The Force Awakens. He did it not by rehashing an old storyline, but by placing good actors in suitable roles. Daisy Ridley shined in her role as Rey, a scrap metal scavenger who ended up as one of the major players in the film. Ridley made Rey a fun character who had the sass of a young Princess Leia. Her mostly scrappy personality was also met with a sincere and soft side as viewers saw later with Finn.

Furthermore, Abrams struck gold with John Boyega as Finn. Finn left the First Order to run away but oddly enough found Rey in that attempt. Their onscreen chemistry rivaled Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher's in episodes IV - VI. It was that good and going forward, fans will see more of it. As good as Boyega was, however, Finn wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Usually that would make for a terrible character, but Finn had the capability to rise to the occasion and not cower from the fight.  He was a rebel with a cause.

Even Adam Driver as Kylo Ren was correctly placed. His presence as the constant antagonist was something the prequels desperately lacked, so watching his abilities and onscreen presence was refreshing. With his interesting beginning and surprising killing, Kylo Ren fully aligned himself with the Dark Side. What is more, his name stuck and held the aura of the Dark Side champion.

While the acting was no doubt great, what about the story? The story, while a reboot, was exceptional. Abrams held the magic of Spielberg rather than Lucas. That storytelling ability made the reboot s revitalization. The Force awoke with new fans and a new direction. In some way, it had to pay homage to the old order with various cameos and inconsequential roles. That mixture needed a high level director to achieve success and Abrams pulled it off.

One downside about the film was Ren's inability to exert his Sith fighting prowess upon non Jedi. It confirmed that Ren required more training but his trouble to deliver the final blow was bothersome.
The ending, leaving viewers with more questions than answers, was perfectly drawn. Will he take it? Then what? The scene in and of itself would have been futile without the music and John Williams' touch hit the dramatic spot.

With The Force Awakens, Star Wars returned to its paramount of great storytelling. Its ascension was not out of nostalgia but a good story. Its future was built on a solid foundation and that was tremendously done by Abrams.
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Grade: A-

By Jon Kissel

About 40 minutes into Sicario, FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) walks into a room full of CIA operatives, US Marshalls, and assorted guns for hire.  Her ponytail and lithe figure are immediately out of place amongst the barrel chested, heavily bearded men who are supposedly her coworkers.  In addition to the obvious gender outlier, she also becomes an organizational outlier.  She and her partner, well-groomed members of the upstanding FBI, are concerned with rules and protocols, while their CIA overseer, played by Josh Brolin, is introduced being deliberately vague, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops.  The difference between the shadowy areas of the government and the parts exposed to sunlight are further deconstructed in Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s thriller about the extra-legal vagaries of drug interdiction.  The battle between these two is revealed to be not a battle at all.  One side is simply operating on a different set of rules.
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Opening on Macer leading a raid on an Arizonan drug house, she and her team are shocked to find a brace of bodies sealed into the house’s framing.  They are further shocked when an improvised explosive device suddenly explodes in the backyard.  This cartel escalation puts Macer in a mood to step things up, and she leaps at the opportunity to go after senior cartel officials when CIA agent Matt Graver (Brolin) presents the chance to her.  As minor members of Graver’s extensive team, Macer and her partner Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) are left grasping for information and mission parameters, while secretive Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) seems to be running things, as he takes the lead in interrogations.  Baffled by the mission and the legal latitude Graver and Gillick are using, Macer is left to grapple with her growing doubts about the mission, and her desire to stop nibbling around the edges of the drug trade in exchange for a big catch.

Villeneuve is making a name for himself as a devotee of the morality play thriller.  His breakout film, Incendies, placed its characters in impossible situations, blossoming out from a brutal civil war.  His follow-up, Prisoners, brought torture to small-town America, placing brutal crimes on the scale against the slim possibility of finding an abducted child.  Sicario gives the viewer another moral scenario to weigh, and it might be the grayest of Villeneuve’s career.  The characters spend a fair amount of time in Ciudad Juarez, and the town is littered with corpses, including bodies strung up from bridges as a show of intimidation.  Against that kind of depravity, what are the rules and jurisdiction that Macer is concerned with really worth?  Macer is the clichéd lieutenant, demanding the badge and gun of the reckless cop, thrust into the lead and deprived of real authority.  The lieutenant always comes around to the reckless cop because, as Homer Simpson would say, the cop gets results, but what if on the way to those results, a shootout erupted in a traffic jam, or children were put at deadly risk?  Sicario asks about the limit to getting results, and then proceeds to ask if those results are worth getting in the first place.

Graver and Gillick’s methods ultimately overtake Macer’s protestations, and as they exert more power over her, Sicario shifts to Gillick’s film.   A film from Macer’s perspective is unique, while a film about a deadly operative working in the shadows is plentiful.  Once Gillick takes over, Sicario becomes significantly less interesting.  His vendetta against the Juarez cartel simply isn’t breaking new ground.  The climax has nothing to do with her, just as the thrilling intro, which the film never tops, has nothing to do with Gillick.  Split between those two perspective, Sicario loses sight of the moral quandary at its center.

The tonal shift doesn’t detract from the onscreen expertise from all sides.  This is Villeneuve’s most setpiece-heavy film, and in the several standoffs and stalking, he acquaints himself well with spacing and orientation.  These setpieces are all impossibly tense as well.  Coupled with expert cinematographer Roger Deakins, Sicario retains a lived-in, gritty look throughout.  The environment is used thematically well, as the intense brightness of daylight is just as obscuring as darkest night.  Blunt continues to establish herself as a credible lead, following up her excellent turn in Edge of Tomorrow with a similarly strong role.  As frustrating as the shift to Gillick is, Del Toro is no slouch, effectively stealing the film.  He infuses a world-weariness into the character that turns into cold resolution when the bulletproof vest comes on.  He has a habit of invading the personal space of those who he’s trying to intimidate, and it works every time, forcing the viewer back in their seat as well as the intimidate-ee.

