Watched on a Plane: How to Make a Killing

This is another in Cinema Romantico’s non-existent sporadic series of reviews of movies watched on planes.

John Patton Ford’s “How to Make a Killing” was based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, as was the 1949 film “Kind Hearts and Coronets” in which Sir Alec Guinness played eight roles, all members of a wealthy family that a distant relative murders one-by-one to claim dukedom. The loose remake, then, would seem tailor-made for its star Glen Powell to follow in Guinness’s footsteps given that he convincingly played multiple roles in 2023’s “Hit Man.” Instead, Powell takes one role, starring as Beckett Redfellow, son of a teenage mother (Nell Williams) exiled from her affluent family for deigning to keep her baby and risk bringing shame to the family name. Despite her banishment, however, Beckett’s surname remains intact, and when his mom stresses that he should lead the life he deserves, he eventually takes that to mean murdering all his relatives in line for the massive Redfellow inheritance so he can claim it for his own. He is spurred to drastic action not only by his mother but by Julia Steinway (Margaret Qualley), his old childhood friend and “How to Make a Killing’s” resident femme fatale, in a sense laying a piece of Pule cheese at the end of an elaborate maze that Beckett cannot resist. And though Powell is only technically playing one part, in another sense, he assumes multiple personalities in so far as Ford’s screenplay requires him to cycle through different ones as the complicated plot plays out. Those personalities, alas, come across more like a matter of narrative convenience than they do a complicated sense of self, creating a fatal emotionally muddled tone. 

The story is framed as Beckett’s confession to a priest (Adrian Lukis) while awaiting his execution on death row in a few hours. Here, Powell deftly turns his own movie star features against themselves to fully inhabit the air of a charming psychopath. Problem is, in the flashback scenes, as Beckett hesitantly wades into his run of murders, egged on by Julia, the character and subsequently the performance feel altogether different, less psychotic than lucid. This is epitomized in how Beckett falls in love with Ruth (Jessica Henwick), girlfriend of his obnoxious cousin Noah (Zach Woods). Though the narrative speeds through their courtship, the chemistry that Powell and Henwick have is real, but overall, their genuine warmth never squares with the cold, calculating individual narrating the story. As the murders pile up and his choices close in on him, it’s as if “How to Make a Killing” wants to portray Beckett as a noir sap gradually ensnared in a web of his own deceit and lies even as the Beckett narrating the story suggests just the opposite. Ford’s camera, meanwhile, might salivate over Qualley, but Powell never does, never quite sure if he is supposed to, evocative of how his performance is compromised by the writing and direction as everything culminates in a scene that cannot decide between comedy and tragedy, a would-be punch to the face that whiffs.

In the Grey

“In the Grey” is the figurative place where Rachel Wild (Eiza González) works as a debt collector for shady investment firms lending massive sums of money to unscrupulous borrowers. Borrowers like criminal tycoon Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), from whom Rachel is hired to extract the one billion he never paid back, the narrative engine of writer/director Guy Ritchie’s action-thriller. You cannot, alas, just sit down and ask a criminal tycoon’s lawyer, Mr. Horowitz (Fisher Stevens, having the most fun of anyone in the cast, I swear), for the money, though she does just that as something of a feint before pressuring Salazar by dispatching her team of furtive operatives led by Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill) to sabotage his various businesses and bring him to the table. If this set-up raises some comical notions of criminal code, like the pseudo-ethical line between going after someone’s business investments and someone’s personal investments, Ritchie mostly just treats all this financial gobbledygook as pretext for ravishing scenery and an ultimate showdown with Salazar’s private army on his private island. Rachel might technically be in charge, but Ritchie’s heart is with Bronco and Sid.

That’s a little ironic because between and this and Ritchie’s previous action opus, “Fountain of Youth,” it would seem he wants to help make González a star. His idea of doing so here, however, seems to be nothing more than putting her in fabulous costumes. Indeed, those costumes, courtesy of Loulou Bontemps, are the real stars, including a flowing white get-up in a brief desert scene that looks plucked from luxury Tatooine fashion magazine, and a half-black, half-white dress that suggests a wearable black and white cookie commissioned for the Met Gala. As far as her vaguely defined character goes, Rachel’s team codenames her mom, seeming to paint all these buff, proficient, weapon-toting operatives as her sons, except that in Gyllenhaal and Cavill’s understated, frequently deadpan chemistry there is no mistaking the unmentioned but obvious homoerotic undertones between Bronco and Sid. Are they sons or lovers, Ritchie does not seem to know, nor care, never committing, mere allusions ultimately signifying nothing even if glimpses of the fun Gyllenhaal and Cavill are having still emerge now and again. 

Often Ritchie the screenwriter is just teeing it up for Ritchie the co-producer and location manager Nicolás Kico Aráez to shine, marshaling I-don’t-know-how-many locales and places, and teeing it up, too, for editor Martin Walsh to stitch so many scenes and accompanying exposition together. It’s nothing if not a professional production and that professionalism echoes Bronco and Sid’s habitually unfazed approach, so unfazed as to be damn near aloof. They are so good at what they do, that even as the plot picks up speed and the stakes theoretically increase, everything fits together with minimal fuss, so much so that the one hitch consciously feels like screenplay engineering, underlined in how Ritchie never even really lets the nominal emotion of it resonate. It’s ultimately evocative of “In the Grey” itself, a slam-bang thriller that passes like an inconsequential breeze.

