Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.12

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Sherlock Holmes (2009) — 6/10
2. Hijack (2023) — 6/10
3. French Dispatch (2021) — 9/10
4. Exploding Kittens (2024) — 5/10
5. Tombstone (1993) — 8/10
6. Kiss of the Dragon (2001) — 6/10
7. Waterworld (1995) — 7/10
8. Godzilla Minus One (2023) — 8/10
9. I Canoni die Navarone (1961) — 8/10
10. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) — 8/10

Sherlock Holmes (2009) — 6/10

Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is like a superhero. He’s not only brilliant, but he’s also an amazing fighter. Downey seems to have been playing Holmes as Tony Stark.

The script is entertaining enough. We are introduced to Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) as highly technical brawlers, which is significantly off-canon. But it gives director Guy Ritchie a chance to flex his customary directorial style—which consists of scenes cut into short, stutter-step, labeled chunks, usually with a swooping camera transition. He does this a lot. Several examples come when Sherlock is planning an attack on an opponent, where he plans it out in his brilliant mind, then executes it. It’s a gimmick that wears thin quite quickly, as it means that you have to see each fight scene twice. I’m watching Sherlock Holmes: I didn’t even really need to be seeing any fight scenes at all.

Lord Henry Blackwood (Mark Strong) is trying to take over England by convincing it that magic exists and that he is a powerful wizard. He fakes his death, then comes back from the dead. The point is to make Sherlock doubt whether facts and science can explain the world. Spoiler alert: It turns out they can. Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is in Blackwood’s employ but is also falling in love with Sherlock—because an arrogant, know-it-all, hopeless alcoholic is supremely attractive, I guess.

The French giant Dredger (Robert Maillet) is a lot of fun as a Juggernaut-style opponent. The whole movie is a way of introducing the nemesis for the sequel: Professor Moriarty. He is seen only as a shadow throughout the film, pulling strings and manipulating everyone, including not only the ostensible nemesis Blackwood but also Holmes and Irene..

I watched it in German.

Hijack (2023) — 6/10

This short series was better than it had any right to be. It was probably too long, but it was shorter than it could have been. It drew out its relatively straightforward plot—as pretty much every Netflix series does—but Idris Elba as Sam Nelson anchored things pretty well.

A bunch of British idiots hijack a plane from Dubai to London in order to force the British government to release the two heads of their crime family who’d recently been arrested. Not only that, but they’re using the hijacking as an opportunity to run a short squeeze on the airline that they’ve hijacked. That part is ludicrous because the exchange would obviously have intervened and stopped trading on the stock for the day. This is uncontroversial and shows the (A) low level of knowledge about how markets are run and (B) the utter disdain for the audience in assuming that they know nothing.

Anyway, they’ve hijacked the plane and they spend some time proving how ruthless they are—the token female hijacker Jamie (Aimée Kelly) is particularly grating and over-the-top in this regard. They manage to force the pilot (Ben Miles) to open the forward cabin by threatening his flight-attendant lover (Kate Phillips). He overrides the copilot (Kaisa Hammarlund) by beating the ever-loving hell out of her, which was wildly gratuitous and more unsettling because they pretty much ignored that he’d done that throughout the rest of the show. It was like when you watch a movie where a cop’s family is killed at the start of the movie in order to justify his murdering dozens of other people throughout the rest of it. They’re just setting up a plot device to convince you that it’s OK. The point of the movie is to show the rampage. Which makes this scene extra-weird because then it seems like the point was to show you a man beating a woman within an inch of her life? Why?

Anyway, the hijackers have gained the forward cabin and are in control of the craft. They don’t do much, though, except keep flying to London. Also, they try like hell to keep anyone from finding out that the plane has been hijacked. This would have made sense if they were planning to actually crash the plane into something. But, as noted above, the whole point is to use the hijacking to leverage the release of two prisoners and to enable a short-squeeze on the airline’s stock. That doesn’t work if no-one knows the plane has been hijacked. Sam manages to get a message out to the ground, to his ex-wife, advancing their agenda while thwarting their actual plan for it.

