Review: 'The Furious' is an inventive Hong Kong martial-arts movie with fast and bloody action from start to finish

Pick practically anything off the shelf at a Home Depot, and the folks behind “The Furious” will turn it into a weapon — creating the most endlessly inventive and freakishly violent martial-arts movie this side of “The Raid” movies.

In an unnamed southeast Asian country, Wang Wei (Xie Miao) works quietly to provide for himself and his daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), who communicates with her mute father using sign language. When a child trafficking ring plucks Rainy off the streets, Wang tries to fight back — and, with fast moves and righteous anger, he nearly succeeds. 

When the bad guys get away with Rainy, Wang goes to the police, who say they can’t help. A woman sergeant, Yadong (Manatsanun Phanlerdwongsakul), tries to take on the case, but her commander overrules her. Later, to no one’s surprise, we find out the commander is in the pocket of the wealthy cabal in charge of the child trafficking.

Wang spots one of Rainy’s kidnappers, which leads him to a high-security nightclub, where he starts bashing heads into tables, glass partitions and other heads. One of the people he encounters there, Navin (Joe Taslim), turns out to be on the same side — he’s a journalist who’s been investigating the missing children, along with his reporter wife, Matia (JeeJa Yanin), who we see get kidnapped before the opening credits. 

Wang and Navin team up, and become a two-man wrecking crew — using knives, hammers, ice blocks, lead pipes and whatever else is handy to take out the bad guys. Is the bloody violence too vicious? Maybe, until you’re reminded that those on the receiving end are trafficking young children, so they get what’s coming to them.

Director Kenji Tanigaki stages one physically impressive fight sequence after another, all the way up to a two-on-two final boss battle that gets complicated by a fifth fighter (Brian Le) returning to the action — and seemingly alternating his loyalties with each hit, encapsulating the entertainingly blood-soaked chaos of the entire film.

——

‘The Furious’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and language. Running time: 113 minutes; in English, and in Chinese and Thai with subtitles.

Review: 'Stop! That! Train!' adds a campy spin to the 'Airplane!' disaster-spoof genre, with 'RuPaul's Drag Race' alums and a lot of cameos

The wild and wacky “Stop! That! Train!” is a broad, goofy parody of ‘70s disaster movies that puts a lot of faith in the comedy stylings of several alums of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” including RuPaul Charles themself.

The action takes place aboard the Glamazonian Express, a high-priced high-speed train where every rail attendant worth their tray tables wants to work. Tess (played by Ginger Minj) and Deedee (played by Jujubee) work, instead, at a low-rent rival company, Stank Rail. But when that rail line shuts down unexpectedly, Tess and Deedee hustle their way into an open job at Glamazonan — despite objections from the first-class crew, led by the haughty Amber (Brock Hayhoe). 

At U.S. Rail headquarters, though, one of the dispatchers, Donna Dusk (Rachel Bloom), sees trouble ahead — a massive weather event, with the technical name Stormaganza. Unfortunately, her bosses, all men, don’t believe Donna’s warnings and mock her for thinking she’s smart. Donna persists, though, and contacts the Glamazonian Express’ conductor, Davenport (Chris Parnell), to warn of the storm the train is about to encounter.

Also on board the Express are a kid with a wayward scorpion, a famous actress (played by famous actress Sarah Michelle Gellar) who thinks people recognize her, a sex-starved passenger (Missi Pyle), and Davenport’s dumb-but-gorgeous assistant conductor, Cal (Brian Jordan Alvarez) — for whom Deedee pines.

News of the impending danger reaches the Oval Office, where President Judy Gagwell — that’s RuPaul — is worried the disaster will be a catastrophe for her approval ratings, knocking them down to “Lea Michelle, 2020.”

Director Adam Shankman (“Hairspray”) and writers Christina Friel and Connor Wright eagerly jump into all the LGBTQ-coded humor 90 minutes of screen time will allow. A low percentage of the jokes land, but there are so many of them that a few still hit the target. And when all else fails, the filmmakers resort to a string of cameos to generate some chuckles of recognition.