Apex

“Apex” begins with an adrenaline junkie couple, Sasha (Charlize Theron) and Tommy (Eric Bana), at a risk-taking crossroads inside a tent suspended in mid-air alongside a sheer vertical rock face. She wants to keep climbing despite the bad weather while he is starting to wonder if maybe she needs to stop seeking quite so many thrills and frankly, it’s remarkable just how much these two wily acting vets sell this scene. Yet, even if its purpose is partly to induce terrifying vertigo with a shot looking out the tent, these introductory narrative moves of Baltasar Kormákur’s straight-to-Netflix-streaming action-thriller are so cozy and reassuring that it’s like slipping into a warm bath. Do I need to tell you that Sasha is riddled with guilt when Tommy perishes on the rock face? Flash ahead five months and Sasha is traversing a remote Australian National Park where, a ranger warns, numerous people have gone missing. Sure enough, the genial local Ben (Taron Egerton) who helps her fend off a few loutish red herrings turns out to be a cannibalistic psycho. Game on! What ensues suggests an outback horror-thriller, like “Wake in Fright,” crossed with “Surviving the Game,” as Ben gives Sasha a head start in the wilderness and then gives chase. For his part, Egerton plays Ben like a simmering kettle, really letting his insanity escalate before unleashing. Theron, on the other hand, while evincing as much resolve as desperation, is done a disservice by a script that does not explore nor even so much as just momentarily wonder whether this diabolical version of the most dangerous game reactivates in her a macabre rush of adrenaline. It speaks to a lack of deeper emotional layer or even a true sense of surprise, no matter how intense the stunts might be, meaning “Apex” ultimately is a thriller that just regresses to the middling mean.

Shelter

Unfortunately, the copious asses that Jason Statham kicks in his latest ass-kicking opus yield diminishing returns. “Shelter” starts well enough with Statham as a man of mystery who is not so mysterious because, of course, certain ass-kicking backstory is automatically baked into such a Statham character from the jump. In this case, his ersatz enigma Michael Mason is hiding out on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland and being delivered supplies that seem to consist entirely of bottles of liquor by a teenage girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and her uncle (Michael Shaeffer), a former associate of this strange hermit. If it might strain credulity that Jessie would take such an interest in the gruff, uncommunicative Mason, I kept thinking of the scene in “One Battle After Another” when teenage Willa asks Col. Steven Lockjaw in all oblivious earnestness why his muscles are so big. Teenagers are on a different wavelength, man. And so, when Jessie winds up injured and stranded on the island, she gradually breaks down his impersonal wall, which proves good and bad, especially when Mason’s ex-MI6 assassin background finally catches up with him and the semi-unwitting current MI6 chief Roberta (Naomi Ackie) sends a black ops squad across the sea to deal with him. 

The sequence in which Mason dispatches this death squad one-by-one with minimal fuss is promising. It subverts expectations by forgoing full-throated Schwarzenegger “Commando” mode for something else as Mason effortlessly pilfers and uses their own weapons against them, not quite taking them all out with his own bare hands but coming close. What’s more, Statham’s air, a small gleam in his eyes, suggests a thrill of the hunt, a thread too sinister for writer/director Ric Woman Waugh to pull. Indeed, as Mason and Jessie are forced ashore, bit by “Shelter” peters out. True, there is something refreshing in Statham allowing his character’s actions to convey his burgeoning affection for Jessie rather than laying the emotions on thick, but nothing is ever really made of the Jason Bourne-like black ops program (underlined in how Bill Nighy never gets to truly cut loose as the bad guy) and the action gradually loses all sense of creative sizzle. The climactic showdown in a dance club denotes how Waugh just starts pulling locations off the action-thriller rack. By the end, when Mason is dispatching the one pesky assassin that just won’t quit, that original gleam in his eye is conspicuously gone and he looked the way I felt: ready for it be over. 

Dead Man’s Wire

“Dead Man’s Wire” does not tell the real-life story of Tony Kiritsis so much as the real-life act that made Tony Kiritsis famous, or infamous – that is, in February 1977, he took hostage the son of the mortgage broker he accused of ripping him off. Working from a screenplay by Austin Kolodny, director Gus Van Sant tells the this incident from beginning to end as Tony (Bill Skarsgård) shows up at the Meridian Mortgage building and promptly wires a shotgun to the back of the head of Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) before ferrying him to his booby-trapped apartment where he winds up in an intentional standoff with the police outside, demand both $5 million and an apology from Richard’s father, M.L. (Al Pacino), for having swindled him. He never gets that apology, not even when he takes a phone call with the elder Hall, a deliberately disinterested Pacino talking to him like he’s talking to an aggrieved customer on the customer service line, an effectively bleak reminder that the fine print trumps all ethics and morals.

That moment, though, also demonstrates the tendency of “Dead Man’s Wire” to work best in flourishes and isolated moments than overall. Tony virtually invites the spectacle that crops up around him, talking on the phone with a local radio dee jay, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), throughout the standoff, while cub reporter Linda Page (Myha'la) follows him to his apartment complex and begins broadcasting much to the delight of her bloodthirsty producer back at the studio. These are interesting threads, but Van Sant never entirely pulls them, both these stories petering out. If Tony craves the spectacle more than he rejects it, Van Sant gets that across best in the sequence when he drives Richard home, scored to pop music of the era as myriad police cars crawl along behind, a precursor to the white bronco the L.A. freeway and a reminder that such sensationalism has always been in our American DNA.

Skarsgård is tremendous as Kiritsis, profane, polite, and self-pitying. What’s less clear, however, is what Van Sant wants us to make of this man, broadly speaking. Though chunks of “Dead Man’s Wire” are filtered through the prism of television news, sending the story to a wider audience, we never really see that wider audience and so, are never quite sure if he’s being made out as the American hero he claims to be or if that’s mere delusion. And though Skarsgård’s air hints at delusion, that is never clarified either, the conclusion in which the ensuing trial finds him not guilty by insanity still leaving it up in the air. By sticking just to the incident itself and never doing much to reveal who he Tony outside this context, “Dead Man’s Wire” comes to feel deliberately, diabolically evasive, not so much refusing to judge its character as leaving it open to interpretation so that every viewer can retrofit Kirtsis’s act for their own personal thesis.

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)?

