The Rip

Given the success of “Knives Out” and its subsequent sequels whose exclusive rights were scooped up by Netflix, Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip” feels like a smart Netflix hybrid, a mash-up of a crooked cop crime-thriller and an Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. It begins with Miami police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) being murdered by masked men, setting in motion a federal interrogation of Velez’s specialized Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT, as if subliminally communicating its desire to be a TNT Movie by Netflix) in an effort to determine who might be responsible. After all, rumors abound that certain cops are taking those eponymous Rips - seizures of drugs, guns, or money - for themselves, and the Feds wonder if a TNT somebody might be responsible. This introduces us to the whole crew, including Velez’s second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), and Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Ben Affleck) with whom she was in a relationship. After this inquisition, the TNT quintet pulls up camp chairs outside headquarters to vent, a nice touch, making them seem like heavily armed boys and girls in an Old Milwaukee commercial. This is when we also meet DEA Agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler), rolling around in an armored vehicle that you know is going to turn up again by movie’s end. Indeed, Dumars get a crime-stopper tip via his phone about a Rip and enlists his team to go investigate, setting the mystery in motion. 

At first, “The Rip” generates genuine dread and tension as the team arrives at the home at the end of a caul-de-sac and craftily talks its way inside, discovering an immaculately kept crawl space hiding significant contraband in the form of a lot of money. As a couple team members sledgehammer the wall to get at the barrels containing the cash, Dumars and Byrne interrogate the homeowner, Desi (Sasha Calle). It’s an electric scene in which the sound of the sledgehammer echoing throughout the wall underlines her increasing stress while the cross examination of Damon and Affleck’s characters puts their effortless chemistry on full display. And when the amount of the money is revealed, the tension escalates, especially when a couple cops from the district turn up outside, not-so-subtly implying that TNT is not wanted here. What ensues evokes both “Rio Bravo” and “Assault at Precinct 13” but with some nifty modern flourishes, like a streetlight blinking in morse code and ghost stories of entire blocks like this one bought up by Colombian cartels. 

Yet rather than yield an external threat, the menace comes from within, and from this point forward, “The Rip” becomes as talky as it does action-packed, cop against cop as TNT tries to ferret out where this money came from, who wants, and what they’ll do to get it. This, however, transforms “The Rip” into something more character driven and the characters never amount to much Velez’s death is supposed to hover over everything, but we never spend sufficient time with her for the character to be anything other than a device, while the electric presence of Teyana Taylor as Det. Numa Baptiste is figuratively sidelined for almost the entire movie. Carnahan falls back on Damon and Affleck’s shared history to fill in character where this none otherwise, but Dumars and Bryne’s feints toward the dark side of the force never feel believable. Indeed, Dumars has a tattoo on each knuckle, not unlike the priest played by Robert Mitchum in “The Night of Hunter” having love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. Those, however, were competing ideas, evoking an ambiguity that “The Rip” mostly forgoes in any real or interesting way. One of Dumars’s tattoos, in fact, is a question that the tattoo on the other knuckle answers, effectively solving “The Rip’s” riddle long before it’s solved. What, you thought Boston’s favorite sons were a couple Bad Apples (TM)?

Matt Damon, Serious Funnyman

“Underneath the comic façade I saw a real person of flesh and blood with serious beliefs. I never intend to be a satirist. I never intend to play for laughs.” This is how Margaret Rutherford inadvertently defined comic acting and it’s analysis that stands the test of time. It’s the basic comic principle the late great Roger Ebert cited again and again: “People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing.” In this new improvisational Apatow-influenced comedy ecosphere, however, people are almost always trying to be funny. In a New Yorker profile of Steve Carell, Tad Friend wrote that when “an improv really works, it has a skewed specificity that bears the stamp of an actor’s subconscious.” And that’s often what we are subjected to on screen anymore in comedies – the actor’s subconscious. Carell makes slight variations role to role but his innate nature always rises to the top. Heck, even in “Foxcatcher”, where he piled on the tics and changed his voice to approximate John DuPont, if you look real, real close all you really see is Michael Scott. The comedy subconscious hit barrel’s bottom in “Wanderlust” when Paul Rudd was allowed to stand in front of a mirror for what seemed like a half-eternity and make faces. It wasn’t comic acting so much as riffing, a bit for Funny or Die that just happened to be projected onto a movie screen.

That, I think, is why Matt Damon is undersold as a valuable comic acting commodity. Consider this piece of PopSugar clickbait (which you shouldn’t actually click on). It cites “14 Times In Which Matt Damon Proved He’s Absolutely Hilarious.” Alas, only one of those times, his glorified cameo in “Eurotrip”, is from a motion picture. The rest involve Internet videos and talk show appearances and such. It’s not that he’s not funny in these moments; it’s that it grossly undersells his substantial ability as a comic actor.

