Jon Amiel
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Game Night (2018)
Directed by John Francis Daley
influenced by The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)
Plot
The very funny “Game Night” belongs to the comedy sub-genre of People Think They’re Pretending But It’s Actually Real, a class that includes such fine entries as “Three Amigos,” “Galaxy Quest” and “A Bug’s Life” (which are all the same movie, as you know), plus “Tropic Thunder” and the under-appreciated Bill Murray entry “The Man Who Knew Too Little.”
Plot-wise, it’s still sort of stale, delivering a familiar premise (okay, I guess we haven’t all seen the underrated ’90s Bill Murray comedy The Man Who Knew Too Little, of which Game Night seems like a remake right down to the more successful brother’s role in setting up an immersive theater mystery game that gets confused with a coincidental real crime occurring at the same time).
Of course, in the style of The Man Who Knew Too Little or, uh … Rough Night, a real-life crime intrudes on the supposed performance, sending a bunch of fragile-ego softies out on a flailing rescue mission.
There was a similar comedy premise over 20 years ago in The Man Who Knew Too Little.
Unlike, say, the 1998 "Armageddon," in which entire cities were slaughtered just to move the sleeping giant of a plot around, most of the catastrophes here are as carefully engineered by Mr. Amiel and his crew as those episodes of "The A-Team," which started out soothing viewers with the announcement that no one had been hurt during the stunts.
Recent "end of the world" movies, like Armageddon and Deep Impact, were memorable for little more than being loud, and the trailer for this movie makes it look like it's cut from the same cloth.
It regurgitates the genre’s clichés until the point where it becomes Armageddon , but without that dud’s insipient American jingoism, macho posturing and crappy Aerosmith songs.
El filme, dirigido por el bastante pasable Jon Amiel (La Emboscada, Sommersby), cumple perfectamente con los parámetros de las películas de desastres que tanto auge tuvieron a mediados de los 50 (como representaciones simbólicas del miedo estadounidense al comunismo y las consecuencias de la Guerra Fría) y a finales de los 90 (con el miedo inherente al mentado cambio de milenio que, supuestamente, traería una serie de calamidades para la humanidad), de las cuales algunos ejemplos van desde El Dïa Que Paralizaron La Tierra (The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951) hasta Terremoto (Earthquake, 1974), Día de la Independencia (Independence Day, 1996), Tornado (Twister, 1997) o Armageddon (1998).
Every film requires a certain degree of "suspension of disbelief", but films like "Armageddon", "The Core", and other disaster flicks all present realistic scenarios then try to get you to buy science that even a 5th grader could tell you is bogus.
The Core is probably betting that people are more fatigued by the Riefenstahl-ian "embedded" live coverage of our troops in action than by their over-familiarity with this kind of Armageddon /Deep Impact/Poseidon Adventure falderal, when the truth is that it's possible to be tired of both.
Tchéky Karyo, my new favorite unshaven French actor (you can see him next week in The Good Thief, Neil Jordan's fun remake of Bob le Flambeur [1955]), plays an endearing French researcher called Sergei, and Stanley Tucci is a hoot as a plummy-voiced prima donna celebrity-scientist who might have inadvertently caused the whole core mess in the first place.
There are less overt but no less redolent inspirations throughout Red Notice — to the Bourne, Bond and Mission: Impossible movies, the National Treasure franchise and the Sean Connery-Catherine Zeta-Jones romp Entrapment .
Visual Effects Supervisor Gregory L. McMurry ("Queen of the Damned") employs thirty foot crystals within a geode that casts the terranauts in unnatural light and a free-falling Virgil as realistic as anything in 1966's "Fantastic Voyage."