Some Drivel On...Quantum Hoops

“Quantum Hoops” (2007) does not conclude with a blooper reel, a la so many comedy movies, but begins with one instead, or what might as well pass for one, a montage of the Caltech basketball team failing all over the court. After all, at the time Rick Greenwald’s documentary was shot in the mid-aughts, the woebegone Beavers had not won a game since 1985. (They would eventually end the streak at 310 games on February 22, 2011.) That’s failure on a mathematically improbable scale, as “Quantum Hoops” tells us, and perhaps operating with a mathematician’s mind, it explains the logic behind chronicling such long-running failure while giving a pass to the cosmic absurdity. The whole movie assumes the low-key, even nonchalant, air of its narrator, David Duchovny, a 20-year losing streak treated as something like a passing sun shower. I did not need it to drill all the way down to the very essence of the human condition, necessarily, but when one former Caltech hoopster noted that the 1960s passed on campus with nary a peep of the noise from the outside world, I might have liked at least one follow-up question.

Though “Quantum Hoops” nominally chronicles the Beavers’ 2005-06 season, Greenwald eschews embedding with the team, so to speak, by recounting each game, checking in with the players before and after, or even, really, seeming to go into the locker room at all. Given the described workload of basketball and academics and barely having time to sleep, maybe that would have been impossible, but it makes the approach feel impersonal despite so many talking head interviews. Instead, Greenwald opts for broad overview of both Caltech as an institution and of the basketball program. But because there seems to be virtually no footage of the hardwood team’s past glories and agonies, this overview essentially just consists of past players and coaches remembering them aloud, which only goes so far. It also underlines the lack of visual flair overall, utilizing clips that do not really enhance what's being said, only occasionally underscoring the action, mostly just coming across like something to fill the screen.

No, Greenwald is content to let talking heads do most of the walk for him. And they are chipper bunch, granted, from the current and former players to current and former coaches to Gregg Popovich, formerly head coach of Pomona-Pitzer, who lost to Caltech in 1980. He mentions a chill that went through his body when he realized he was going to lose to the sport’s most woeful program, yet even by the end of his interview, the famously acerbic Hall of Famer is waxing inspirational in a way that mirrors the Explosions in the Sky-like music. If the Caltech players feel sorrow, they never really express it, hardly show it, and when one-time coach Gene Victor does allow a brief admission that it was “hard” to lose so much, he fails to expound, probably because he wasn’t even asked to. There is no room for wallowing. In accordance with a university like Caltech, everything is framed as a learning experience.  

Jay Kelly

An aging white male whose life has turned out empty despite so much fame and success is not a new story, but what counts is in the telling. And that is where I am afraid to report that despite some expressive performances and scenes, Noah Baumbach’s telling of the story of fictional movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) ultimately comes up empty, never demonstrating enough courage in its own convictions, and not quite sure whether it wants to be an easygoing Netflix comedy or something more avant-garde that just happens to be streaming on Netflix. Partly a road trip movie in which Jay journeys from Hollywood to Italy to accept a lifetime achievement award at a Tuscany film festival, it’s clear that Baumbach and his co-writer Emily Mortimer (who also features in a small role) are nodding at Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” though what ensues only occasionally seeks, nevertheless reaches, such metaphysical heights. Despite the fictional movie star’s name essentially being a mirror of the real movie star playing him, “Jay Kelly” remains just outside the looking glass, never bold enough to go all the way through.

“Jay Kelly” begins with a bang by way of a long tracking shot roaming through so much chaos and noise on a movie set before ending with the eponymous character having to go in front of the camera and nail a take. It evokes the actor’s paradox, that despite being surrounded by multitudes, when the camera rolls, the actor is all alone in front of it. It also becomes a metaphor for Jay himself, virtually alone, divorced and with two daughters, one from whom he is estranged and one whom he hardly ever sees, with no real friends other than Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler) who is not really even a friend but his agent. Jay is a ghost in his own life, an idea that Baumbach evokes when Jay re-encounters his old acting school buddy Tim (Billy Crudup) from whom, it turns out, Jay essentially stole the role that turned into his big break. Throughout this sequence, Crudup evinces a mischievous gleam in his eye that you can sense is always half-a-second away from turning to maliciousness, and finally does, their catching up becoming a confrontation. Baumbach seems to play this moment for comedy, but Crudup feels realer, and scarier.

If Crudup steals the movie, then Sandler salvages it. Because this journey to Italy is not just Jay’s, it is Ron’s too, forcing him to come to grips with the fact that he has essentially lived his life on behalf of someone else. And though Jay’s publicist Liz (Laura Dern) decides to walk away from this life, Ron cannot bring himself to, seeing Jay’s career as an extension of his own. It is an affectingly bittersweet character and performance that puts into perspective why actors are always thanking their agents in award speeches whether you like it or not. In a way, the complexities of Ron and his devotion work to explain the emptiness of Jay, but only up to a point. Jay is deliberately written as an empty vessel, a person whose only memories, as he says, come from his own movies, a notion that Baumbach literalizes in flashbacks staged to feel like movie scenes with Jay standing off to the side, as if appraising them. If the emotions these scenes generate can feel pat, they are at least baked in an interesting filmmaking idea, which is more than I can say for how Baumbach treats Jay Kelly as what he nominally is: a movie star. 

Jay never comes across larger than life as intended, illustrated in a scene aboard a European train where he is gawked at and talked to but never in a way that borders on the edge of mania: he feels like, gosh, I don’t know, Charlie Hunnam, not Tom Cruise. What’s worse, Baumbach never infuses a sense of Jay’s work, meaning we never see his onscreen persona contrasted against his real one, to see the gap between the two that ostensibly is supposed to be his emotional fault. All we ever see is a quick highlight reel at the award ceremony and all those highlights are culled from real George Clooney movies. A genial nod to the actor, it might have suggested something more, erasing the lines between actor and character until we realize they are the same, but “Jay Kelly” is not reaching that high and it never seeks to tease out that thin line anywhere else. It is as if by walking up to the edge of actor and character being the same, Baumbach becomes afraid to push it too far, given the unlikable qualities of the character, tying his own hand behind his back, always a little too eager to redeem Jay despite simultaneously suggesting redemption is not so easy. It’s a contradiction he can’t solve, and it causes a closing line that might have landed like a punch to the gut to feel more like a wistful sigh.

