James Mangold
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This slick production under the helm of James Mangold is Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" mixed with Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho."
Have you ever seen one of the many versions of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," in which a group of strangers are brought together in an out-of-the-way location and terrorized by an unseen murderer?
A clever combination of opposing sensibilities Agatha Christie ( Ten Little Indians ) and Friday the 13th Identity is the kind of B-movie that Hollywood cant make enough of these days, and its a darned shame.
Although "Identity" boasts a talented cast that fleshes out its characters to an uncommon degree for what is ostensibly just a fancy slasher flick, screenwriter Michael Cooney (scribe of the "Jack Frost" cult-horror pictures) lifts the motel part of the plot almost wholesale from Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians."
That, of course, would be Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," which has provided the template for hundreds of secret-killer movies good and bad.
In a dangerous gambit, screenwriter Michael Cooney actually has one of the characters mention the resemblance of this situation to Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" (the movie adaptation, of course, not the novel).
Some things are a little on the point like the clips from the Western Shane (a clear influence on this story) being watched by the group in a hotel room.
Not only does Logan make explicit reference to Shane, the film borrows the genre’s self-critical eye, questioning our need to mythologise heroes.
Traversing dusty American backroads haunted by the ravages of social downturns, this trio of interlocking misfits morph into warped western characters, a notion blatantly underlined by a scene in which Xavier and Laura watch Shane.
A closer analogue is the 1953 western Shane, which Mangold quotes liberally.
But mostly the movie is brilliantly on point in its influences — the 1953 Western classic Shane plays a key role — and how it ties in to the previous movies without being beholden to them.
Mangold uses clips and quotes to draw a pointed comparison between Logan and the protagonist of Shane, the 1953 Alan Ladd Western about an aging gunfighter whose attempts to settle down with a family lead to tragedy.
You can see the influence of better racing films in the DNA: the bruised poetry of Ford v Ferrari, the tight emotional structure of Rush, even the metaphorical sweetness of Cars.
…those seeking a similar aesthetic thrill can also find it elsewhere, with recent titles springing to mind including James Mangold’s Ford vs. Ferrari…
…it does not touch the hem of being as memorable and superb as “Ford v Ferrari” (2019), the definitive racing classic film.
The film, which lands in theaters June 27 before a streaming release on Apple TV+, is a deft addition to a sturdy lineage of motorsport flicks, from Rush and Gran Turismo to Ford v Ferrari and, most recently, Ferrari.
…or the dramatic punch of Ford v Ferrari…
As opposed to true stories like Rush or Ford vs Ferrari, fictional ‘be all you can be’ motor-racing films are few and far between…
Taking a page out of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, as well as perhaps Sam Peckinpah’s own story of American legends aging gracelessly in ignominious gore in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Logan opens on a grim and sparse future.
When Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, he filled it with everything he wanted to say about the Western, about violence, and the complexities and damage that violence does to the human soul.
So if you want a very general comparison, the tone and feel of Logan is sort of like if Clint Eastwood's character in Unforgiven had been a claw-wielding mutant and the story was set in the future instead of the past.
“Logan” calls back directly to “ Shane ,” including a scene in which the characters watch the film, but it has more echoes of late-career films for icons such as “ The Shootist ” and “ Unforgiven ” in the way it deconstructs the line between hero and legend.
In the way it explores the inescapable nature of violence and its long-term effects, Logan is the Unforgiven of superhero cinema.
With its overt allusions to Shane (clips of which are shown) and echoes of Unforgiven , Logan demands to be given consideration as a “serious” movie.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced Logan (2017)
Characters Plot Visuals Themes
With its hero suggesting a broken-down cousin to Mad Max, it’s like “The Road Warrior” meets “Shane” meets “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (yes, there’s a “bad” Wolverine).
When “Logan” breaks out into action, it feels organic to the plot, moving the themes and characters forward, much like in James Cameron ’s “ Terminator 2: Judgment Day ,” another film which this one reflects in its road structure and that of a protector for the next generation (and in another way that I won’t spoil).
(In that sense, Logan owes more to Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s aesthetics than, say, Man of Steel.)
Here we’re in a story rooted in the humanity of Logan, not the superpowers of the Wolverine, echoing themes of Cameron’s Terminator 2 and Mendes' Road to Perdition.