Meanwhile, on the ground, there’s a bunch of drama with Sam’s incredibly spoiled son, his inordinately wealthy ex-wife (look at that apartment!), and her boyfriend, a cop. There is also a very savvy and no-nonsense Irish air-traffic controller who’s pretty much my favorite character. There are a bunch of terrible people from the British government being predictably terrible and machinating.

Look, man, they end up landing the plane. One of the two criminals released shoots the other one in the head and easily gets away from the police. The hijackers are all arrested. Thankfully, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make a second season, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief. They actually knitted up the story quite well, but this thing could easily have been a 90-minute movie instead.

French Dispatch (2021) — 9/10

I think this is my favorite Wes Anderson movie. My review from 2022 still stands.

“Nescaffier: I’m not a hero; I just wasn’t in the mood for being a disappointment to everybody.”

I watched it in English and French.

Exploding Kittens (2024) — 5/10

I wanted to like this better because I’ve been reading the Oatmeal comic strip since its inception. It was very generic, though, with occasional flare-ups of stuff that was a bit more inventive and funnier. It never really approached the consistency of the quite-mediocre Disenchanted. If I’m honest, the uneven quality very much matched the online comic. It’s a bunch of low-effort poop jokes rooted in a relatively weak canon based on the Oatmeal comic strips and the Exploding Kittens board game. Based on such a premise, it never really had a chance of being good.

The plot is basically that God is somehow less powerful than his ruling committee, so they banish him to Earth to pass his time as a cat. The same thing happens to Beelzebub, who’s Lucifer’s daughter. This sets things up for (A) equality! (B) sexy times between God and Beelzebub, and (C) a lot of litterbox and hairball jokes.

They end up living next to each other in suburbia, with Beelzebub living with a psychotic cat lady named, unsurprisingly, Karen, and God ending up living with a by-now typical sitcom family: everyone’s quirky in their own way. The mom is an ex-Navy Seal turned veterinarian; the dad is a board-game-playing dweeb who works at a giant box store; the son is a useless lump of online-fame seeking neuroses; the daughter is a genius scientist who’s still in high school.

It turns out that Heaven and Hell are merging while the two leaders are in semi-banishment and that there can be only one leader, in the end. They have a competition, of course, with God winning, of course, but then they share power? I think? I honestly can’t remember anymore, which is suppose is all the description you need.

Look, man, this show is basically a cartoon to fill a five- or six-hour hole in your evening. Since you won’t remember it, you might even be able to watch it again a month later and fill two empty, useless evenings.

Tombstone (1993) — 8/10

This is the story of Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), who moves to the town of Tombstone with his brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), and his good friend Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer). The Earps settle in, picking up lady-friends like Josephine Marcus (Dana Delany) and a bunch of other Earp wives.

There are some bad hombres in town, namely Curly Bill Brocius (Powers Boothe), Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn), Ike Clanton (Stephen Lang), Billy Clanton (Thomas Haden Church), and Billy Breckenridge (Jason Priestley). They are portrayed as nearly preternaturally evil, driven only by drinking and shooting. They don’t even really bother the ladies, actually. They seem to be driven by causing misery, like demons on Earth. This make it much, much easier for the Earps to start wiping them out en masse.

The two sides snipe at each other, taking victims closer and closer to the tops of their respective hierarchies. The Earps have silver stars on their chests, so they’re able to justify their murderous rampages as being “of the law.” Honestly, that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s entertaining as hell, though, and quite well-acted.

I have a soft spot for all of the Doc Holliday scenes, like the so-drunk-he-can’t-see-straight-but-he-can-still-convincingly-cheat-at-cards scene or the so-tubercular-he-can-barely-stand-but-everyone-is-still-terrified-of-his-gun-hand scene or the “I’m you’re huckleberry” scene in which he quickly and easily puts Johnny Ringo in his place—six feet under the ground.

Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) is one of cinema’s greatest characters. The man dominated the film in a way few supporting characters do. Kilmer’s roles were absolutely formative for me. Real Genius, Top Secret, Tombstone, then, later, Heat and Kiss, Kiss, Bang Bang. Holliday strides as a God, being better than everyone at everything, despite an illness that would be debilitating for a lesser man. He never gets his comeuppance. He never gets wounded. His enemies never temporarily get the better of him before he manages to turn the tables. It’s wonderful.