Sentimental Value

“Sentimental Value” is correctly billed as both a comedy and a drama but it begins in the vein of horror as Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve), a theatre actor, seized by stage fright in the moments just before the first performance of her new play, is wrangled into her place in the nick of time by the cast and crew after multiple attempts to flee. There is a discernible air of theatricality to this freakout, however, underlined in how the crew seems to take it in stone-faced professional stride, as if flipping out is how she finds her nerve, a little like the beginning of “The Insider” where Mike Wallace argues with the Ayatollah’s bodyguard to get his heart started. Indeed, it is telling that we hardly see Nora’s actual performance, just this one before it, an evocative delineation of how Joachim Trier’s Scandinavian drama takes place at the intersection of art and life. Not long after, Nora’s father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), an acclaimed film director, returns home for his ex-wife’s funeral after walking out on her and Nora and Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) many years ago. But instead of making amends as one might expect, he makes a movie pitch to Nora, asking her to star in what he hopes will be his comeback film as none other than his own mother who committed suicide when he was just a boy with plans to shoot it in the very same house where the act took place.

Gustav is seeking a cinematic exorcism by way of a cinematic seance, or something, but Nora turns him down flat, and the way Reinsve has her mouth fall open, just slightly, when he proposes his idea becomes one small gesture that cracks open a whole portal into the emotional damage he inflicted. In lieu of casting her, he casts an American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), seeking a different kind of work and inspired by one of Gustav’s earlier movies that starred Agnes before she chose to eschew acting. The sequences in which Gustav and Rachel prepare and rehearse in his mother’s house become a weird kind of voodoo in which we see not only him trying to resuscitate his mother but cast someone else in the role of his daughter. When Rachel achieves an emotional breakthrough in rehearsal, it is affecting, for her and the others around her, all except for Gustav, who seems to feel nothing at all, for one cruel moment seeming to suggest that an artist cannot manufacture his or her own closure.

Gustav is a real piece of work, as they say, and Skarsgård’s performance lives it. He tells Nora that in first seeing an actor perform, he can judge within a matter of minutes whether they are any good or not, and it is that sort of haughty judgement with which Skarsgård plays the entire part. When Gustav meets with Nora, the scene is no different, really, than how he rehearses later with Rachel, suggesting this is how he views all of life, as a rehearsal, a working through, a movie set where he is assigning his own kin motivation. He even casts Agnes’s son in a small role in his burgeoning film, hearkening back to his relationship with Agnes when she was young, forging connection through work. Yet, if Trier comes across primed to dissect the real-world limits of his character’s approach, he pulls each punch he has so shrewdly set up. The denouement of “Sentimental Value” is altogether just so easy, every piece fitting snugly into place, even the usurping of the home not being where heart is cliche. Art can heal all wounds, it seems to say, with something like the kind of shrugging smile Gustav often employs, and is why I cannot help but feel convinced this movie is going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Woman in Cabin 10

Looking for an easy assignment after a traumatic one, Guardian journalist Laura Blacklock (Keira Knightley), “Lo” for short, jumps at the chance to hitch a ride aboard billionaire Richard Bullmer’s (Guy Pearce) superyacht to interview his terminally ill wife Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) about what she intends as a posthumous foundation. It doesn’t take long for things to go wrong, however, and not just because Lo’s ex-boyfriend Ben (David Ajala) is also aboard. No, on her first night she witnesses a person thrown overboard, believing it to be the young woman she briefly met earlier, the one in Cabin 10. After alerting the crew, however, they conduct a search and explain that not only are all passengers and crew accounted for, but Cabin 10 had no occupant in the first place. Given not just the situation but the setting, “The Woman in Cabin 10” seems set up for a stylish murder mystery in which Lo turns sleuth to interview a gallery of intriguing suspects from a rock star (Paul Kaye) to a gallerist (a gloriously icy Hannah Waddingham) to Buller himself. Knightley is certainly game for such a mystery, anyway. When Lo is told everything checks out, time to keep going, chop-chop, director Simon Stone opts for a comic long shot as Knightley’s face quizzically droops, conveying, “Like, wait, what?”

But that mystery never truly materializes. It’s not just that the secret is given away earlier than you might expect, but that “The Woman in Cabin 10” never makes any real attempt to cover the fact that Bullmer is up to no good, underscored in Pearce’s supercilious performance, slurping up orange juice at the breakfast buffet like Shooter McGavin eats pieces of shit for breakfast. Stone, who co-wrote the script with two others, see this less as a mystery than a nightmare, kind of “Gaslight” on a superyacht in which a middle-class journalist slips into psychosis as the rich and famous continually tell her not to believe her lying eyes. Stone, though, doesn’t just see “The Woman in Cabin 10” as a nightmare but, crucially, as trash; it’s set almost entirely on a boat, but like Lt. Frank Drebin, the movie itself is swimming in raw sewage. Stone embodies the unrepentant shamelessness of the rich by throwing all sense of shame to the wind, evoking the haughty belittling of Lo in the over-the-top comical tones, essentially rendering the superyacht as nothing less than an opulent apparatus for covering up a crime, and amplifying Lo’s nigh hallucinatory state through all manner of wide-angle lenses. Indeed, even if many frames remained marred by that artificial Netflix sheen, especially the interiors, Stone’s shot-making is better than you might suspect. One image right after Lo’s concerns have been blithely written off shows her standing at the edge of the yacht, the wide angle disappearing the boat altogether, making it seem for all the world that she has been set adrift with the truth.

Materialists

In telling the story of a matchmaker, Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), torn between two suitors, the wealthy financier Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), and the poor actor with a catering gig on the side, John Pitts (Chris Evans), writer/director Celine Song wants to create a modern update on the class-conscious romantic comedies of the 1930s and 40s. And fair enough. Save for a few ham-fisted attempts at humor involving John’s roommate situation, however, “Materialists” isn’t really funny, or even trying to be funny, or even trying to be arch, as the set-up might have suggested. No, Song takes her ideas seriously, which isn’t a bad thing, and sometimes proves quite good, though her notions of the present-day economic divide in America can’t help but come across glib. At one point, Lucy confesses her salary to be $80k before taxes and, well, renting a Brooklyn apartment all to herself, not to mention maintaining that haircut and wardrobe week-in and week-out, on that salary might honestly be the funniest thing in the whole unfunny movie. 