This came to mind a few weeks ago when Steven Hyden wrote a piece at Grantland exploring, as he called it, “The Four Versions of Matt Damon.” The versions: Everyman Leading Man, Reluctant Action Star, Team Player and Jerk. None of these Damon descriptors are wrong yet they conspicuously leave out his genuine abilities as a comedian. To be fair, Hyden does highlight Damon’s funny-man performances, he just sees them through a different prism. He sees Damon’s turn in “The Departed” as a “sniveling little liar” and his role in “The Informant!” as a “middle-American doofus.” The labels are apt, and perhaps this is why Mr. Damon never gets full credit for being such a funny guy – his funny guy parts are always wrapped up in another persona.

In “The Departed” he might very much be the “sniveling little liar” Hyden pegs him as, but Damon also outfits his Colin Sullivan, a Boston cop turned mob informant, a distinct petulant comicality. “They have this,” he says at dinner with the air… “and they don’t have duck l’orange.” He’s an asshat and Damon knows it and plays straight to it. In “The Informant!” he’s essentially playing a straight-faced version of Tommy Flanagan: The Pathological Liar. But whereas Jon Lovitz played the role like the sketch it was, fishing for laughs, Damon just takes the dude at face value; a compulsive liar who seems ill-equipped to confront that compulsion. In a way, these characters, living grand fabrications, are similar, but Damon plays both men completely different, getting under their skin to find what makes them tick, and allowing the humor to rise intrinsically from the person he’s playing.

In “True Grit”, Damon took it to the next level. In an interview with Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times “Damon said he and Joel Coen came to the idea of making the cowboy a sort of Cliff Clavin of the Old West by modeling him on Texas actor Tommy Lee Jones but subtracting the notable fact that Jones is a Harvard-educated intellect.” That sounds like an impossible-to-meet standard, yet Damon manages the feat, affecting an Old West spin on George W. Bush and any untold number of Don’t Mess With Texans, citing his home state like it renders him impervious to criticism. But he is also a moral authoritarian, fancying himself an arbiter of, well, everything, and when he spanks the film’s other protagonist, the young girl, Damon looks like a put upon schoolmaster. It’s a great moment, of which Damon has many, but it’s also telling of the full arc he effects, one that goes from Texas Ranger to Big Baby.

Never, however, has Damon been more comically skilled than in his turn as Linus Caldwell in “Ocean’s Twelve”, the much maligned sequel to “Ocean’s Eleven.” The performance is all about, as Hyden noted, being stuck in “little brother lane” to George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Those two titans were very funny in their own right but were also playing variations of themselves, reveling in their Hollywood wattage, while Damon got under the skin of his character. The name “Linus” is no accident. There might be a live-action “Peanuts” movie on the way but Damon turns Linus Caldwell into a heist movie Linus Van Pelt, believing in the Lost in Translation like The Great Pumpkin. He wants to prove he’s a leader, that he can hang with the Big Thieves, and he spends the whole movie trying to worm his way from supporting to top billing, eager beaver-style, never quite getting promoted from JV to Varsity. And underneath that marvelous comic façade you see a real person of flesh and blood. Damon is not being a satirist and he is not playing for laughs; he just is. And goddam, is he ever funny.

The Martian

“The Martian” opens in the midst of a NASA mission on Mars that aborts and heads for home aboard their ship, the Ares III, when a storm hits, save for astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), presumed dead. He is not, of course, and wakes up to find he’s been left behind, forced to square with a decided lack of food and the precariousness of the equipment necessary to keep him alive. His odds of surviving given the remote possibility of communicating with earth and the time it would take to mount a rescue mission are astronomical. It suggests a red planet “All Is Lost”, the 2013 film in which Robert Redford was stranded at sea. But that was a matter-of-fact survival movie giving way to a symbolism-infused parable, one man losing everything before he can spiritually begin anew, whereas “The Martian” remains strictly literal. In the aftermath of finding himself marooned, Mark sits in silence, the wind howling outside his window, weighing the options, as if reaching the decisive moment in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The next morning he declares aloud: “I’m not going to die here.” It’s just that simple; time to get to work.

Director Ridley Scott takes no steps to establish Mark as a character before he’s seemingly left for dead, and though that suggests a film where Mark spends this cornucopia of alone time to find himself, this is an external movie. Damon doesn’t play the part haunted or fatalistic but practically ebullient in the way he goes about crafting solutions, colonizing Mars, so to speak, by employing his botanist background to extravagant creative effect by harvesting potatoes. He’s not a pessimist or a philosopher; he’s a problem solver. What, you think NASA teaches these people to brood when faced with Mission: Impossible? The entire movie comes coated in that can-do spirit, underlined by the film’s preponderance of disco music on the soundtrack. Choosing “Rock the Boat” over “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is positively revelatory.

