Chop Chop (2020)

Live can’t come to the door, she’s all tied up.

(2020) Thriller (Gravitas) Atala Arce, Jake Taylor, David Harper, Mikael Mattsson, Jeremy Jordan, James McCabe, Mike Thompson, Nicholas Correnti, Natasha Missick, Lizzie Chaplin (voice), Jazmine Jordan, Theresa Byron, Emily Katter, Paul Syre, Mandy Martino. Directed by Rony Patel

 

Most couples appreciate the quiet evening home alone. Someone cooks dinner, maybe a movie (and microwave popcorn) out on the couch, and then to the bedroom for *ahem* the main course. Sounds like a pretty good night to me.

And that’s what Chuck (Taylor) and Liv (Arce) have in mind. Then, there’s a knock on the door. There’s a guy there named Teddy (Harper), delivering the pizza they ordered. Except, they didn’t order any pizza – Chuck made dinner, so Liv tells Teddy thanks but no thanks, and shuts the door, and goes back into the living room.

And that’s where she finds Teddy waiting for her. “I have abilities,” he says, almost modestly. He also has a bag of bloody severed heads. Now, that’s as promising a beginning for a movie as it gets, thinks I. Sadly, Chop Chop doesn’t quite live up to that early promise.

When Teddy attacks Liv, Chuck comes to the rescue and ends up killing Teddy. However, instead of calling the cops – technically, they were defending themselves which isn’t illegal, even in California – they decide to dispose of the body themselves, calling in some favors from some shady underworld types. When a cop (Jeremy Jordan) stumbles on what’s going on, the couple have to shove him in the trunk as well. And all these underworld sorts are, inexplicably, trying to kill Liv and Chuck. I mean, WTF, right?

Along the way, they meet all manner of killers and fend them off as best they can before they end up being captured and set up for torture…but by that point, you’ll be wondering why you’ve stayed with the movie even this long. The story is told in such an incomprehensible manner that you can be forgiven if you think that the chapter heading for the first scene, Teddy, actually refers to Chuck – it isn’t until a little later that you find out that Teddy was the dead serial killer. The one with abilities…that are never explained, or referred to. And let’s face it, Liv took them pretty much in stride. Do lots of people that she knows have abilities?

Another flaw of the film is that nearly all the action takes place off-camera, or is so brief as to be blink-and-you-missed-it. I’ll give Patel the benefit of the doubt and assume that was for budgetary reasons, but it may well be inexperience, or an attempt to set his thriller apart from the glut of them on the market. I will give him that the concept is solid.

However, he changes tone regularly to an almost maddening degree. The movie starts out as kind of a noir thriller, moves into a romantic comedy at one point, and then shimmies into torture porn at the end before finishing up as…well, that I’ll keep to myself. The really maddening thing is that there is a ton of potential here, but the decisions made by the person sitting in the director’s chair as well as the person at the laptop banging away the script (the same person, by the way) just about guaranteed the movie wouldn’t succeed. I think the movie could have worked as a kind of extreme action version of a noir Nick and Nora Charles-type of thing. That’s a movie I’d love to see – John Wick meets The Thin Man. Hollywood, get on that one, wouldja?

REASONS TO SEE: The concept is an intriguing one.
REASONS TO AVOID: Clumsy storytelling vies with questionable directorial decisions for the most damaging aspect to the film’s success.
FAMILY VALUES: This is plenty of violence and profanity, bloody images, some sexual content, and brief drug use.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: This is the feature film debut for Patel, who was born in India but currently resides in Los Angeles.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango Now, Google Play, Microsoft, Redbox, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 10/27/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 20% positive reviews, Metacritic: No score yet
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Funny Games
FINAL RATING: 5.5/10
NEXT: Day 3 of Six Days of Darkness!

Grand Isle

Nicolas Cage, after reading the script to his next movie.