Lucy’s matchmaker profession instantly evokes romance as a business. Indeed, she meets Harry, and re-encounters John, at a wedding for a client. Harry overhears her mid-business pitch, and when he tries to ask her out on a date, she comes across more interested in signing him up as a client, eventually relenting to a relationship in the face of his charm offensive. Even so, every conversation they have is born less of sweet nothings than practicalities, what each person offers the other, etc., as if they are dealmakers hashing out details, underlined in how Song tends to shoot these scenes in two shots that render so many swanky locales as boardrooms. Even Lucy’s discussions with John, trying to win her heart all over again, involve the details of real life, his lack of material world usefulness. These scenes are fascinating, and in them, the dialogue assumes a captivating kind of hyper-formality, one that impeccably meshes with Johnson’s oft-impassive acting style.

At times, Song appears to be attempting to deconstruct the rom com itself, like she watched “Hitch” one night and wanted to pick apart its rigidly structured sentimentality like a frog. Yet, in the end she becomes as reliant on formula as any regular old rom com. She might tack on a sexual assault subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients (Louisa Jacobson), and though she at least lets the victim have the final word, the whole thing still chiefly and insultingly exists to spur Lucy toward her own self-realization. What’s more, Song never really sees any of this trio as real people; they hardly exist outside the notion of their swirling relationships. The closest we get is a brief snippet of John acting in a play, but even then, we learn next to nothing about what drew him to the stage in the first place. Who they are beyond their socioeconomic status is irrelevant. That might not have been so bad had Song followed the transactional nature of relationships to the end, but ultimately, she wants the characters to overcome it, which is hard to do when they aren’t really characters at all but mere stand-ins.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

When Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) tells his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) to tell the record company that he wants no press for his latest album, “Nebraska,” he says it’s not so much because he doesn’t want to explain the record as he couldn’t even explain the record in the first place. It’s a good window into the all-acoustic, out of step 1982-released “Nebraska” itself but it’s an equally good window into writer/director Scott Cooper’s difficult task in adapting Warren Zanes’s book about the album’s recording: how do you make a movie about a making a record the artist can’t explain? And it’s why I admired Cooper for eschewing the standard biopic template, not telling the Boss’s story from the beginning but seeking to capture a moment in time, one in which an on-the-cusp-of-superstardom Bruce Springsteen forged one of his most revered records while in the throes of considerable emotional and mental struggles. The problem is, even if “Deliver Me from Nowhere” wants to put us in that headspace, it can’t. 

“Deliver Me from Nowhere” begins with Springsteen ending his latest tour and hunkering down in a temporary New Jersey home where he plans to demo some new material on a four-track cassette recorder with guitar tech Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) functioning as makeshift producer and Bruce’s bedroom functioning as makeshift studio. “I want it to sound like I’m in the room by himself,” he notes, hinting at an isolation from the world around him born at least part from his depression. These are abstract concepts, however, to show on screen and rather than unlock his imagination, Cooper resorts to humdrum biopic convention like black and white flashbacks to Springsteen’s mentally ill father (Stephen Graham) and inventing a diner waitress girlfriend, Faye (Odessa Young), with whom the singer-songwriter can’t bring himself to connect. That uninspired approach with the screenplay trickles down to the direction, reducing White’s turn to nothing, really, but a series of disconnected emotionally constipated poses in which the actor strains to show us something but just winds up signifying nothing. And White never looks worse than when he’s opposite Hauser, the former’s effortful acting standing in harsh contrast to the latter’s effortlessness. 

Though much of “Deliver Me from Nowhere” ostensibly turns on Springsteen’s creative process, Cooper fatally fails in bringing that creative process to life. Springsteen famously culled his album’s title track from the plot of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” and though we see the character watching the movie on late-night TV, there is no sense of why it moved him, or how it connected to what he was feeling, just as one scene of him revising the lyrics from the third person to the first is an unsatisfactory literalization of putting himself into the song without conveying why he thought it so personal. What’s more, there is no sense of his awakening social and political consciousness, one that gave rise to “Born in the U.S.A.,” which we see come to life in the studio in the movie’s most thrilling sequence, because Cooper infuses virtually no sense of the larger world and how the songs written during this period were an echo of it. “Deliver Me from Nowhere” might lead you to believe that song was just a telling of Paul Schrader’s bar band screenplay with the same title, a script we see Landau give to Springsteen, though that is not even a little bit true. 

Odd as it might sound, the only real glimpse of the outside world is when we see Bruce listening to Foreigner’s 1981 hit “Urgent” on his car radio. I enjoyed it simply for seeing Bruce Springsteen listening to Foreigner but in its own unexpected way, it also puts into perspective the pop culture climate into which he wanted to release “Nebraska,” the seeming folly of such a choice. In making it, Landau and his team have to move some measure of mountain and earth to follow through, but unlike 2019’s electrifying “Her Smell,” “Deliver Me from Nowhere” does not evoke the herculean struggle of handling a tempestuous artist, not least because it can’t help but soften Springsteen’s tempestuous edges, as if afraid of offending its subject. On “Nebraska,” Springsteen got down to where his spirit met his bone, but “Deliver Me from Nowhere” doesn’t even get close. 