I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles.

Kiss of the Dragon (2001) — 6/10

Liu Jian (Jet Li) arrives in Paris from Beijing. He’s an agent of some sort. He uses acupuncture needles to immobilize his opponents, but uses Kung Fu if that doesn’t work. He ends up using Kung Fu a lot. His style is very minimalistic and, relative to today’s super-hero-style histrionics, realistic.

Liu is on a mission, in the employ of an intelligence agency of the Chinese government. The French police are led by inspector Richard (Tchéky Karyo), who’s holding Jessica’s (Bridget Fonda) daughter hostage, keeping Jessica in a prostitution ring run by a savage pimp. No-one honestly knows why any of this has to be this complicated but it offers a Gordian Knot that can be cut by Kung Fu and acupuncture, so it is what it is because it must be.

I am a fan of Jet Li, especially when he’s being an earnest down-to-Earth guy who just happens to be absolutely amazing at Kung Fu. Does he eventually bring down Inspector Richard’s evil empire? Of course. Does he rescue Jessica from bondage? Certainly. Does she get her daughter back? Are you kidding me? Of course she does. Do Jessica and Jian fall in love and live happily ever after? I honestly can’t remember, but I don’t think so.

La Main Droite du Diable (Betrayed) (1988) — 7/10

Katie Philips (Debra Winger) is an undercover police officer on assignment in the Midwest, looking for the killer of highly divisive radio DJ Sam Kraus (Richard Libertini) who’d been murdered in cold blood in a parking garage. She drives a combine and befriends Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger), striking up a romantic relationship, and getting to know others, like Shorty (John Mahoney) and Wes (Ted Levine). The officer in charge of the case at the FBI Michael Carnes (John Heard) is also romantically interested in her (I mean, of course).

This seems like a pretty innocuous investigation at this point. Down-home people trying to scratch out a living in an increasingly difficult economy. Wholesome. Familiar. It rings true even almost 40 years later. Except it’s not wholesome. Gary keeps asking Katie to go hunting with him. She eventually agrees and they meet up early in the morning with some of Gary’s friends (Shorty, Wes, etc.) There’s also a terrified black man who’s obviously been worked over and is gibbering for his freedom. Katie is taken aback, watching them let him loose and start counting down before they give chase. I think he manages to kill Shorty, which they take to be an act that will justify what they are doing to him. They eventually catch him and kill him, after offering Katie the kill, which she refuses.

Gary brings her in to the fold even more, being very, very open now about how the Jews and the Niggers are at fault for every little thing that’s gone wrong in their lives. They have training camps and picnics where there are guns everywhere and where they train for the coming war against … everyone who’s not white and from the midwest. It’s pretty over-the-top but it’s pretty much what people imagine is going on right now in America in all of the nooks and crannies that haven’t gotten the message yet. It is absolutely not like that, though. I was just at a gathering like this yesterday and no-one was even bitching about immigrants, to say nothing of the Blacks and the Jews.

In the movie, the group robs a bank, shooting a guard but also taking a casualty in Wes, who’d been very suspicious of Katie. It turns out that the FBI had deliberately taken him out so as to protect Katie’s cover. The group has bigger ambitions and is financing a local politician who’s in the KKK. We also get to see Katie being driven past a Klan rally before she travels to a city where Gary is going to kill a recalcitrant politician with a sniper rifle. Katie shoots Gary before he can take out his target, but there’s a backup sniper who kills the politician anyway.

It’s an odd ending because Katie ends up quitting her job and, a year later, returns to the village and family where she’d been undercover, receiving equal parts reprobation from the townsfolk and love from Gary’s daughters, to whom she’d become a mother. I guess the movie’s trying to say that, no matter how many black people you might see killed in human safaris, you can still forgive people?