In a motel room, Laura catches George Stevens’ Shane on TV, and while the reference feels appropriate — Logan probably owes more to Westerns than to superhero flicks, with a bit of Firestarter, Children of Men and Terminator 2 also thrown in — we may be struck by how little our nihilistic lead behaves like Alan Ladd’s romantic, all-American drifter in that 1953 classic.
After much ado we eventually get on the road, and instead of following typical superhero formulas Logan bites off massive chunks from other movies like Children Of Men, Firestarter, True Grit, The Professional, Terminator 2, Alice In The Cities, The Outlaw Josey Wales, A Perfect World and hell, pretty much the entire cinema of Clint Eastwood until the last-half hour when it becomes a straight-up remake of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
(The old Cary Grant charmer “Charade” did this perfectly.)
While watching the new Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz spy thriller “ Knight and Day ,” I kept flashing back to Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in Alfred Hitchcock ’s “ North by Northwest ” and Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Stanley Donen ’s “Charade,” the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made.
But since Knight and Day really wants to be Charade (1963), it kept reminding me that as much as Cruise and Diaz aren’t Kutcher and Heigl, neither are they Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn—by a very long shot indeed.
"Knight and Day" aspires to the light charm of a romantic action comedy like “Charade” or “ Romancing the Stone ,” but would come closer if it dialed down the relentless action.
He says he wanted to pattern this on two Cary Grant caper films, Stanley Donen�s, Charade (1963) and Alfred Hitchock�s North by Northwest (1959).
The reason director/co-writer James Mangold's ("3:10 to Yuma" and "Walk the Line") carefree homage to globe-trotting capers like Audrey Hepburn's "Charade" works so effectively has more to do with teamwork than plot.
Writer Michael Cooney ("Jack Frost") uses the single location thriller format of "Ten Little Indians" to pay homage to "Psycho" with a twist on that film's psychiatric underpinnings while director James Mangold ("Heavy," "Kate & Leopold") keeps the action barreling forward, roving about the limited confines of a desolate motel with flair.
Identity seems at first to be a cross between Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho but then twists into something even more surprising.
Not since "Psycho" has a motel provided the setting for such terror and helpnessness in the face of an unseen, rampant killer.
But instead of being shocked, we have to muster the energy to roll our eyes at the solution doled out in one of those serious psychological lectures, a device that was cornball when Hitchcock resorted to it in the otherwise brilliant "Psycho."
But, even as its end credits are in sight, the movie does a huge turnaround to become a horror version of "Six Characters in Search of an Author" -- and a homage to Hitchcock's "Psycho."
A touch of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is present, but the similarities are minimal.
The Right Stuff (1983)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
influenced Ford v Ferrari (2019)
Themes Characters
Its structure and sentiment is familiar from movies from “The Right Stuff” and “Seabiscuit” to “The Fighter” and “First Man,” hitting all the right notes as a maverick-versus the-corporate-suits movie.
Telling the story of the 1966 Le Mans auto race, a 24-hour ordeal that pitted underdog Ford against perennial champion Ferrari, director James Mangold draws out his two-and-half hour runtime in what could have been The Right Stuff of car racing.
Like Tucker: The Man and His Dream or The Right Stuff , Ford v Ferrari is an acutely observant examination of the holes that an obsession with the envelope, the edge, the very line of what’s possible can leave and the ones it can fill.
Car movies need more than visceral excitement, and although Ford v Ferrari features the pride of production, national representation, and performance (through the hierarchy of owners and risk-taking performers), it never quite grasps the aspirational aspect of American adventure that distinguished The Right Stuff or Tucker: A Man and His Dream (although the scene where Henry Ford II lifts off in a private helicopter at a crucial moment in the race says something real about how obligation meets privilege).
Given the era, there are echoes of "The Right Stuff" in these hard men -- speed junkies, risking all in their '60s-era machines -- with Damon as a glib good ol' boy and Bale as a working stiff with a Dickensian accent who, it's noted, fought his way across Europe during World War II.
Like the Chuck Yeager character in The Right Stuff, he’s married to a good woman (Caitriona Balfe) who understands his passion for cars and gives him the space he needs.
Hence, like Children of Men, she is the future they must protect.
The “tired man travels cross-country with an endangered child” plot mimics both Children Of Men (with all the despair, though without the bravura no-cut combats) and Midnight Special (with all the spooky-kid action, though without the Spielbergian wonder).
