Are Action Comedies Dead? "Bullet Train" Makes A Case
#188: "Bullet Train," "Prey," "Xanadu," "She's Funny That Way"
Edition 188:
Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: Brad Pitt leads a loaded cast on a bloody train ride to hell, the Predator franchise goes full native, and it’s time to honor two recently passed legends with our streaming suggestions. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” is it coincidence or was Timothy Chalamet trolling his former co-star with this teaser drop?
Bullet Train
We’ve been conditioned, in the era I’ll now optimistically call the post-apocalyptic rebirth of theatrical moviegoing, to think that the vanishingly few movies treated to a wide release nation-wide in theaters have to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. That means huge spectacle, the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the funniest/scariest thing of all time, or some piece of art so beautiful it makes you rethink human nature.
Where in this high stakes chaos do we slot Bullet Train, an ensemble action comedy bordering on screwball status? This movie is, in a nutshell, a bunch of very famous people on a train joking and fighting, fighting and joking…busting each other’s balls both literally and metaphorically. I’m just not sure that’s what audiences are looking for anymore.
In my humble opinion, Marvel murdered the action comedy genre — and I know what you’re thinking, here Matt goes blaming Marvel again, but think about it — in the genre’s golden age of Beverly Hills Cop and Lethal Weapon they were a perfect counter to the self-serious, humorless blockbusters of the time. Nowadays, thanks to Marvel, there’s an expectation that every punch should with a quip, every explosion with a laugh line.
Perhaps “murdered” is not the right word, because in one respect the genre has never been more popular or successful. But it’s been monopolized, for sure, leaving in a precarious position this story ostensibly set in the real world, about several groups of assassins who end up on a Japanese bullet train all vying for the same package, unbeknownst to each other.
What Bullet Train may have wanted to do then, logically, is to differentiate itself from the status quo. It simply doesn’t. The world it’s in is anything but “real,” inhabited by one-dimensional characters who can give and take super-human levels of physical punishment, and use humor to mask what is an incredibly (and often cartoonishly) violent movie. All presented with the now-standard winking, ironic detachment, “meta” tone. Oh, and how about the recent trend of dropping in a half-dozen A-list cameos? Does that description sound like any other type of movie? Perhaps one with capes?
I’m not sure why I was expecting anything different from the guy who directed Deadpool 2 and Hobbs and Shaw. But David Leitch did have one trick up his sleeve this time, and that’s Brad Pitt. Fresh off an Oscar win and ready to blow off some steam, Pitt decided to come have fun with the director who in a past life was actually Pitt’s stunt double (for Fight Club and Ocean’s Eleven!).
Pitt plays an assassin whose heart is no longer in killing (not exactly an original concept), but actually excels by playing the character as the kind of dufus surfer boy that hues closer to Pitt’s natural state (like what he did in True Romance or Burn After Reading). As the movie’s anchor, he certainly has the gravitas and magnetism to carry it to the requisite level of “fun.”
Listen, I’m the first to tell you that a movie doesn’t have to be “good” to be … good. Fun is enough! I love the movies of Guy Ritchie (Snatch, RocknRolla, The Gentlemen), whose trashy yet super fun ensemble action-comedies are the closest comp to what this movie was hoping to be. (In fact, the cockney characters of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry here seem to have walked right off the set of a Ritchie film.)
It’s just that something about this movie’s jokes, and its punches, rang hollow to me. There wasn’t a whole lot of energy holding the movie’s fragments together, allowing it to drag along from kill to inevitable kill, which is an odd thing to say about a movie set on a train. In fact, train movies have proven to be incredibly fruitful over the years — Snowpiercer, Unstoppable, Train to Busan, Source Code, The Taking of Pelham 123 (original), and The Murder on the Orient Express (original) are all fantastic and should be prioritized over this movie.
Still, this is the facsimile of a bonafide blockbuster, as its $90 million production tab and endless A-list cast (both credited and cameo) would tell you. It’s splashy enough to reign over the barren August box office, and fun enough be worth your two hours in a dark, air-conditioned room during the insane late summer heat…which, by the way, might need to be factored into theatrical programming in future, increasingly unbearable summers. These next few weeks, I think I’d pop in to see anything. And luckily for you all who have read this far, I will.
Something New
Prey (Hulu): I confess I’m not really sure how many of the seven Predator movies I have seen (the one with the famous handshake meme, at least). But as a well-documented hater of the “bigger, brighter, louder” approach to franchise moviemaking, Prey is just about the best case scenario for getting me interested in wherever the series decides to go next. It strips the franchise elements down, like WAY down, to the point that they’re basically meaningless. The alien that gets dropped off a spaceship into the Great Plains of the early 1700s could’ve been any alien intruder, there’s no real reason to need to know that it’s a “predator.”