El filme, dirigido por el bastante pasable Jon Amiel (La Emboscada, Sommersby), cumple perfectamente con los parámetros de las películas de desastres que tanto auge tuvieron a mediados de los 50 (como representaciones simbólicas del miedo estadounidense al comunismo y las consecuencias de la Guerra Fría) y a finales de los 90 (con el miedo inherente al mentado cambio de milenio que, supuestamente, traería una serie de calamidades para la humanidad), de las cuales algunos ejemplos van desde El Dïa Que Paralizaron La Tierra (The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951) hasta Terremoto (Earthquake, 1974), Día de la Independencia (Independence Day, 1996), Tornado (Twister, 1997) o Armageddon (1998).
Nathan Lind (former Tarzan Alexander Skarsgard), who is the most conveniently buff, action-enabled, lowly, and intellectual stud this side of Aaron Eckhart in The Core.
Put another way, it cobbles together pieces of The Core , Alien vs. Predator, Pacific Rim , a selection of the more recent Marvel tales and Ice Age 3 and targets Pensacola, Florida and Hong Kong as battlegrounds.
Being a disaster movie, The Core is more notable for how many things it borrows than how many things it invents: in this case, the general shape of the first act from 1997's Volcano (man, Volcano, there's a movie I haven't thought about in a fucking lifetime) - or the exact, specific first act from 2009's 2012 , if only it had existed at the time - is welded onto the second and third acts of 1998's Armageddon .
Famed blockbuster filmmaker Irwin Allen would be pleased as punch to see that his tradition of big, loud action flicks that pits man against nature-induced disaster, such as "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno," is still alive.
The most striking visual calamity occurs in London's Trafalgar Square, which endures a variation of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
Flocks of pigeons forget how to navigate, swooping down into crowds of unsuspecting citizens, as though they were auditioning for the next made-for-TV sequel to The Birds.
We don’t really see as many serial killer movies coming out of Hollywood as we used to. Back in the 1990s they were a dime a dozen, headlined by Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and David Fincher’s Seven (1995) but including the likes of Copycat (1995), American Psycho (2000), Natural Born Killers (1994), Kalifornia (1993), and many others.
Kimi is ultimately a very basic thriller built on threads from far better ones ( Blow Out , The Conversation , The Net , 1995; Copycat , 1995; Intruders , 2015) but it’s a blue-haired Kravitz that keeps viewers fixated.
(Richard Gere and Jodie Foster played out the same plot in the post-Civil War South in "Sommersby.")
For two refreshing takes on the genre, check out Peter Weir's Fearless (1993) and Don McKellar's Last Night (1998).
Copycat…
He was the epitome of evil male chauvinism in Your Friends & Neighbors and In the Company of Men.
It’s impossible to review Zero Dark Thirty without having to infiltrate a room full of political lasers like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (much nicer metaphor than a mine field, isn’t it?).
He was the epitome of evil male chauvinism in Your Friends & Neighbors and In the Company of Men.
"The Core" also calls to mind "Independence Day" in its willingness to pulverize world-famous landmarks (the Colosseum in Rome, for starters) for the sheer spectacle of it.
El filme, dirigido por el bastante pasable Jon Amiel (La Emboscada, Sommersby), cumple perfectamente con los parámetros de las películas de desastres que tanto auge tuvieron a mediados de los 50 (como representaciones simbólicas del miedo estadounidense al comunismo y las consecuencias de la Guerra Fría) y a finales de los 90 (con el miedo inherente al mentado cambio de milenio que, supuestamente, traería una serie de calamidades para la humanidad), de las cuales algunos ejemplos van desde El Dïa Que Paralizaron La Tierra (The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951) hasta Terremoto (Earthquake, 1974), Día de la Independencia (Independence Day, 1996), Tornado (Twister, 1997) o Armageddon (1998).
The production is a mix of "Independence Day," "Armageddon" and the aforementioned Irwin Allen films as the earth-ship Virgil is constructed at breakneck speed before the Earth stops spinning, the electromagnetic field collapses and the unprotected world is incinerated from the bombardment of space-born microwaves.
Ms. Swank may never again find a role as challenging as Boys Don't Cry, but at least she recently started her own production company.
Swank might have been so touching in Boys Don't Cry (1999) because she was playing the part of an overactor instead of merely overacting.