Weapons

“Weapons” has a great hook. Set in a small Pennsylvania town where 17 kids from the same grade school classroom vanish one night without a trace, this mystery is recounted in voiceover by a young girl, initially over nothing but a black screen, imbuing the sensation of a campfire story. Did this really happen? It did, and writer/ director Zach Cregger recounts it through a nonlinear narrative, jumping between fragmented vignettes, each one sharing the title of a character’s name. This proves ironic given how little interest Cregger demonstrates in getting to know who these people are, reducing them to proverbial chess pieces, the performances only able to fill in so much. What’s worse, the most crucial character is the one kid from the class who did not disappear, Alex, played by 9-year-old Cary Christopher. Child performances tend to be sculpted as much by the director, and given Cregger’s lack of interest in character, Christensen is hung out to dry as Alex is rendered a zero. For a while, at least, the disjointed storytelling effectively underlines the confusion and fear gripping the town and provides scattered details intimating at the title’s underlying significance. Yet, as the puzzle of “Weapons” gradually locks into place, all those details are revealed as hollow tricks exposing the whole thing as mere clever artifice. The comedy/horror hybrid of the denouement might have made for something incredible if “Weapons” was ever intended to mean anything at all.

Deep Cover

In “Deep Cover,” three improvisational comedians are recruited by Detective Sergeant Billings (Sean Bean) of London’s Metropolitan Police to run a sting operation by utilizing the number one rule of improv – “Always say yes” – to improbably penetrate the deepest reaches of the criminal underworld. Sort of suggesting an inverted version of Bill Murray’s “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” director Tom Kingsley’s straight-to-Amazon-Prime action-comedy sounds like such a can’t miss idea that I’m surprised it hasn’t already been done. But even if in blending occasionally gruesome black comedy with a true heart of gold, “Deep Cover” is often fun and funny, it also skims along in one gear, never quite blooming into something that feels truly outrageous and alive to its own enticing possibilities.

The unlikely undercover team is commanded by Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard), a struggling stand-up comic rendered insecure by her more successful friends, and improv teacher, a living manifestation of a version of that Liz Lemon line from “30 Rock” about where she sees herself in five years: “Teaching improv on cruise ships.” She is joined by Marlon (Orlando Bloom), a commercial actor yearning to go Method, and IT worker Hugh (Nick Mohammed) who signs up for the class in effort to gain some confidence. And though the four-person screenplay affords them little dimension beyond these set-ups, their distinct comic traits work well together, as do the actors, impeccably harmonizing with their roles. Bloom is over the top; Mohammed is deadpan; Howard is the glue melding them together. In the end, though, no one, perhaps, is more important than Bean. If the plot strains credulity, he credibly effects the air of someone who would send three amateurs into harm’s way.

Less successful is Kingsley’s decision to recount the action scenes in that familiar Hollywood house style of shaky camerawork and herky jerky editing. I suspect the intention was to underline the characters’ out of place sensation by plunking them down in a real action movie, which I kind of admire, even if only winds up undercutting the comedy and creating a tonal imbalance. It’s bolder, at least, then a script filled with quasi-outrageous reversals tracking to a predictable conclusion. Predictability is not inherently a bad thing, but in the case of “Deep Cover,” it counteracts the whole notion of these improv comedians responding to one another in the moment. Rather than seeming to make it all up as they go, they follow the outline to the end.

Havoc

A title like “Havoc” sounds a little off-the-middling-thriller rack, but really, it’s an apt description of Gareth Evan’s long-gestating (it appeared on this blog’s THRILLERS ONLY movie preview for 2023) shoot-em-up released directly to Netflix. We are dropped almost straight away into a wild car chase that goes from side streets to the freeway, culminating with a laundry machine full of cocaine hurled out the back of a truck and through a cop car’s window that functions as a triple exclamation point. It’s like Round One of Hagler v Hearns. Of course, that fight was so intense so fast that Hearns could not help but run out of gas, and so does “Havoc,” not least because narratively it hangs its hat on a complex, nay, convoluted web of conspiracy involving New York police, politicians, and the criminal underworld that goes a lot of places but also goes nowhere. Ostensibly, it’s all tied together by Patrick Walker, a bad detective trying to go straight, and played by Tom Hardy which is ironic because Tom Hardy is the kind of actor that likes to transform and there just is not much to transform into; he seems to just sort of bring along his accent from “The Bikeriders.” Set on Christmas Eve, we are introduced to his character buying a few presents for his daughter, and the cashier mercilessly mocking him may as well be the movie mercilessly mocking its own cliche as just that. No, everything that happens in “Havoc” is just an excuse for Evans to stage violent action scenes, and if that’s your jam, then giddy up. Bodies become cinematic biological experiments in how many different ways blood can spurt and ooze and the machine gun fire lights up the screen like so many weaponized yule logs for the winter solstice. 

Cleaner

The shadow cast by 1988’s seminal action-thriller “Die Hard” remains so immense that almost 40 years later, movies continue copying the formula. Movies like “Cleaner,” directed by Martin Campbell who in 1988 helmed “Defenseless” starring Kevin Bacon and Gary Oldman and which I didn’t even know existed until this very moment. The cleaner in this case is not a Winston Wolf-type making problems go away but an actual cleaner, a window washer, that is, named Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley). A window washer, yes, but also a dishonorably discharged ex-British special forces and boy, won’t that come in handy? Indeed, she’s washing the windows of London’s third tallest building when it happens to be taken hostage, leaving her stranded outside. It’s “Die Hard” on a suspended platform, in other words, which is a fair to middling remix as these things go. In a brief prologue, we see adolescent Joey avoiding her abusive father by climbing out the window and onto a high ledge, foreshadowing a life washing windows, I guess, which was just kooky enough in its semi-origin story sensation to make me hope “Cleaner” knew what it was doing.

The dramatic urgency with which “Cleaner” begins gave me some hope too. Joey is trying to help her autistic brother Michael out of a jam, which makes her late to work, which causes her unhappy boss to keep her working into the night, and is why she’s out on that suspended platform during the shareholder meeting of the ostensibly well-meaning energy company for which she works when all the higher-ups are taken hostage by Marcus Blake (Clive Owen) and his team of environmental radicals. Unlike Hans Gruber, however, a common, nay, exceptional thief who cited the Nakatomi Corporation’s greed but only sought to pilfer it, Marcus is out to plum expose that greed to the rest of the world and make them answer for it. It’s evocative of our current movie world. Where the Third Reich once made for standard-issue villains, now it’s the one percent, with some notes of climate change thrown in, a motivational stew made more intriguing by the ideas of violent v non-violent protest that are innately raised. Innately if briefly. In ways I won’t reveal, the three-person screenplay yanks the tablecloth out from under this set-up and reorients it as a far more straightforward action-thriller.