(2019) Thriller (Screen Media) Nicolas Cage, Luke Benward, KaDee Strickland, Kelsey Grammer, Beatrice Hernandez, Emily Marie Palmer, Zulay Henao, Duncan Casey, Oliver Trevena, Haley Milsap, Isabella Grace Roark. Directed by Stephen Campanelli

 

Nobody freaks out in the movies better than Nicolas Cage and I mean that as a compliment. Sure, Conan O’Brien once suggested the Department of Homeland Security use clips from his films to demarcate the various terrorist threat levels (not a bad idea, actually) but nonetheless Cage knows how to lose his shit onscreen better than anybody.

In this film he plays Walter, a Vietnam vet slowly drinking himself to death in a small Southern town. It’s one of those delta locales where the steam seems to rise from the skin and even the flies find it too humid to buzz. Campanelli does a good job of establishing the locale (you can almost smell the sweat) although his actors for the most part overdo the Southern accent.

Walter hires a fellow vet (albeit much younger) named Buddy (Benward) to fix a section of picket fence just as a hurricane is arriving in town. As Buddy’s long-suffering wife Fancy (Strickland) observes, it takes some kind of idiot to repair a fence before a hurricane but I suppose it makes sense to the bourbon-soused.

Buddy has been chronically unemployed, putting massive strain on his relationship with his wife Lisa (Palmer) who is coping not only with Buddy’s lack of income but with the health problems of their infant daughter as well. It goes without saying that he’s happy to take any sort of work, even if the job makes him feel uneasy. Much of that uneasiness stems from Fancy (Strickland), the oversexed wife of Walter.  Her husband is, shall we say, less than a stellar performer in the bedroom and she’s plenty frustrated over it.

Of course, Buddy gets caught in the hurricane and is forced to hunker down with Walter and Fancy. And of course, the tension between the three starts to edge over the boiling point. And of course, Walter and Fancy are hiding a dirty secret in that basement which has been locked in such a way as to guarantee curiosity if not outright suspicion.

There are elements of both Southern Gothic and film noir, two genres that usually compliment each other well and to be fair to the filmmakers they manage to strike a fine balance here. However, there is also a lot of disquieting elements to the film. For starters, the actors chew the scenery with so much gusto one would question whether or not they had just been liberated from a prison camp.

Cage is usually the actor I look to when it comes to commanding attention, but he’s much more low-key than usual here which I suppose has to do with the southern demeanor. Naturally, it came as a bit of a surprise that it was Strickland who really made an impression on me, in this case as a Southern femme fatale. She is as seductive as a siren, as acerbic as a pundit and as merciless as a snake.

The script kind of falls apart in the last third. The clichés and tropes begin to pile up and all plausibility goes right out the window. The saving grace here is the entertainment factor; if you don’t think about this one too much you might find yourself enjoying it in spite of itself.

This is the sixth film starring Cage to be released in 2019 (with at least four more scheduled for 2020), almost all of them action thrillers and none of them released wide. Not a great standard for an Oscar-winning actor but hey, you take work where you can get it.

REASONS TO SEE: Southern gothic meets film noir.
REASONS TO AVOID: Southern-fried clichés.
FAMILY VALUES: There is violence, profanity and some sexual situations
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Although Walter is supposed to be an ex-Marine, the uniform he wears in the penultimate scene carries Army insignias and medals.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango Now, Google Play, Microsoft, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 12/13/19: Rotten Tomatoes: 0% positive reviews: Metacritic: 29/100
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Key Largo
FINAL RATING: 5.5/10
NEXT: Noelle

A Violent Separation

Carrying her across a different threshold.

(2019) Crime Drama (Screen Media) Brenton Thwaites, Ben Robson, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Claire Holt, Ted Levine, Gerald McRaney, Francesca Eastwood, Michael Malarkey, Peter Michael Goetz, Isabella Gaspersz, Lynne Ashe, Carleigh Johnston, Cotton Yancey, Silas Cooper, Jason Edwards, Kim Collins, Morley Nelson, Bowen Hoover. Directed by Kevin and Michael Goetz

 

The backwoods hide its share of secrets. Sometimes, when the wind is blowing just right you can swear you hear the trees whispering about dark deeds done in the dead of night, of murder, mayhem and cheating hearts.

