THE CREATOR Review

Visually absorbing if not thematically so. Though the ideas it's playing with and tropes it's utilizing may not be as shallow as they initially appear they tend to feel cursory due to the fact writer/director Gareth Edwards (Monsters, Rogue One) never finds the right groove for his film to slide into. The Creator is ultimately a movie of fits and starts in which each new promise of something exciting and/or interesting never fully delivers on as much.

It's an odd feeling, really, given mere minutes into the film I was bowled over by the authenticity imbued on an image of a massive spacecraft hovering over a more natural (and clearly real) location. I'm a sucker for when films can integrate futuristic or not yet realized elements into a more common and recognizable environment and Edwards has a great eye for such combinations that really allow both components to pop, but while I was immediately in on the aesthetic I kept wondering when I was going to be made to care or even be wowed by anything other than the framing.

Aside from a few in-world inventions, performance moments (largely from Madeleine Yuna Voyles in a really wonderful and really complicated role for a child to play), along with some questionable story turns there wasn't anything that made me sit up in a way that I was inclined to lean forward. Rather, I kind of shifted my weight to the other armrest to consider why the film didn't seem interested in leaning into its ideas either. The mission is fairly straightforward, but the intentions are not...always. Weirdly, and despite admitting it was beings operating on artificial intelligence who nuked Los Angeles, The Creator is determined to convince us the only thing left of our souls are the fingerprints we left on the programming within the robots we're now at war with.

THE DROP Review

When one approaches a film with a certain set of expectations based on the individual components and what it could potentially add up to as a whole it gives way to a certain direction we think the film will go. From the outside looking in The Drop starring Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini in his final screen role sold itself as a Brooklyn-based crime drama that centers around a robbery gone wrong and the investigation around the robbery that brings a certain drop-point system to its knees. While all of this is still very much a part of the film, it isn't the centerpiece, as an audience we aren't drawn into the plot as in the series of events that make up the story, but instead become more interested in how these specific characters will decide the course of the story rather than the tropes typically employed in this genre. To be fair, it is a deliberately slow-paced affair that sets the tone of not only the critical environment in which the movie takes place, but the attitude of our main character and how it lines up with the aforementioned plot elements that combine to bring home more than we bargained for in the third act. As the film goes on and we wonder why the tension never reaches breaking points with the police involvement or why more things, shocking things aren't happening we are getting a portrait painted for us and we don't even realize it until director Michaël R. Roskam wants us to. There are core questions people have to ask themselves when put in a predicament such as Bob Saginowski (Hardy) is here. What is his overall goal in life? What is standing in his way? What might he lose if he doesn't achieve his goal? They are questions that Dennis Lehane no doubt asked himself as well when he penned both the screenplay and his short story the film is based on. These questions though, ones that typically provide a kind of structure for where a story needs to go, while still in place, are allowed to become side-tracked and thus result in a film where it doesn't feel we are dipping in on a very specific moment in time in the life of the characters, but that this is simply another set of struggles, another set of detractors and minor set-backs in a neighborhood where everyone is fighting to make a living and maybe one day, achieve their ideal goals.

RUNNER RUNNER Review

Runner Runner is a film that would seemingly be posed as a well-received thriller-infused drama about the high stakes world of online gaming, the billions of dollars in revenue it provides and the dirty schemes the people who run these sites use to cheat schmoes sitting in their living rooms and betting their life savings. It would seem that way, it certainly has all of the components. Both of its leading actors, Justin Timberlake and Ben Affleck, have careers as hot as they've ever been at the moment and director Brad Furman's previous film was The Lincoln Lawyer, a gritty legal drama with a slick persona at the center that didn't necessarily break any barriers, but played to its strengths and began the career renaissance Matthew McConaughey is now experiencing. So why, with all this potential, all these favorable facets coming into play as well as the added bonus of having a script penned by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, they guys that also wrote Rounders and Ocean's Thirteen, end up being little more than a slog of tedious and boring beats we've seen a million times before with little more to offer than pretty scenery via Costa Rica? While that script is certainly one of the major culprits it seems as much as there are good things working for this film there are just as many if not more negative aspects working against it. I hate to rag on a film that clearly is trying for a certain style and has a clear intent of what it would like to be and the kind of quota it is trying to fill as far as entertainment value goes because Runner Runner clearly knows what it is and how far it can go, but even within these limitations it fails to meet the most basic rules of being a movie and that is first and foremost being entertaining. There is nothing to keep us invested, no characters to sympathize with or plot twists to intrigue us further. From the moment we are introduced to Timberlake's character and presented with his dilemma and then subsequently presented with Affleck's position in the whole thing we can see where things are heading and thus, they do.