Waterworld (1995) — 7/10

It is the year 2,500AD, when the Earth has become nearly completely covered with water. The characters of the movie are exclusively living on man-made atolls, which are all that is left of civilization. There is no mining, no materials, no manufacturing base. Mankind lives on the leftovers of civilization, slowly burning through what is left.

Mariner (Kevin Costner) sails alone on a jerry-rigged but somewhat high-tech catamaran. He pulls in to such an atoll, ready to trade dirt and other items that only he seems to be able to get. The atoll-dwellers trade with him but they are suspicious of how he is able to obtain goods to which no-one else has access. They discover that he is a mutant, with functional gills behind his ears. He is, of course, parted from his possessions and sentenced to death.

He is accidentally saved by an attack by the Smokers, who are a gang of bastards that are somehow still running their empire on fossil fuels. Their home base is the Exxon Valdez and their patron saint is Captain Hazelwood. It’s 500 years in the future, so it’s pretty far-fetched that the boat would even be seaworthy anymore, but it’s fine. The Deacon (Dennis Hopper) leads this merry crew.

The water world of the future is a brutal one, with a stark delineation between man and woman, based simply on might makes right. After the attack, the Mariner manages to escape with the help of Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and her daughter Enola (Tina Majorino), neither of whom are particularly useful on the boat. The hierarchy is clear and warranted but they chafe against it anyway. Old Gregor (Michael Jeter) also gets away in a zeppelin-like craft, which he’d prepared for himself, Helen, and Enola. The escape goes awry and he’s left on his own, while they’re left with the Mariner.

They have adventures, completely improbably meeting another trader, who’d been drifting for days with nothing to offer but a few sheets of paper. That’s enough for the Mariner, whose interest in history and explanations far outweighs his interest in sexy Jean Tripplehorn. He trades a roll with her to the other guy for a bunch of paper. This doesn’t go well and he ends up slaughtering the guy, in what we are supposed to feel is a justified manner—but the guy was holding up his end of the bargain. He just had no leverage to bring to bear should the deal go south. He could only bargain if the other side wasn’t going to just kill him and take his stuff. Which is what the ostensible hero of the story does.

This is fine: as noted above, the world is a brutal place, far more brutal even than our present. Rules, mores, and ethics become unsustainable luxuries chewed up as fodder for the stories we tell that portray ourselves in the best possible light as we do what we can to survive.

After Helen continues to ride the Mariner about taking them to Dry Land—even though he’s explained that there aren’t enough supplies for them all—he takes her in his diving bell, down, down, down to the former surface of the Earth. He drags her in the bell through the remains of Denver, Colorado. Enola continues to draw objects that suggest that she had been raised on Dry Land, but no-one can figure out how this could possibly be. The Smokers show up while the Mariner and Helen are underwater, kidnapping Enola and torching the Mariner’s boat.

Gregor—remember him?—fortuitously and completely improbably—appears to rescue them from their fated deaths aboard the torched husk of the Mariner’s boat. The Mariner stages an attack on the Exxon Valdez to rescue Enola. He succeeds pretty handily, sustaining no damage and managing to sink the entire vessel, with thousands of souls aboard. He manages to get Enola aboard Gregor’s dirigible only for her to fall into the ocean again, forcing him to bungee-jump to rescue her in an utterly comical rescue that incites a jet-ski collision that should have proved fatal to all involved, but which the Deacon improbably survives, despite being weighed down by a tremendous amount of wet leather and steel decorations.

They end up deciphering the map tattooed on Enola’s back—she’s about eight years old and someone had already tattooed a map on her back, where she would never be able to read it herself—and finding Dry Land. The end. Oh no, wait, the Mariner has gills. He hates dry land. He builds a new boat and leaves them. Now the end.

It was a pretty good movie, by modern standards. I took away a star because it was too long and indulgent and because they made Jeanne Tripplehorn’s character too dumb.

I watched it in German.

Godzilla Minus One (2023) — 8/10

This was an actual movie, with an actual plot and, incidentally, also a giant radioactive lizard monster in it. Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who pretended that he had engine trouble in order to avoid carrying out his mission. He lands on an island for repairs, where the crews are doubtful about his story since his plane is just fine. Soon after, though, they are either distracted or outright killed by a rampage by Godzilla. Shikishima also fails to fire on the giant lizard, further cementing his reputation as a coward, especially with mechanic Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), who watches all of his other compatriots die in the attack—while Shikishima did nothing but cower.