And fair enough. “Cleaner” scales its dramatic obstacles with more professional propulsion than this year’s similar “G20,” at least. Campbell, though, never truly exploits the Looney Tunes-like set-up of his main character dangling from the side of One Canada Square for half the movie. And though “Cleaner” raises the idea that Joey is as much on the side of the activists cum terrorists as she is on the side of law and justice, the screenplay throws too much water on the former, undermining the sensation of her complicated allegiances and ruining the ostensible surprise ending. It also means the pent-up rage Ridley plays the part with has nowhere to go. Or, virtually nowhere to go. The action scenes are oddly terse, as if they were merely meant to punctuate more grave matters, except those grave matters, as stated, are muted, so there’s nothing to punctuate. And yet. One brief sequence of hand-to-hand combat between Ridley and stuntperson cum actor Melissa Humler as one of the terrorists proves truly magnificent. It feels physical and real and like something is at stake in a way the rest of the movie never quite manages.

Fountain of Youth

In Guy Ritchie’s “Fountain of Youth,” archaeologist cum treasure hunter Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) recruits, nay, semi-extorts his museum curator sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) into helping him locate the mystical eponymous eternal life-giving water source. Bankrolled by Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a tech billionaire who is dying of cancer (or is he?), their globe-trotting quest is threatened not only by Interpol but by Esme (Eiza González) and the Protectors of the Path, a secret society entrusted to safeguard the Fountain’s location lest idiot humanity be able to harness its awesome power. These details suggest “Indiana Jones,” of course, but specifically “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade” while the map to the mystical fountain being located on the back of various Rembrandt paintings evokes “National Treasure.” Ritchie, however, cannot imbue the same sense of awe as Steven Spielberg while Krasinski is just a little too in on the joke to impart the same sort of crucial zany-eyed earnestness as Nicolas Cage following a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

That’s not to rule “Fountain of Youth” entirely out of order. Ritchie keeps a blistering pace, opening with an action scene on the streets of Thailand and then segueing right into another action scene on a train and then segueing right into another action scene at the National Gallery in London. These scenes tend to be more amusing than thrilling, underscored in Ritchie’s agreeably fluid camera, putting the action-packed puzzle in a way to underline Luke’s spur of the moment problem solving. I especially liked his riding the motorbike onto the train platform and right up to the train, as if it were a motorized horse in an old western. The problem is, despite this larger-than-life adventure, James Vanderbilt’s screenplay connects the dots with too little panache, and Ritchie imparts no sense of discovery nor wonder.

This is a movie that makes raising the freaking Lusitania (part of it, anyway) ho-hum. Luke is reduced to literally observing that they are first people to board the doomed ship in decades because Ritchie cannot live that line through his moviemaking. When Luke and Charlotte step inside they may as well be walking through the front door of some newly constructed McMansion in Destin, Florida. The Fountain of Youth itself, meanwhile, proves less a moving Lucas Cranach the Elder painting than akin to the computer-generated gloom with which “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” conveyed the same legendary spring. It all just reinforces my belief that when it comes to cinema, at least, CGI is too often a crutch that impedes imagination rather than unleashing it.

Carver is a potentially interesting character, reconfiguring the evil N*zis of “Indiana Jones” as a selfish technocrat posing as your best friend, but Gleeson never brings that idea to life with real relish. As Esme, González has nothing real to do and her chemistry with Krasinski never sizzles because Krasinski’s part and performance are stranded somewhere between Brendan Fraser and John Hannah of “The Mummy,” playing an annoying brother more than a dashing romantic lead. When Luke prattles on to Charlotte about seeking adventure in your life, it sounds less like a call to action than a smug dismissal of the life she has built for herself. Charlotte’s yo-yoing between wanting to go home and wanting to go after the fountain feels too much like confused writing, but Portman, at least, cagily plays to that confusion by rendering a true sibling relationship. One minute, Charlotte can’t stand her brother and the next, she loves him to pieces, the two feuding in these arrestingly exact, erudite sentences that kept making me tilt my head at the screen like a dog whose just heard an oddball noise it can’t quite place. That’s a welcomingly weird vibe for a would-be summer blockbuster. I can’t claim it saves “Fountain of Youth,” but a faint pulse is better than none.

Drop

What’s more terrifying than a first date? Nothing, and that’s the joke at least partially embedded in “Drop.” Cursed with an exemplar middling thriller name, Violet Gates (Meghann Fahy) begins Christopher Landon’s premise-of-the-year picture by slipping on a dress, leaving her five-year-old son in the care of her sister, and going out for a blind date dinner at a restaurant housed inside a glittering skyscraper, pausing before she enters, the mood and the music making it seem like it’s the Spook Central building in “Ghostbusters.” Indeed, the marvelous set design turns the entrance to the chic dining room into a kind of tunnel, like one leading to a rollercoaster ride. Convenient, because that’s what Violet is essentially about to go on, and us too, as once she sits down with Henry (Brandon Sklenar) to peruse the menu and see if maybe this is a match, her phone lights up with threatening messages ordering her to kill Henry or else a man inside her home will kill her son. It’s a superb set-up, and Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s screenplay does a solid job continually re-stacking the deck and setting up a gallery of suspects, though Landon’s direction does not synch enough with Fahy’s crucially grounded performance to imbue a true sense of increasing emotional and mental claustrophobia and isolation given that she is almost exclusively locked into one locale and the killer dictates she can’t tell her date what’s going on.