“Stop! That! Train!” follows as its model the Rosetta Stone of parody films, “Airplane!” The cast of drag stars made me think of the unsung hero of “Airplane!,” Stephen Stucker, who played Johnny, the one over-the-top comic performer in a room full of actors who were performing seriously. (Example: When Lloyd Bridges’ airport director Steve McCroskey shows Johnny a map and asks, “What do you make of this?”, Stucker’s Johnny replies, “Oh, I can make a hat, or a brooch, or pterodactyl wings!”)

“Stop! That! Train!” plays like it cast a room full of Stephen Stuckers. (The original, alas, died in 1986 at age 38, from AIDS.) And that approach to the comedy the problem — “Airplane!” worked so well because the stars behaved as if everything they said was deadly serious, and the cast here leans too far into the camp. The exception is Bloom as the harried train dispatcher, who in going deadpan gets the movie’s best laughs.

——

‘Stop! That! Train!’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material, language, some drug material and brief nudity. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: 'Disclosure Day' allows Steven Spielberg to raise a big question — what if we're not alone? — in an entertaining, thrilling package

Though not a direct sequel to his 1977 masterpiece “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” director Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” shows the veteran director still has deep thoughts about humanity’s place in the universe — and maintains the skills to transfer those thoughts into a rousing, thought-provoking entertainment.

Spielberg throws us into the action from the beginning, with shadowy agents threatening a man, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), in the stands at a pro wrestling match. Daniel has a backpack with memory chips the agents want. The agents, working for a shadowy defense contractor named Wardex and their boss, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), have Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), zip-tied in a van outside the arena.

Because of what’s in the backpack, Daniel is able to get Eve back, keep the backpack and escape the clutches of Scanlon’s operatives. The couple find a place to lay low — a monastery where Jane was once a novitiate — and then are taken to a safe house by people working with Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who’s got plans of his own.

Early on, Jane learns what’s in Daniel’s backpack. Daniel and Hugo, we’re told, worked at Wardex, where they discovered the big secret that’s revealed by those memory chips — video evidence, going back 79 years, of extraterrestrials landing on Earth. It’s a secret Hugo is convinced the world needs to hear, and one Scanlon will go to great lengths to keep quiet.

While this is going on, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park”), working off Spielberg’s story idea, introduce us to Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter at the NBC affiliate in Kansas City. She’s getting ready for work, chatting with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), when a cardinal flies in the window. From here, Margaret begins acting oddly, speaking languages she claims not to understand and knowing intimate secrets of anyone she meets, from the cop pulling her over to her newsroom colleagues.

Then she rushes onto the set to deliver the weather forecast, and suddenly starts speaking in some strange clicking language. The video of this moment goes viral and Daniel sees it — and, unlike anyone else we’ve met so far, understands what she’s saying.

That may feel like a lot of synopsis, but actually it only covers the first 30 minutes or so, and it’s all covered in the movie’s trailer and ad campaign. I won’t go further into spoiler territory, except to say Spielberg and Koepp have created a road movie with a structure similar to “Close Encounters,” with people traveling across America trying to solve a mystery, pursued by quasi-governmental operatives trying to stop them.

Spielberg and Koepp are working here with some big ideas, like setting this story against a backdrop of global panic of an imminent nuclear war. Because Spielberg is who he is, with more than a half-century of delivering the cinematic goods, he can bring the scale and technical chops needed to tell such a big story. There are few directors working today who can command such resources — Christopher Nolan, and maybe Martin Scorsese on a good month — and know how to use them.

That said, not everything in “Disclosure Day” is perfect. The first half hour is a bit bumpy, as Spielberg and Koepp set everything into place. Blunt has the hardest road at first, saddled with some creaky character development to establish Margaret’s flighty personality, to contrast the serious things that happen later. Thankfully, Blunt is a gifted actor, and she eventually rights the ship with a performance that gracefully captures Margaret’s tenderness and resilience.

It’s significant to note that Spielberg was six months old when the first stories came out of Roswell, New Mexico, about debris supposedly from an alien spacecraft — so the question of whether we’re alone in the universe has hovered, like a UFO, over him and us ever since. In “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg doesn’t just tell us he thinks we’re not alone, but he makes viewers consider how that knowledge, whenever it finally comes out, will affect the 8 billion of us.

——

‘Disclosure Day’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence, some bloody images and strong language. Running time: 145 minutes.

