John Hillcoat
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He’s a gifted director, clearly inspired by the work of Martin Scorsese (especially Goodfellas ) and Michael Mann (especially Heat ), but assured enough to mount multiple sequences that take big cinematic risks and work like gangbusters because of them.
And while director John Hillcoat loves big, loud, urban violence full of high-caliber assaults and tough sweaty guys — there's one robbery here that may remind you of Michael Mann's classic "Heat" — he doesn't know how to rein in his actors.
Very “Heat”-like.
More like the one in Heat or the opening scene of The Dark Knight—swift, methodical, and necessarily brutal.
This was an opportunity for Hillcoat to make his Heat, and get on the radar of casual film fans.
Beyond the titular hook, there’s little here that you wouldn’t get from putting “Heat,” “The Departed” and half-a-dozen episodes of “The Shield” in a blender.
Like “Training Day” before it, “Triple 9” is eminently watchable, with tension throughout, and violence and treachery omnipresent.
Indeed, were it not for the film being set in Atlanta rather than Los Angeles (something which screams "tax breaks!" rather than a storytelling choice, unfortunately), you could squint and think the movie from the same guy who brought us “Training Day,” “Street Kings” and “End Of Watch.”
David: The last really good movie I saw about rogue cops was "Training Day" (2001) with Denzel Washington.
Opening with a messy heist reminiscent of Heat (1995), then crossing into the morally murky jurisdiction of Training Day (2001), this Atlanta-set thriller comes from the helm of John Hillcoat, a director with a long rap sheet of films dealing in the criminal mindset (Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, 1988; The Proposition, 2005; Lawless, 2012).
A former Black List entry written by Matt Cook, the script is not shy about its influences, recalling half a dozen cop dramas from the past few decades, most prominently Heat and Training Day .
Within “Triple 9,” there’s a subplot reminiscent of “Training Day,” as Marcus takes on a new partner, Chris (Casey Affleck), teaching him that the rules of the streets are far from police protocol.
If the landscape owes something to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the pairing of this disembodied voice with images of paradise lost recall the films of Terrence Malick, especially The Thin Red Line.
…which, in those naive, pre-COVID times, was received as a rosier take on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”
(Think The Road, but not nearly as good.)
It’s tough to watch The Dog Stars without thinking of The Road, another film about trying to hold on to your love and humanity as the world collapses…
It certainly never quite achieves the same level of depression and isolation that The Road (2007) reaches.
It’s a story that might remind some of such films as Captain Fantastic and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both curiously starring Viggo Mortensen, or perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s small dramas set in the American Northwest (Wendy and Lucy, Old Joy).
I was reminded often of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic parenting thriller The Road ; I was also sometimes reminded of Manchester by the Sea , with its narrative of a man unable to shake his demons.
This could be some postapocalyptic scenario — like the father-child pair seen in that other Viggo Mortensen movie, “The Road” — except that neither nuclear war nor zombie outbreak has forced them into such straits.
It Comes at Night (2017)
Directed by Trey Edward Shults
influenced by The Road (2009)
Themes Characters
It Comes at Night, on the other hand, can’t help but veer into thematic territory that’s been explored ad nauseum in everything from Night of Living Dead and The Road to The Stand and The Walking Dead.
Paul, a quiet man belying his short fuse, preaches the priorities of family, but his paranoia speaks for itself: Travis is everything that matters to his parents, and, like the son in The Road, he represents all that’s worth preserving after the world ends.
An indie, post-apocalyptic drama recalling John Hillcoat’s neglected “The Road,” “It Comes at Night” was written and directed by Texan prodigy Trey Edward Shults, whose 2015 release “Krisha,” a film about the baddest bad sheep you’ve ever met, is even scarier than “It Comes at Night.”
It Comes at Night is a movie for those who found The Road excessively sentimental.
"The Road," by John Hillcoat, who directed the grim Australian Western "The Proposition," is an apocalyptic "The Grapes of Wrath," in which Man and Boy push a shopping cart filled with their few possessions across a parched earth toward an unknown.
Hillcoat combines minimalism with classical rhythms here – drawing from films such as The Grapes of Wrath and Bicycle Thieves.
A blight of wickedness has fallen on this blighted land (the film was shot in bleakest Iceland) and roving hordes of marauders — more reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” than anything biblical — pillage at will.
Cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera renders Noah’s landscape as one ravaged by cataclysm; the mud-smeared denizens of a barren, craggy land remind of the post-apocalyptic melancholy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
These early passages resemble nothing so much as the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, with our heroes beset by roving gangs of vandals; in one encounter, they rescue an orphaned girl, Ila, and adopt her gratefully into the family circle.
