Author Archives: Keith Garlington

REVIEW: “Rogue Hostage” (2021)

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“Fast and Furious” wisecracker Tyrese Gibson is handed a much more serious role leading the upcoming action-thriller “Rogue Hostage”. Jon Keyes directs from a story by screenwriter Mickey Solis. Their movie, set mostly in a Wal-Mart styled department store, starts out with glimmers of promise. But as the tropes start to pile up and the flimsiness of both the characters and the story is exposed, it quickly becomes evident that the film’s title isn’t the only thing that’s generic.

Gibson plays Kyle Snowden, a former Marine suffering from severe PTSD following a traumatic tour of duty in Afghanistan. Now he works for child protective services with his fellow caseworker and friend Clove (Brandi Bravo). Through a couple of vague information drops we learn that Kyle’s wife up and left him and their young daughter Angel (Zani Jones Mbayise). We never learn why, only that her departure has left Kyle in a tough spot.

Image Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

Kyle’s stepfather, a wealthy local business owner named Sam Nelson (John Malkovich), doesn’t help much. He barely notices Kyle’s struggles, instead offering such unhelpful advice as “You need to find your purpose again.” The hard-to-read Nelson is much more interested in his bid for Congress, and with the election right around the corner optics are everything.

Of course in a movie like this you have to have a baddie and here we get it in the form of Eagan Raize, an angry militant type holding a pretty big grudge. He’s played by Christopher Backus who has both the look and demeanor that the role demands. His introduction is foreboding and frightening. It teases a ruthless and unstable antagonist, driven by something unseen and determined to see his personal mission through. Unfortunately like so much else in “Rogue Hostage”, he too becomes a shallow caricature and the kind of cookie-cutter villain you could plug into almost any movie of this type.

Image Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

The story is kickstarted when Kyle and Clove rescue a young Mexican boy and stop by Sam’s store to get him something to eat. Inside Sam is prepping to shoot a new campaign ad making it the perfect time for Eagan and his two heavily armed cousins to barge in and take over the place. From there the movie turns into your prototypical hostage flick with Kyle trapped inside with an assortment of surface-level characters – the resourceful store manager Sunshine (Luna Lauren Vélez), a young shoplifter (Holly Taylor), Nelson’s self-absorbed press secretary (Susannah Hoffman) to name a few.

From there nothing about how “Rogue Hostage” plays out will surprise you. Despite hitting some pretty conventional beats, it sets itself up to be a fairly entertaining genre film. But soon all hints at originality start to unravel and it becomes your garden-variety hostage thriller with most of the clichés yet none of the thrills. And it tosses in so many themes yanked from today’s newspaper headlines. Income inequality, white supremacy, guns, the southern border, crony capitalism and more, all handled superficially and with no punch whatsoever. Just more frustration from this unfortunate misfire. “Rogue Hostage” opens tomorrow (June 11th) in select theaters and on VOD.

VERDICT – 2 STARS

First Glance: “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”

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Younger audiences won’t remember Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the hosts of the immensely popular television ‘ministry’ The PTL Club. Starting out of a small North Carolina studio, the Bakkers grew their show nationally and eventually into its own TV network. They even launched a 2500-acre theme park and resort. The couple’s lavish lifestyle was enough to rouse suspicion, but it was Jim Bakker’s sex scandals that brought the powerful hucksters to their knees.

The new film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” sees Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain stepping into the roles of the televangelist power couple. The two stars make for a fascinating match and there is certainly plenty of material to cover. The film, directed by Michael Showalter, dropped its first trailer and looks to be taking a very sympathetic look at Tammy Faye. Jim Bakker was clearly a corrupt and contemptible charlatan but Tammy Faye’s hands weren’t exactly clean. It’ll be interesting to see if Showalter’s film sticks to their true story or has something else on its mind.

“The Eyes of Tammy Faye” opens in theaters September 17th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.

REVIEW: “Awake” (2021)

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Gina Rodriguez gets a hefty lead role in the newly streaming Netflix film “Awake”, a sci-fi action-thriller built around a weirdly intriguing premise. The movie is directed by Mark Raso from a screenplay he wrote with his brother Joseph. Raso’s previous film was 2017’s road-trip drama “Kodachrome”, also for Netflix. “Awake” is a much different animal – a movie that seems to have some big ideas and plenty of genre ambition. But it’s so scattered and lacking much-needed detail that it’s impossible to fully buy into the world the movie creates.