Review: 'Masters of the Universe' revives the '80s toy commercial, er, TV show into an action franchise with no brains

I acknowledge that I am not the recommended audience for “Masters of the Universe,” for two important reasons: 1) I was too old to be a fan of the oversized toy commercial of an animated series that ran from 1983 to 1985; and 2) I have a functioning brain in my head.

Apparently the folks at Mattel thought they could turn their intellectual property into the same type of crowd-pleasing movie that they did with “Barbie.” They did this without considering that the “Masters of the Universe” toy franchise didn’t spark children’s imaginations the way Barbie dolls did — because the cruddy TV show did all the work there. 

The series was centered on Prince Adam of Eternia, who would wield a magic sword that — with the incantation of the words “By the power of Grayskull! I HAVE THE POWER!” — would turn him into the hyper-muscular He-Man. Our hero had friends and allies, including the armored Man-at-Arms, the brave Teela and a talking green tiger named Cringer, aka Battle Cat. The villain, Skeleton, was a talking skull with a ripped body. 

The names were dumb on purpose, so children wouldn’t get confused when buying the corresponding toys. In this new movie version, that becomes a running joke, as the names were given out by young Adam when he was 10 years old.

The movie shows Prince Adam as Adam Glenn (played by Nicholas Galitzine), a hapless cubicle dweller in Oklahoma City who has vague memories and childhood drawings of his youth as a prince on Eternia. To set this up, we see a younger Adam witnessing Skeletor’s takeover of the kingdom, defeating Duncan, aka Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba), who’s trying to protect Adam’s parents, the king (James Purefoy) and queen (Charlotte Riley). Only fast thinking by The Sorceress (Morena Baccarin) gets Adam and the magic sword to safety on Earth.

It takes an attack from a monster, The Beast, to allow Adam to connect back to Eternia — when his former childhood friend, Teela (played all grown up by Camila Mendes) arrives on Earth to rescue him and return him to his home world. That world is dark and depressing, thanks to Skeletor and his chief aide, the witchy Evil-Lyn (played by Alison Brie). 

Will Adam discover his power? Will he rescue Eternia from Skeletor’s grip? Will Teela and Man-at-Arms, her inebriated father, reconcile their differences? If you can’t guess the answers to those questions, then first grade must have been rough.

The casting of Jared Leto as Skeletor is worth a moment to reflect, mostly on how horribly the Oscar-winning actor’s career has gone the last few years. The last few years, Leto’s movies have included “Tron: Ares,” “Haunted Mansion,” “Morbius” and “House of Gucci” — stinkers all. At least with “Masters of the Universe,” Leto could have denied involvement, as Skeletor’s bony mask never comes off. You have to admire Leto’s commitment to the bit, even if the performance is as much a mess as the rest of the film.

Galitzine, who was fun in “The Sheep Detectives” and the Anne Hathaway romance “The Idea of You,” is fine as the goofy and gallant Prince Adam. But the only performer who doesn’t act like they’re above this nonsense is Brie, who actually understands the assignment of playing a campy villain.

The real mystery here is who director Travis Knight (“BumbleBee”) thought he was making “Masters of the Universe” for. The tone veers from strained attempts to joke about the franchise’s dumb-as-dirt characters or earnest scenes of the hero learning his purpose. And because the movie tries to have it both ways, trying to be either self-satire or inspirational fantasy adventure, it fails to connect either way.

——

‘Masters of the Universe’

★1/2

Opens Friday, June 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence/action, some suggestive material, and language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Power Ballad' shows the power of Paul Rudd, in a charmer from the director of 'Once' and 'Sing Street'

It’s no surprise but still a delight that Paul Rudd can’t help but give a charming, likable performance, even when he’s playing someone who’s a bit unhinged — as he does in “Power Ballad,” the newest music-centered comedy by Irish director John Carney.

Rudd plays Rick Power, the lead singer for a Dublin wedding band, performing ‘90s pop for happy couples. We learn fairly early that he was once a rock star, who left his musical glory days behind for a settled home life with his wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), and their teen daughter, Aja (Beth Fallon). 