The year is 2029 and, in a set-up reminiscent of Children of Men, people have stopped giving birth to mutants.
In a motel room, Laura catches George Stevens’ Shane on TV, and while the reference feels appropriate — Logan probably owes more to Westerns than to superhero flicks, with a bit of Firestarter, Children of Men and Terminator 2 also thrown in — we may be struck by how little our nihilistic lead behaves like Alan Ladd’s romantic, all-American drifter in that 1953 classic.
The comparisons to “ Children of Men ” and classic Westerns may lead one to believe that this is overwritten and overly intellectual.
Logan, which features a pack of brave mutant kids forced to live entirely on their own, also brings up memories of Children of the Damned and Children of Men, although it’s not as good or resonant as either.
“Grand Prix” (1966), starring James Garner, is clearly an important influence; the photography allows the audience to be inside the tight quarters of the race cars as they fly along the open track.
Not that the running time is a problem per se; the great 1966 racing masterpiece Grand Prix is longer still.
Not since John Frankenheimer revved up his engines to bring 1966’s Grand Prix to life have I watched a motion picture that made me feel as if I was sitting in the seat right next to the driver.
With its old-fashioned dramatic approach, the insertion of numerous dead weight scenes involving Miles and his wife (Catriona Balfe) and young son (Noah Jupe) and an insistence on dragging things out to over 2 1/2 hours of screen time, this is the kind of film that could have been produced back in the day alongside such racing epics as “Grand Prix” (1966) and the Steve McQueen vehicle “Le Mans” (1971) with nary a change.
Damon and Bale are as solid as foundation as you can build a film on (the two have a mid-film scrap that’s essentially the “I tea-bagged your fucking drum set!” fight from Step Brothers put in the middle of Grand Prix ), and it’s actually quite nice to see the latter actor, famous for his brusqueness, work on a project that spotlights his warmth.
The interior compositions are sedate and classical, and when the film hits the track the disciplined camera coverage and superb editing recall such racing movie classics as John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966, with James Garner), Le Mans (1971 with Steve McQueen) and Winning (1969 with Paul Newman).
He teams up with his friend, savant driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale, finally getting to show off his versatile British accent) and the Ford Motor Company to take on Ferrari in the famous 24-hour long Le Mans race in France.
Newman starred in 1969's Winning (about the Indianapolis 500), and McQueen did 1971's Le Mans (about the famous 24-hour French race).
Cinematically, Mangold ( Logan ) covers much of the same visual and narrative territory of those from era it is depicting – it’s a talky, thoughtful companion piece to Steve McQueen’s 1971 pet project directed by Lee H. Katzin, Le Mans, augmented by Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography and some remarkably invisible CGI.
With its old-fashioned dramatic approach, the insertion of numerous dead weight scenes involving Miles and his wife (Catriona Balfe) and young son (Noah Jupe) and an insistence on dragging things out to over 2 1/2 hours of screen time, this is the kind of film that could have been produced back in the day alongside such racing epics as “Grand Prix” (1966) and the Steve McQueen vehicle “Le Mans” (1971) with nary a change.
The film is a relatively straightforward western drama, a “famous gunslinger’s last rodeo” type adventure not unlike The Shootist and it is quite successful in its respective goals.
“Logan” calls back directly to “ Shane ,” including a scene in which the characters watch the film, but it has more echoes of late-career films for icons such as “ The Shootist ” and “ Unforgiven ” in the way it deconstructs the line between hero and legend.
For this superior followup, Mangold and Jackman turn to the Western; "Shane" is referenced directly, but the violent result is closer to a Sergio Leone revamp of John Wayne's final film, "The Shootist," as an ill, perhaps dying hero, Logan (Jackman), aka the Wolverine (the ex-X-Man with the adamantium claws), is pulled from self-medicated seclusion for a final mission involving his former mentor, Professor X (Patrick Stewart), who is succumbing to a neurodegenerative disorder, and a silent, scary-eyed little girl (transfixing newcomer Dafne Keen), whose own retractable talons and lethal athleticism have made her the target of the usual hunting party of corrupt government/corporate agents.
Logan uses violence, profanity, and other unnerving, shocking artistic choices the way a film like Bonnie and Clyde, The Passion of the Christ, The Wild Bunch, or RoboCop for example pushed boundaries as statements and to speak to greater truths about the characters and the world they inhabit, to evoke responses that make the moments of violence resonate within the viewer as expressions of the themes and how we connect to them personally.