That dictum, in fact, saddles Sklenar with a nigh impossible task, which is why I don’t want to be too harsh on his underwhelming turn, needing to seem a little suspicious but also a little charismatic and ingratiating but also a little bit like a pinball in a pinball machine getting bounced around by the game of life. In the end, Sklenar just winds up inert. Fahy has better chemistry with Gabrielle Ryan as the bartender who’s been around the block. The villain, alas, lacks real juice, and the ultimate confrontation between the villain and Violet is a letdown, ineptly staged and rushed, and probably rushed because it’s so ineptly staged. But then, “Drop” isn’t about the villain anyway. It’s about Violet confronting the lingering fear and trauma of domestic abuse, set up by the opening scene. That’s a weighty topic, a little too weighty, really, given where “Drop” ends up going. It’s not too weighty for Fahy, who imbues it in her performance, but as “Drop” increasingly untethers itself from reality, the more it creates an unworkable contradiction. The culminating twist seems ripped from the deliberately over-the-top “Commando,” but yields an incredulous cackle rather than a euphoric laugh. What’s worse, the last scene has a bad joke fake-out so mean-spirited given what Violet has gone through that, for a second, I swear, Fahy seems to step outside the character, saying “That’s not funny” to the writers more than her fellow actors. It might be the most piercing moment in the whole movie. 

Inheritance

NYT film critic Wesley Morris once said that sometimes when writing a review, he will see if he can remember a character’s name rather than consulting the press notes or IMDb as a kind of stress test of that character’s rememberability. And when I sat down to write about Neil Burger’s 2025 middling thriller “Inheritance,” I tried to remember the name of Phoebe Dynevor’s main character and realized I couldn’t. Sara? Rachel? Willow? It was Maya. In playing her estranged, possibly evil father Sam, Rhys Ifans must say her name a dozen times, and still, I couldn’t summon it, emblematic of Lily’s impossibly rote introduction, pilfering a bottle of liquor, going to a club, bringing home a guy, and contemplating suicide while perched on a window ledge. This all ostensibly stems from having been the caretaker for her recently deceased mother but, well, far be it from me to rewrite Burger and Olden Steinhauer’s screenplay, I kept wondering if actual scenes of Emily caring for her mother might have generated more interest and sympathy. Yet, if that scene on the ledge proves a less than successful window into Olivia’s ruined psyche, it does at least hint at “Inheritance’s” semi-radical formal presentation in so much as the camera effortlessly glides right out the window alongside her as she gazes down. That’s because the camera is an iPhone 13.

It makes sense, then, that when Sam approaches his daughter at her mom’s funeral after a long absence and convinces her to work for him in some nebulous role at his nebulous real estate company, the company would be in Cairo, where Burger can take his two principal actors and his iPhone right up to the Pyramids of Giza to have a conversation, no doubt sans pesky permits. That conversation touches on the slaves who built one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the differing quality of various pharaohs, people who sought to live forever but who are long gone, which maybe means nothing matters, or that maybe we’re all free. This dialogue teases an intriguing moral relativism, though Burger hardly follows through, providing the possibility of a macabre twist on a father-daughter story and then mostly just utilizing it for narrative twists rather than any genuine emotional depth. That ties back to Claire’s underwritten introduction, foreshadowing the role to come. And though that hamstrings Dynevor’s performance to some degree, she also never invests the role with the sort of wild-eyed recklessness that set-up, or the ensuing situations, suggest.

Whatever the character and narrative shortcomings, Burger’s filming device at least proves more than merely a gimmick. In fact, that is why a stronger narrative might have enhanced “Inheritance.” When the camera follows Daisy down dark alleys and into crowded streets, it elicits the impression of a surveillance state and might have resonated even more had the idea of government spying been effectively grafted onto the plot. And though the iPhone might negate some of the more traditional action scenes, it also enhances them in unexpected ways, like a chase through the streets of New Delhi in which a nigh unbelievably heroic motorbike taxi driver (Amit Grover) helps her escape a legion of pursuers, a sequence flipping the indelible “Bourne” movies on their head. Rather than being completely in control, she’s just along for the ride.   

G20

“G20” is too dumb to be taken seriously yet takes itself a little too seriously to just be entertainingly dumb, echoing its own confused politics, inadvertently designed to both enrage the right and irritate the left. In that way, director Patricia Riggen’s movie is a success in so much as it might bring a divided America together, if only for a moment, to shout: “This should have been better!” That’s because the premise is designed to send every middling thriller fan’s heart aflutter: when the G20 summit in Capetown, South Africa is taken hostage by techno-terrorist Rutledge (Anthony Starr), intending to make himself rich through cryptocurrency by using deepfake technology to exploit the gathered world leaders, American President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) and a band of geopolitical misfits – the UK Prime Minister (Douglas Hodge), the South Korean First Lady (MeeWha Alana Lee), head of the International Monetary Fund (Sabrina Impacciatore), and a loyal secret service agent (Ramón Rodríguez) – manage to evade capture and fight back (resist?) all while the First Husband (Anthony Anderson) seeks to guide he and POTUS’s two kids to safety. This provides several enticing set-ups that, alas, lack inventive and even worse, gleeful payoffs. Unlike the President’s daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) who is introduced by ditching her security detail to live it up for one night, “G20” never cuts loose. 

Davis, at least, meets the moment, using that opening of her Serena’s night out to inform how she plays the role, like raising your daughter is as exhausting as running the country. That grounds the character, but as “G20” progresses, she is supposed to become larger than life and in the murky color and unimaginative framing, Riggen never renders her that way. When President Sutton straps Kevlar over her red dress, it should be a moment of exultant lunacy (business in front, party underneath) but just falls flat. Ditto Rutledge. Starr brings pep to the part, but there is only so much you can do when your climactic moment is having a crypto wallet slip through your fingers. In theory, this moment is funny, a falling killer scene repurposed, but “G20” doesn’t know it’s funny, and so it isn’t. And that lack of fun is a real weight. The only time “G20” achieves true liftoff is when the IMF head and British PM go for a ride in POTUS’s armored vehicle, bold enough to go to the very edge of parody, memorably conveyed in Impacciatore’s unhinged facial expression. On the other hand, when Sutton and Rutledge come face to face, finally ready to throw down, the giant G20 seal logo on the floor effectively setting this up as a championship bout in a makeshift UFC ring, Riggen stops short. My laughter gave way to a groan, one more in a long string of missed opportunities.