At one wedding, it turns out the groom has invited an old friend — Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), the last member of a now-defunct boy band who hasn’t been a solo success. Danny joins Rick’s band for a song, and the two singers strike up a friendship — which leads to an all-night jam session where they talk about songwriting and show each other what they’re working on.

Not much comes of this until months later, when Rick is in a shopping mall and hears something over the PA system. It’s a song that sounds familiar — because he wrote it. But it’s Danny who’s turned it into a hit single.

Rick tries to contact Danny, through his L.A. agent, Mac (Jack Reynor) — but because Rick can’t prove he wrote the song, he’s got no way to claim credit. He still tries, which makes him so crazy it alienates Rachel, Aja, and his bandmates. The exception is his guitarist pal, Sandy (played by Peter McDonald, who co-wrote the script with Carney). 

Carney has made a nice career out of Irish-based movies about musicians — the best being the Oscar-winning “Once” and the delightful “Sing Street.” “Power Ballad” is more broadly comedic than those movies, though not as obvious and slapstick-driven as it could have been. Carney also collaborates again, as he did on “Sing Street,” to write songs with rocker Gary Clark, and the resulting song “How to Write a Song (Without You)” is a worthy example of the movie’s title.

Ultimately, what keeps “Power Ballad” energized is Rudd, who deploys his good-natured persona and brings just a bit of edge to it. He also, it turns out, has a passable singing voice — he’s no Michael Buble, but he makes Rick’s wedding-singer moves feel authentic, which makes us like Paul Rudd even more. And I didn’t think that was possible.

——

‘Power Ballad’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout and some drug use. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Backrooms' is a warped suspense thriller with strong performances, visual thrills, and not enough room for explanations

The mind-bending suspense thriller “Backrooms” has a deliciously warped premise — a mystery space on the fringes of what we naively call reality — and tries to apply it to a few psychological themes, including loneliness and survivor’s guilt. 

If director Kane Parsons doesn’t quite succeed in melding all of those ideas together, give him a ton of credit for taking some big swings in this visually arresting movie.

The setting is a nondescript furniture store in an ordinary strip mall in an unremarkable American suburb, circa 1990. The owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is in bad shape — recently divorced and kicked out of his house, he’s living in the store, which would only inconvenience the customers if he had any. The only people he talks to are his assistant manager, Kat (Lucite Maxwell), her video making boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), and his therapist, Dr. Mary Klein (Renate Reinsve). 

Clark is trying to figure out why the lights keep flickering in the store. When he’s exploring the basement showroom, he sees light trickling in from what appears to be a crack in the wall. Within that wall, Clark discovers a portal that goes to … well, another room like the one he was in, with the same beige walls and carpeting. And beyond that, more rooms, along with other things that defy explanation.

At least when Clark tries to explain it all to Mary, the explanations make no sense. Only when Mary, whose road to psychiatry started when dealing with her unbalanced mom (Krista Kosonen), ventures into the store does she see for herself. 

Parsons, a 21-year-old filmmaker who started experimenting with these scenarios in a series of YouTube shorts, deploys a script by Will Soodik to create fascinating scenes that dig under the mundane suburban surface to find unsettling things beneath. Seldom has an empty hallway seem so packed with menace.

In front of those beige walls, Ejiofor and Reinsve give electric performances. Ejiofor distills the American male feeling of feeling hard done that life hasn’t worked out like he thought it would. And Reinsve, the Norwegian star of “Sentimental Value,” gives one of the smartest and most nuanced versions of the horror “final girl” trope I’ve ever seen.

“Backrooms” has moments that frequently surprise, which makes it a pity that Parsons, unsurprisingly, can’t stick the landing. I won’t say much about the ending, except to say it involves a character played by Mark Duplass — and that his scene should either have been five minutes longer or cut entirely. The movie needed either less explanation or more, not the half-baked coda it delivers.

——

‘Backrooms’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some violent content/bloody images. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'Pressure,' a play-turned-movie about the decision to launch D-Day, is a showcase for Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser

The World War II drama “Pressure” feels like a movie from another era — a self-contained chamber piece where men (and one woman) in uniform talk about a weighty decision that’s rapidly approaching, the outcome of which hinges on the force of their well-acted arguments.