As with 1995’s Heat, an obvious reference point, it’s not short on acting talent: Hillcoat can afford to bump off The Walking Dead ’s Norman Reedus – the kind of greasy presence who might have flourished in a Body Count – early on, and later recruit Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire ) for a one-scene bit as a crossdressing good-time gal.
Like the film version of Cormac McCarthy 's The Road, it has quasi-religious overtones and one very good scene, involving a horde of cannibalistic vampire zombie things being dropped on a town from a helicopter.
It's clear right from the get-go that filmmaker Jim Mickle has absolutely no interest in offering up bursts of either self-referential gimmickry or tension-relieving humor, as Stake Land boasts a consistently dark (literally and figuratively) sensibility that immediately establishes an atmosphere of palpable authenticity and realism (ie the movie comes off as a spin on The Road, except with vampires).
Writer-director Jim Mickle (2007's " Mulberry Street ") has a real artist's eye for detail and texture, and he displays this gift time and again during "Stake Land," a post-apocalyptic drama with the character nuance of 2009's " The Road " and the encroaching threat of 2003's " 28 Days Later ."
There are echoes here of Zombieland (2009) and The Road (2009) but Stake Land seems most closely related to the films of George Romero, especially his recent outings such as Diary of the Dead (2007).
Spare, mournful, and often inert, this vampire-flavored take on “The Road” is more admirable than fulfilling, expelling more effort with atmosphere than story, wasting time with stares when legitimate tension is desperately needed.
There are echoes here, less eloquent, of " The Road ."
Hillcoat combines minimalism with classical rhythms here – drawing from films such as The Grapes of Wrath and Bicycle Thieves.
Much is contributed by the stellar lensing of Ben Richardson (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and the beautifully spooky score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, which so mournfully echoes the one Cave created for The Proposition (2005).
Instead, Hillcoat gathered many of the technical staff from his previous film, including Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (music), editor Jon Gregory, production designer Chris Kennedy, and Margot Wilson (costumes), and, with to-date unproven screenwriter Joe Penhall (a playwright whose "Blue/Orrange" won an Olivier Award and Critics Circle Award for Best Play), fashioned one of the best adaptations I recall since Frank Darabont tackled Stephen King's "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile."
Kevin Costner’s sign off to The Untouchables, “I think I’ll have a drink”, may be the last word on prohibition, but in keeping with the philosophy of the humble soak, there’s always time for another.
But if the film will boost Hillcoat’s stock as a commercial director, it is lacking in both the poetry that infused The Proposition and The Road and the mythic quality of many other retro ‘30s gangster pictures from Bonnie And Clyde to The Untouchables .
With a set-up like this, I was expecting “The Untouchables” in the hills.
For while Chris Kennedy's formidable production design places us in an uncomfortably real space, absent McCarthy's haunting language, "The Road" for the most part is not so good at transcendence, at making us feel, as the book definitely does, that there is reason for us to endure its pitiless descriptions of what Joseph Conrad described in "Heart of Darkness" as "the horror, the horror."
The duo clearly did their homework while preparing for their comeback project; references to other cinematic apocalypses abound (biker gangs that could have ridden right out of Mad Max; a poster for the 1975 cult favorite A Boy and His Dog displayed in the background of one key scene) and the movie opens with a pre-title sequence that evokes the dark, desolate, ash-strewn world described in Cormac McCarthy's The Road more faithfully than the recent film version of that Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
The Book of Eli might also suffer over its uncanny resemblance to John Hillcoat’s current release The Road in that it follows a man heading westwards across America after an apocalyptic event has devastated the world.
Clearly the biggest hurdle facing the first movie from the Hughes Brothers since their Jack the Ripper thriller “From Hell,” is that it’s coming out so soon after John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”
Post-apocalyptic America has become a popular place for filmgoers to hang, whether we’re walking “The Road” with Viggo Mortensen or seeking “Salvation” in the latest “Terminator” installment.
There are, rather curiously and maybe entirely intentionally, some parallels to be drawn with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , about a man and a boy on a brutal odyssey across a ruined America.
If the landscape owes something to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the pairing of this disembodied voice with images of paradise lost recall the films of Terrence Malick, especially The Thin Red Line.
Instead, Hillcoat gathered many of the technical staff from his previous film, including Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (music), editor Jon Gregory, production designer Chris Kennedy, and Margot Wilson (costumes), and, with to-date unproven screenwriter Joe Penhall (a playwright whose "Blue/Orrange" won an Olivier Award and Critics Circle Award for Best Play), fashioned one of the best adaptations I recall since Frank Darabont tackled Stephen King's "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile."
In the end, however, the best parts of How It Ends kind-of sort-of feel like a bad rip-off of John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road .