Shikishima returns to a devastated Tokyo, finding his former neighbor Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando), who tells him that his parents are dead. Shikishima meets Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) in the market as she’s chased through by police. She thrusts baby Akiko into his arms, then circles back hours later to pick her back up. The child is not hers, but she and Shikishima settle in to a family life in the wreckage of his old home.

He ends up taking a job as a minesweeper, his facility with the deck-mounted gun gaining him praise from his colleagues captain Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), engineer Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), and greenhorn Shirō Mizushima (Yuki Yamada). They clear mines for a while, but soon learn that Godzilla is back, having grown and mutated through even more H-bomb testing. They manage to drop a mine in its mouth, then shoot it, a scene that mirrors Jaws nearly perfectly. At least no-one said “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Godzilla survives the attack easily, as the lizard is capable of incredibly quick regeneration, it’s ruined mouth and cheeks quickly regrowing into a fearsome and angry visage. Godzilla goes on to attack Ginza, where Noriko works. Shikishima hurries there to rescue her, but it is she who ends up sacrificing herself to save him, pushing him into an alley as Godzilla’s all-consuming nuclear fire tears up the main street.

Devastated by the loss, Shikishima vows revenge and begins to work with Noda, Akitsu, and Mizushima—as well as a host of other volunteers—to bring down Godzilla. The government won’t do it. They hatch a wild plan to use nitrogen bubbles to drop Godzilla to the sea floor and then to use rapidly inflating cushions to bring it back to the surface quickly, hopefully causing irreparable damage through rapid decompression. This wasn’t ever likely to work, as it’s unclear whether Godzilla even has lungs or uses Oxygen. At any rate, the backup plan was for Shikishima to fly a kamikaze mission into Godzilla’s mouth with an even bigger bomb. For this, they recruit Tachibana to fix up an experimental plane for the pilot.

Shikishima accomplishes his mission, bailing out at the last moment, using an ejection seat—labelled Schleudersitz—and avoiding the certain death that he’d planned for himself and which even Tachibana no longer wished for him. Noriko turns out to have survived the attack in Ginza and everyone lives happily ever after.

Or do they? The final scene shows a chunk of Godzilla’s seared flesh sinking in the ocean but seemingly slowly regenerating.

I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles.

I Canoni die Navarone (1961) — 8/10

This is quite a famous WWII film about a motley crew of saboteurs gathered together for a suicide mission to destroy the titular giant German guns emplaced on the Greek island of Navarone. Capt. Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) is the no-nonsense head of the operation, having been recruited for his renowned mountaineering skills. He is joined by an old Greek colleague Greek Col. Andrea Stavros (Anthony Quinn), British Cpl. John Anthony Miller (David Niven) as well as a few others. They take a hired boat through stormy waters to the uninhabited side of the island, which is fronted by a sheer cliff.

A terrible storm tosses the ship to shreds on the shoals and rocks, leaving the team soaking and exhausted on the tiny shore at the foot of the cliff. They climb up, getting everyone up there safely, save for Maj. Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle), who is injured enough that they have to schlep him on a litter for the rest of the way. A 12-mile march across the mountains takes them to a village, where they were to meet up with local rebels. Both the rebels and the team seem to be completely and utterly surprised to see the other, even though they totally planned to do this from the beginning. After clearing up some misunderstandings, they continue together, with the silent Anna (Gia Scala) and Maria Pappadimos (Irene Papas) being absorbed into the crew.

They are eventually captured by Germans, escaping, then finding a traitor in their midst (spoiler: Anna), then breaking through the tunnels to the guns after all, setting explosives, and blowing the guns to kingdom come after having made a daring cliffside escape once again. Explosives expert Miller came through big-time, as did the wounded Stavros. Stavros and Pappadimos kindle a relationship near the end and he decides to stay on to fight the good fight in Greece.