Until, of course, you find out that the alien has invisibility and infrared vision and laser-guided missiles and bullet-proof skin. Matching up this high tech killing machine against a tribe of Native Americans with bow-and-arrows and sticks is the kind of movie premise that just clicks immediately. It’s elemental. We as audiences know the humans are going to win, but it’s impossible to imagine how, and that’s what makes it compelling to watch.
The story is incredibly simple, centered around a young female member of the tribe who desperately wants to be a hunter rather than accepting her place as a female medicine-maker, but that simplicity allows the movie to be incredibly light and nimble. At a sleek 99 minutes, it’s not bogged down at all by “franchise mumbo jumbo,” and no time is wasted on exposition, world-building or even explanation — hell, for a good portion of the movie they’ve cut out all the dialogue entirely. The Native Americans here don’t know what the predator is, don’t understand its technology, and none of that really matters to them. They, and more specifically she, has to kill it either way.
Cutting away all that excess fat leaves tons of time for beautifully shot and choreographed action sequences, which more often than not end in some incredibly graphic kills (fair warning). I am a huge fan of director Dan Trachtenberg, who made the claustrophobic thriller 10 Cloverfield Lane and episodes of “Black Mirror” and “The Boys.” Amber Midthunder shines in her first leading role, and overall this movie just grabs a viewer and doesn’t let them go the entire time. I wish it had come out in theaters — the common refrain — but alas, it’s the biggest debut in Hulu history and a must-watch streamer for you this week.
Something Old
Xanadu (1980): We lost another pop culture icon this week in Olivia Newton-John, who earned her immortality as Sandy in 1978’s film adaptation of Grease. We’ve all seen Grease (hopefully), and though it’s always worth a rewatch, this week I decided to check out her other big on-screen performance, coming in a movie that was both critically reviled and commercially unsuccessful at the time but has since grown into a cult classic.
It’s not hard to see why both realities are true. The premise is basically that Newton-John is a magical muse, sent by Zeus to inspire a young artist in LA to chase his dream of…opening a disco nightclub. The movie is the peak of coked-out late 70s/early 80s Hollywood, including random extended dance sequences, hilarious early CGI, a scene where everything turns into animation for five minutes, the fact that our main characters spend more time on roller skates than shoes through the movie’s runtime, or a climax that gets completely hijacked and turned into a Newton-John music video medley. It’s…bonkers.
Still, the movie’s soundtrack paired Newton-John with Electric Light Orchestra, was certified double platinum and scored five top 20 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s got some jams. Plus, this was the final movie performance for the legendary Gene Kelly (star of Singin’ In The Rain and American In Paris), who in his late 60s is still seen here dancing and roller-skating and flashing that mega-watt smile. I imagine this, like most cult classic, could be enjoyed greatly in a large viewing party with perhaps some 1980-appropriate substances. Not that I’m recommending anything.
Something to Stream
She’s Funny That Way (Netflix): In the style of the classic screwball comedies of old, like Cary Grant in Arsenic and the Old Lace or His Girl Friday, this ensemble comedy presupposes that there’s only about eight people in all of New York City, and they’re all having sex with each other. But it helps when those eight people are Owen Wilson, Jennifer Anniston, Kathryn Hahn, Will Forte, Imogen Poots, and Rhys Ifans (plus Cybill Shepherd and Richard Lewis), who form so many intersecting love triangles that it becomes one giant inter-tangled web.
The movie is set around a Broadway production, where the director (Wilson) is married to the star (Hahn) but has an affair with a young actress (Poots) who begins dating the writer (Forte) who is cheating on his therapist girlfriend (Anniston) who has the hots for the show’s other star (Ifans) who really only loves his co-star (Hahn again). Naturally, they’re all staying at the same hotel, work together and seem to eat at the same restaurant, leading to a non-stop series of chaotic intersections.
This was the final feature film directed by the late great Peter Bogdanovich, and though it fails to produce the comedic brilliance or cleverness of those Cary Grant-era laughers or even the Woody Allen-style dramadies, it does give off the same frenetic energy. Personally, it’s a genre I love and, if cast well, makes for the platonic ideal of a “streaming movie,” in my mind. I’d love a newer, more modern and younger version of this kind of movie to come out every year. Please and thank you.
Trailer Watch: Bones and All
A bit of cosmic coincidence, or perhaps intentional schadenfreude, took place Thursday. The same day that the trailer dropped for the Armie Hammer documentary outlining his real-life “cannibalism” scandal, Timothy Chalamet sent out the teaser for his new movie, which is directed by the same person who directed Chalamet and Hammer together in Call Me By Your Name and just so happens to be about…cannibalism. You can’t make this stuff up.
As for the movie, it’s hard to tell much from a 30-second teaser, but director Luca Guadagnino doing some kind of horror/rom-com mash-up with Chalament and Taylor Russell, who I loved in Waves, has me more than a little intrigued. Mark Rylance has never not been great, and the same goes for Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny. When the full-length trailer drops we’ll discuss more before a fall awards release!