Villeneuve hasn’t quite broken through for me into the upper echelon of directors, but he gets closer with Sicario.  The difficult choices presented by Taylor Sheridan’s script are a good fit for Villeneuve’s oeuvre, and the tension repeatedly reaches nigh-unbearable levels.  Blunt and Del Toro are nicely complemented, though the film turns too much into a commando-style assassination plot.  As an examination of the drug war, it remains noncommittal and provides no pat answers, befitting the intractability of the problem.  Sicario flirts with greatness and novelty, but it has to settle for high competence.  B  

By Jon Kissel

Musician biopics have been savaged by Walk Hard, such that it's difficult to watch one without thinking back to Dewey Cox's journey from machete fight survivor to celebrated musical icon.  Love and Mercy, about Beach Boys' mastermind Brian Wilson, very easily could've gone down that path, as Wilson has a life well-suited to the highs and lows of a very predictable film.  Instead, Bill Pohlad's film captures the one thing so few similar films do; the actual process of transforming inspiration into a record.  There are no hackneyed scenes of a serendipitous eureka moment, as the camera slowly dollys into a character'f face.  Love and Mercy puts in the time to show how music is actually made, and combined with Wilson's stranger-than-fiction life, it leaves the lazier, alternative film it might've been far behind.

Taking a page from recent biopics like Lincoln and Selma, Love and Mercy picks two events from Wilson's life and builds itself around them.  As a young man trying to keep his band in competition with the ascendant Beatles, Wilson (Paul Dano) composes the album Pet Sounds single-handedly while his band-mates are on tour in Japan.  Following its critical success but commercial failure, a chastised Wilson experiences an exacerbation of existing mental issues, culminating in becoming bed-ridden and near-comatose.  As a middle-aged man many years later, a recovered Wilson (now played by John Cusack) strikes up a tentative relationship with Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) but is thwarted by his tyrannical legal guardian Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti).  Pohlad cuts back and forth between the older and younger Wilson, tracking both versions' dissolution.

​Minimal knowledge about Wilson and the Beach Boys accompanied me into Love and Mercy.  An opening-credits montage of their surf-rock, white-bread, wholesome success led me to expect a very different film, perhaps something about darkness lurking underneath the all-American image the band put out to the world.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Wilson is praised as a genius, and Pet Sounds is regarded as one of the best albums ever made.  With the ecstatic depiction of its recording, it's not a difficult lesson to learn.  The greatest amount of time is spent on composing God Only Knows, a beautiful song I honestly didn't know belonged to the Beach Boys.  Dano is irrepressible in these scenes, bringing in all manner of instruments and barnyard animals into the recording studio and scampering from musician to musician, giving persistent but clear instructions.  He's trying desperately to pull the melody out of his head, which Pohlad designs as a cacophony with the barest semblance of a melody undergirding it.  It's the clearest depiction of writing music I can recall seeing on film, making a skill that I do not possess seem knowable in an abstract way.

Juxtaposing the energetic young Wilson with the lethargic, medicated, older Wilson is another striking depiction of another quality, though this one is thankfully unpossessed.  The toll that mental illness has taken on Wilson in the decades between Pet Sounds and the 80's is readily apparent.  Pohlad withholds details about older Wilson's mental and legal status as long as possible.  One scene offers that he hasn't seen his daughters in years.  Another reveals all the excuses Wilson is willing to make for Landy and Wilson's abusive father.  Love and Mercy is a story about inspiration in the 60's, but in the 80's, it's a mystery and half of a kidnapping tale.  As he grows closer to Ledbetter, she becomes the angel on his shoulder to Landy's devil, though the picture of Landy as petty tyrant is clouded by his success in transforming Wilson from the comatose blob that he very much used to be.

Pohlad has assembled a strong cast in service to Wilson's interesting life, none more than the actors tasked with playing the musician.  As the younger Wilson, Dano is doing the best work of his career.  He's able to convey Wilson's visionary status in a tactile fashion, something Love and Mercy needed to succeed.  Brilliant in the studio, Dano can't quite translate those talents into leadership, as he repeatedly comes up short against his skeptical bandmates or his cruel father (Bill Camp).  That mix of genius and weakness is alchemical, making the often-irritating Dano an appealing lead.  Cusack has played many hyper-verbal roles in his career, but this is the exact opposite.  His Wilson is tentative in all things, with Cusack's large frame melting into resignation and obedience.  Genuinely afraid of Landy, Cusack sells his deep terror.  As the person most likely to free him from Landy, Banks is a capable ally.  On the receiving end of Landy's threats and grandstanding, she has plenty of steel and gravitas to withstand them and give some back.  Giamatti, with some subpar wig work, is the weak link amongst the main actors, chewing much of the scenery in frequent outbursts. 

For all its admirable focus on Pet Sounds and the Ledbetter romance, Love and Mercy can't completely shed its genre trappings.  The decay of young Wilson towards his comatose state doesn't break new ground like the recording sessions do, and even in those sessions, Pohlad can't keep himself from including a scene in which a musician tells Wilson he's a genius.  That doesn't need stating.  That Love and Mercy so plainly made that clear to someone who had dismissed the Beach Boys as a clean-cut proto-boy band is an impressive and pleasant surprise.  B+