Ray Young (Robson) is one of those country boys whom trouble just seems to follow. He’s a man who likes to drink and has a hair-trigger temper, not a great combination. He’s done some jail time for petty crime and makes up “the usual suspect” in the small Missouri town he lives in. His younger brother Norman (Thwaites) couldn’t be more different; a straight-arrow deputy sheriff who is painfully naive, romantically awkward and a bit exasperated by his hot mess of a brother.

Ray is on-again off-again dating Abby (Holt) who is a single mom whose baby daddy is Cinch (Malarkey), a construction worker built in Ray’s mold – this girl sure can pick them. Her younger sister Frances (Debnam-Carey) is quiet, upstanding and of course the object of Norman’s affection, although much of what she jokes about goes sailing over his head. Abby and Frances live at their childhood home where they take care of seriously ill patriarch Tom (McRaney) who trundles an oxygen tank wherever he goes but is not above roaring his disapproval over one thing or another at the sisters, particularly when Frances has the temerity to take away his smokes.

After the four young people go out for a night of drinking an dancing at a roadhouse charmingly known as The Whispering Pig, Ray predictably makes out with a barmaid (Eastwood) and gets into a fight that Norman has to come to his aid for. Furious, a drunk Abby gets into her car and peels out of the parking lot, leaving the other three behind.

The next day a badly hungover Abby takes her dad’s pistol and lambastes an equally hungover Ray, nagging him to teach her how to shoot which he is reluctant to do. The two drive into the woods where a terrible accident occurs. Ray panics and calls his brother to help him cover up his involvement. In a moment of weakness, Norman agrees to.

The town sheriff (Levine) is a pretty smart cookie and he begins piecing together the crime from the few clues that have remained. Norman, as a cop, knows how to stage a crime scene and manipulate an investigation. While the Sheriff (and a few other people) are certain that Ray had a hand in what happened to Abby, nobody suspects Norman. As time goes by and the trail goes cold the romance between Norman and Frances begins to heat up. However, the guilt both brothers are feeling begins to bubble to the surface and threatens to expose what they’ve both done.

The brothers Goetz seem to be waffling between Southern Gothic and neo-noir when it comes to tone and ends up being neither. For some odd reason, they decided to set the film in Missouri but filmed in Louisiana an it looks like Louisiana – why not just set it where you filmed it? Nobody cares overly much. Secondly, most of the main cast (with the exception of Levine and McRaney) are British or Australian. Not that the cast members (mostly of basic cable and TV pedigree) from across the various ponds can’t handle these very American art forms, but it just seems a curious thing hauling them all the way to the backwoods of Louisiana.

Actually, the cast is pretty decent although it is the veterans McRaney and Levine who steal the show. Robson and Thwaites capture a brotherly dynamic that feels authentic; having directors who are themselves brothers probably has a lot to do with it. The movie is reasonably suspenseful as the brothers come closer to cracking, although the “twist” ending feels forced and much of the movie loses its punch because of the melodrama that tinges the entire production.

There are moments of cinematic beauty which are provided by cinematographer Sean O’Dea; however, Evan Goldman’s score is intrusive and a little bit annoying. Overall this isn’t all that bad but there aren’t enough good things about it that really make it stand out among all the other movies that are out there at the moment. Fans of the various shows the young actors are in might get a kick out of seeing them in very different roles than they’re used to but otherwise, this one’s pretty much a toss-up.

REASONS TO SEE: The cinematography has some lovely heartland images.
REASONS TO AVOID: Really doesn’t add anything to the genre.
FAMILY VALUES: There’s a fair amount of profanity, some violence and a couple of disturbing images.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Peter Michael Goetz, who plays Riley Jenkins, is the father of the directors.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 5/20/19: Rotten Tomatoes: 11% positive reviews: Metacritic: 28/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Murder by Numbers
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Aniara