Here, he imbues Logan with elements of Shane as well as the likes of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (especially in its use of elegiac violence) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven with a touch of the more contemporary likes of the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men.
Newman starred in 1969's Winning (about the Indianapolis 500), and McQueen did 1971's Le Mans (about the famous 24-hour French race).
The interior compositions are sedate and classical, and when the film hits the track the disciplined camera coverage and superb editing recall such racing movie classics as John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966, with James Garner), Le Mans (1971 with Steve McQueen) and Winning (1969 with Paul Newman).
Decades ago, we saw James Caan in “Red Line 7000” (1965), James Garner in “Grand Prix” (1966), Paul Newman in “Winning” (1969), Steve McQueen in “Le Mans” (1971) and Burt Reynolds in “The Cannonball Run” (1981).
Identity seems at first to be a cross between Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho but then twists into something even more surprising.
The whole premise of 10 people stranded in an isolated location during a thunderstorm is a classic horror setup (think The Cat and the Canary or The Old Dark House), and having them killed off one by one by a mysterious killer is both classic horror and classic Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None).
Written by Michael Cooney (Jack Frost) and directed by James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold) the film is tightly and cleverly constructed -- both in the way that it follows the And Then There Were None motif and in the way it does not drop the ball in the final minutes, as many horror films do (even last year's above-average Below suffered from a poor ending).
And a lot happens in "Identity": This is a movie in the mold of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," except that the killings, once they start, seem to trigger an avalanche of death.
Much like Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery And Then There Were None , a book made into a movie five times, the latter four with the title Ten Little Indians , Identity slowly kills off its characters and reserves the identity of the killer until the cruel end.
Working with screenwriter Patrick O'Neill, Mangold also sneaks in a party-clever visual reference to Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes involving misted breath on a train window, and a verbal shout-out to France's legendary Hotel du Cap, where the director once held a press conference for his 1997 film Cop Land during the Cannes Film Festival.
Mangold and co-writer Patrick O'Neill reference romantic-comedy twisters such as Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, Stanley Donen's Charade and Doug Liman's Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
There are some exhilarating workouts for the hero (on a superfast train, in a battle with ninjas that recalls Kurosawa's Throne of Blood), one or two unexpected turns of events, and formidable femmes fatales in acrobatic samurai Rila Yukushima and slinky Svetlana Khodchenkova, who plays a venomous chemist with her own set of deadly claws.
In one scene, a couple dozen ninjas pinion Logan with arrows of steel strings, until he is as perforated as Toshiro Mifune at the end of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.
That said, there are kicks to be had from a dizzying fight atop a bullet train, and, for Kurosawa fans, the sight of the Wolverine, on a snowy night, impaled by a forest of arrows pays stylish—and wholly appropriate—homage to “Throne of Blood.”
While it’s instinctive to compare “Ford v Ferrari” to the likes of “Le Mans” or (the far superior) “Rush,” shades of “Apollo 13” and “Rocky” (especially “Rocky IV” with the over-pronounced national pride in Mangold’s movie) seem more visible here, with a story that sees family and father-son dynamics of equal importance as the eventual outcome of the race.
And it is a sports movie, despite not really being ABOUT racing, just as something like “Rocky” is a sports movie despite not really being ABOUT boxing.
It’s one of those endings like “Rocky” (1976) where you’re initially rooting for the win-lose outcome, but it’s so well-crafted that you ultimately don’t care as long as the hero experiences personal growth.
Which is saying something since the climax at Le Mans is just as intense as a Rocky movie.
Le Mans ’66 doesn’t do anything particularly revolutionary: it hews to a classic sports-movie structure that’s been tried and tested in everything from Rocky to Hoosiers , while the single major female character, Miles’ wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe), doesn’t get much to do except occasionally gripe about his workload.
He is the Howard Hawks of his era, but even Hawks and his one racing film, Red Line 7000, couldn’t match up to the level of skill Mangold pours into Ford v Ferrari.
Decades ago, we saw James Caan in “Red Line 7000” (1965), James Garner in “Grand Prix” (1966), Paul Newman in “Winning” (1969), Steve McQueen in “Le Mans” (1971) and Burt Reynolds in “The Cannonball Run” (1981).