That can do spirit comes through just as loud and clear back on earth. Sure, the director of NASA, Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), upon learning of Mark’s improbable survival, must weigh cost and the probability of failure, but Daniels does a sly job evincing a man outwardly maintaining bureaucratic appearances while deep down inside scrounging for any possibility to bring home his missing man. And working with his mission directors, Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Mitch Henderson (Sean Bean), and a whole host of others, they are eventually able to forge rudimentary contact with their astronaut, formulating plans for a rescue, one that eventually involves Mark’s crew members aboard the Ares III going faux-rogue to lend a hand.

Drew Goddard’s screenplay, frankly, has no interest in legitimately posing the question Will He or Won't He Get Home? Although it tosses roadblocks into the narrative, those feel more like a matter of seeing how Mark and NASA will overcome them rather than if they will. And while this approach eliminates tension, it allows for a pervasive bounce in the film's step. This is an enjoyable jaunt, not a titanic struggle. At two hours and twenty-two minutes, “The Martian” never feels that along. If it’s Sci-Fi, it’s more like an old-fashioned Sci-Fi serial woven together into a single piece, one where an appreciation of ingenuity is more crucial than conflict.

The further “The Martian” goes, the more it opens up into a true ensemble, even if that ensemble is spread across billions and billions of miles, from the red dirt of Mars to the Johnson Space Center of Houston, Texas on Earth and to the Ares spaceship halfway between both. There is a moment when Daniels, Bean, Kristin Wiig (as NASA’s PR director) and Donald Glover (as an intelligent if social indelicate mathematician) share a scene, even though they are four actors you would never really expect to share a scene. And that abnormality only underscores the film’s intrinsic message of how everyone must come together in the face of a crisis to find a resolution. And if the all these characters, including Mark, are noticeably lacking in any kind of development or off screen life, that only enhances the message – they set themselves aside for the greater good.

“The Martian” could have been NASA agitprop, especially given a couple wholly unnecessary closing sequences, one of Mark speechifying to a room of new recruits and then a closing credits scene that feels like watching a post-Super Bowl celebration. Heck, some have gone so far as to seriously, or not-so-seriously, or both, suggest a conspiratorial tie-in between the film’s release and the real NASA’s announcement of water on Mars. Yet the film itself rarely offers pointed arguments on behalf of NASA. Its reasons for going to Mars in the first place deliberately remain vague; this is expressly a rescue mission. And as so many different entities (even China!) unite to rescue Mark, “The Martian’s” insistence that in the tortured, fractured climate of this country and the world around, we can, when called upon, stand together and get shit done doesn’t come across so alien. It comes across…inspiring.

The Cinema Romantico Action Hero Championship Belt

You might have heard that Bill Simmons, The Sports Guy, Grantland founder, recently threw up a mammoth article on his site in which he re-imagined the Action Movie Star as a sort of Heavyweight Champion. His argument is that the Hollywood action hero as we know him and her began in 1968 with Steve McQueen's "Bullit" and so he goes from there, naming champion after champion. It's a typical Simmons list, not at all wholly inaccurate, but spotty on its real movie history (such as giving the belt to Jackie Chan for "Rush Hour 3" as opposed to any of his Hong Kong efforts) and littered with head-scratching decisions such as Sylvester Stallone re-claiming the belt in 1996 for "Daylight" (wait, what?).

His list, as it had to, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking: what if Cinema Romantio had its own Action Hero Championship Belt? You know, like this blog was a fly-by-night fringe boxing council - The Kremlin-Calexico International Boxing Federation - that awarded its own title belt that absolutely nobody - including the recipients, who would in all likelihood decline it - took seriously or even paid attention to? A champion's list that made people reading it think, "Who the hell made this list? What is with this guy?" Ah, now that sounds like the Cinema Romantico Action Hero Championship Belt!

ac·tion he·ro
     1. Ineffable
      "that's my favorite action hero!"

The Cinema Romantico Action Hero Championship Belt (established 1977)

Harrison Ford. 1977 - 1988.

For: "Star Wars Trilogy", "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Bruce Willis. 1988 - 1992.

For: "Die Hard."

Daniel Day-Lewis. 1992 - 1998.

For: "Last of the Mohicans."

Robert DeNiro. 1998 - 2000.

For: "Ronin."

Zhang Ziyi. 2000 - 2003.

For: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Johnny Depp. 2003 -  2005.

For: "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl."

Matt Damon. 2005 - 2010.

For: "The Bourne Supremacy", "The Bourne Ultimatum."

Angelina Jolie. 2010 - Present.

For: "Salt" (and general contributions to global badassery)