I watched it in English with Italian subtitles.

Born on the Fourth of July (1989) — 8/10

This is the true story of Ron Kovic, a young man who grew up in Massapequa, Long Island. Director Oliver Stone tells his story well, showing how he’d been plagued his whole life by being nearly as successful as he wanted to be, never quite fulfilling his mother’s expectations. His mother was very, very religious; his father less so. Ron did well at wrestling but we are shown his defeat in some sort of regional or state championship.

He hears about the war, he hears about the dastardly communists that must be stopped, he signs up for the Marines, he makes fun of friends who are too chicken to do the same. He fails to impress “his girl”, who goes to the prom with someone else while Ron sits at home. He decides on a grand gesture, running through torrential rain to get to the gymnasium, where he gets a dance with her. It’s unclear whether she’s genuinely happy that he showed up or whether it’s just a pity dance because he’d run through the rain.

Fast forward to his second tour in Vietnam. He welcomes a young guy named Wilson (Michael Compotaro) from Georgia to the shit, telling him he’s never heard of anyone from Georgia dying before. He’s just as cocky now as he was in high school, faking it to make it. Their first sortie with Wilson goes south pretty quickly, with Kovic’s unit shooting up a village and, in particular, one hut in which a family had been hiding. They move in to find a whole family slaughtered, all except for a single crying baby. Kovic tries to soothe it, but his commander tells him that there’s no time because more Vietcong are on the way.

Soon after, they’re under fire, coming from left, right, and ahead. They fall back in a wildly disorganized retreat, with Wilson coming up over a dune, framed as a silhouette in the sun, surprising Kovic, who riddles him with bullets. Kovic is traumatized; Wilson is dead. Kovic tries to report the friendly-fire incident but his commanding officer isn’t having it. Kovic is absolved by the Marines but not by himself.

Soon after, he’s in another heavy-fire battle and takes a bullet to the foot. Instead of crawling back, the adrenalin rips through him and he thinks he can be a hero. He levers himself up on his shattered foot, holding his machine gun Rambo-style. He is cut down by a bullet to the chest that leaves a giant exit wound in his back and shatters his spine just below the chest.

Back home, he starts his new life in a filthy, filthy VA hospital. He tries to beat the odds, but the odds are 0% that he will ever walk again. He eventually shatters a femur in a fall he suffers when walking on crutches, dragging his dead legs. He doesn’t feel a thing.

He is released to go back home, where he tries to put a happy face on things. It’s only surface, though. His mother can’t hide her disappointment. His father is more accepting, but obviously shattered. Ron is in the parade, as a veteran. He’s invited to speak, but chokes up when he hears a crying baby, which sends him into a flashback. He’s unable to continue and has to be escorted off the stage.

Ron sinks into a life of alcoholism, living at home and making everyone miserable. He visits his former girl Donna (Kyra Sedgwick) in Syracuse, attending a vigil/protest for the victims of the Kent State shootings. Kovic watches the highly militarized police repressing people’s rights to protest.

He eventually moves out of his parents’ house, down to Mexico, where he meets Charlie (Willem Dafoe), a fellow paraplegic who has discovered tequila and Mexican prostitutes who understand how to take care of him. After some entirely predictable misadventures there, Kovic returns to the States, traveling to Texas to visit Wilson’s parents, his widow, and his young daughter. He confesses what happened: the widow hopes that God forgives him, but is unable to herself; Wilson’s parents are actually more understanding.

Flash forward to Kovic protesting at the Republican national convention where Nixon is being nominated. He is repressed, along with other protesters but surges to get back in the hall, only to be rejected again. All the time, though, the cameras are rolling. The movie ends with Kovic addressing the Democratic national convention, way back when they were still pretending to be anti-war.

This is just like so many of Oliver Stone’s movies: well-made and important. Tom Cruise is really, really good in the role, striking just the right balance of at least partially misplaced arrogance along with a slowly dawning and growing earnestness about the crimes of his country. It’s a long journey, but one that he made and maintains to this day. Stone’s movies almost always have the right politics and the right interpretation of history. He is a national treasure.