Director Anthony Maras (“Hotel Mumbai”) focuses in on Allied headquarters in the U.K. in June 1944. The commander of the Allied forces, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), has a major decision ahead of him: To order some 160,000 troops to storm the beaches at Normandy by air, sea and land. They’re all ready to go on Monday, June 5.

The one uncontrollable factor in the invasion is the weather. Eisenhower’s meteorologist, Col. Irving Krick (Chris Messina), assures Ike that the skies will be calm on the 5th, just as they were on June 5, 1925, and other years on that date. But Ike has brought in another meteorologist, Group Capt. James Stagg (Andrew Scott), for a second opinion.

Stagg, a taciturn Scotsman, has no use for Krick’s charts of weather data from years past. He wants the current data, from weather balloons and observatories from Spain to Iceland. And what the data tells Stagg is that two massive storms are bearing down on England and Normandy on the 5th. Stagg’s recommendation is to wait, possibly as long as June 18th, even though that means the Germans will learn of the invasion plans in the meantime. 

Maras wrote the screenplay with David Haig, based on Haig’s play — and the script’s concentration on tense conversation shows those theatrical roots. The movie is a series of one-on-one dialogues, between Stagg and Krick, or Stagg and Ike, or Ike and his secretary and chauffeur, Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon), or Kay advising Stagg on how to talk to Eisenhower. (The play doesn’t get near the speculation of an affair between Kay and Ike, which historians have largely discounted as false.)

The performances by Fraser and Scott highlight the contrasts between their characters. Eisenhower is the man of action, seeking a definitive answer to the weather problem, to fend off doubts prompted by a disastrous invasion dress rehearsal that left many troops dead. Stagg, on the other hand, is a man of science, which means he’s learned to comfortable with the uncertainty left by incomplete data. 

The best parts of “Pressure” come when Scott and Fraser work off of each other, finding common cause within the gaps between command decisiveness and scientific ambiguity. And when the break in the weather comes, as history tells us it must, their reactions speak volumes.

——

‘Pressure’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for war violence, bloody images, some strong language, and smoking. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Tuner' hits some strong notes as a romance and character study, but its heist element is a sour chord

Director Daniel Roher’s first narrative feature, “Tuner,” is part heist flick, part character study and part romantic drama — and never comfortably meshes those disparate parts.

Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) is a piano tuner in New York City, working in rich people’s houses and music schools, making Steinways and Yamahas sound better. Harry’s getting on in years, so he’s training an apprentice, Niki White (Leo Woodall), to take over the trade. 

Niki suffers from hyperacusis, a disorder he says makes him allergic to loud noises. He wears earplugs while he’s tuning pianos, so he can focus on the notes of the strings, and he wears headphones to block out the distractions of other noise.

One evening, when he’s working on a piano in a rich family’s home, Niki hears something distracting upstairs. He goes up and finds a crew trying to cut into a safe. Niki uses his sensitive hearing to crack the safe, so he can get on with his piano work. But the guy in charge of the crew, Uri (Lior Raz), recognizes talent when he sees it — so he offers Niki a lot of money to open more safes for what Uri calls his “security” firm.

Niki agrees, because of a sudden need for money — because Harry has fallen ill, and Harry and his wife, Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), owe some $36,000 in hospital bills. 

All this happens just as Niki has met Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a gifted pianist and composer, whose working on a composition that she hopes will land her an apprenticeship with a famous composer (Jean Reno). Niki and Ruthie begin a romance, which is the last thing a guy who’s palling around with crooks should be doing.

Roher, a documentarian who won an Oscar for “Navalny,” co-wrote the script with Robert Ramsey, a Hollywood veteran — but I’m not assigning blame for the story’s more ridiculous contrivances as it works to meld the classical music world with the criminal element. I was along for the ride, mostly, until a jaw-dropping coincidence toward the movie’s end made the movie’s plausibility snap like a twig.

Woodall, who made an impression as a young soldier in “Nuremberg,” is solid here as the accidental thief, and he and Liu (“Bottoms”) have an easygoing chemistry that makes the romantic subplot the most charming part of the movie. But there are too many elements of disbelief that one has to swallow to make “Tuner” palatable.

——

‘Tuner’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 29, in theaters. Rated R for language throughout, some violence, drug use and brief nudity. Running time: 109 minutes.