Rodriguez gives it her all playing Jill, a former soldier and a single mother with a troubled past. Like so much of “Awake”, most of Jill’s history is skimmed over and barely touched on leaving us with a fairly incomplete image of who she is. We know her husband is dead. We know that her mother-in-law (Frances Fisher) has custody of her two kids, the younger dinosaur-loving Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt) and her disgruntled estranged oldest Noah (Lucius Hoyos). And when we first meet Jill we see her smuggling pills out of a university lab where she works as a security guard and then selling them to street dealers.

Image Courtesy of Netflix

The movie loads Jill up with all of that baggage in the first ten minutes and then forgets it the rest of way. Instead she becomes a mother protecting her children after a mysterious event plunges the world into chaos. Essentially something similar to a massive EMP knocks out power across the globe – electricity, automobiles, computers, basically anything with electronics is shut down. It also takes away people’s ability to sleep, something the movie never comes close to explaining in a sufficient way. But obviously it’s bad news. “Without sleep your mind will bend and bend until it breaks”.

Jennifer Jason Leigh pops up as Dr. Murphy, a psychiatrist and a sleep deprivation expert who got Jill the job at the university and now wants her to come help at a remote facility nicknamed “the Hub”. There Murphy and a team of doctors are studying the only known person who can still sleep. What they don’t know is that young Matilda can also sleep. Refusing to let her daughter become a lab rat, Jill flees with her children into the crumbling society encountering a number of increasingly desperate (and in most cases hostile) people groups along the way. Mad scientists, a nudist cult, grubby backwoods rednecks, a so-warped-it’s-silly version of evangelical churchgoers – just some of the threats Raso throws at this family of three.

Image Courtesy of Netflix

If you try hard enough you can find the occasional thematic morsel to chew on. What happens when morality gives way to despair? How far is too far in the world of medicine and science? Stuff like that. But by the end I wasn’t convinced the movie had much interest in wrestling with anything weighty. Instead it all unwinds in a violent finale that has to be a lot more unsettling on paper than on screen. And the long-awaited “explanation” turns out to be no real explanation at all. Bummer.

“Awake” constantly teases us with its interesting ideas and you stick with it even through the rough patches in hopes of a satisfying payoff. Unfortunately the payoff never comes. It’s as if the Raso brothers came up with a cool and compelling story concept but were unsure how to tell it. So we get an intriguing mess that hopes viewers are interested enough to stay with it but not interested enough to want answers to the most basic questions. Oh, and the head-scratching gaps in logic, some cringy attempts at little girl humor, and the frustrating plot-holes don’t really help. “Awake” premieres today (June 9th) on Netflix (www.netflix/awake).

VERDICT – 2 STARS

Movie Poster Spotlight – “Censor” (2021)

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Check out the killer new trailer for the upcoming thriller “Censor”, one of my favorite films from this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Director: Prano Bailey-Bond

Starring: Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller, Michael Smiley

Release: June 11, 2021

REVIEW: “Monster” (2021)

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In the new Netflix movie “Monster” director Anthony Mandler uses a non-linear structure to tell the story of young black student wrongly charged in the murder of a bodega owner. The film premiered way back at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was eventually acquired by Netflix. Based on a Walter Dean Myers novel of the same name, “Monster” maneuvers through its sometimes heavy-handed dialogue to deliver a well-meaning and often crushingly effective legal drama.

The film is told from the perspective of 17-year-old Steve Harmon (a terrific Kelvin Harrison Jr.). The film opens a few minutes after he has been arrested for playing a role in the robbery of a Harlem bodega that left its owner dead. As Steve narrates we watch the overwhelmed high school honor student and aspiring filmmaker as he is processed by police. Soon he’s sitting across from his state appointed public defender (Jennifer Ehle). These unsettling early moments set us up for the nearly 100 minutes of tension that comes baked into the material and directly from Mandler’s style of storytelling.

Image Courtesy of Netflix

The story (written by Radha Blank, Cole Wiley, and Janece Shaffer) bounces us back-and-forth across the timeline. We visit and revisit Steve’s time in prison, in the court room, at home with his loving parents and young brother, out with his neighborhood friends, and in his high school film class where his dedicated teacher Mr. Sawicki (Tim Blake Nelson) inspires him to follow his dreams. While some of the time-jumping seems unnecessary, it’s ably handled and it does keep the film from feeling like a conventional retread.

The film is driven by the richly layered lead performance from Harrison Jr. who has already established himself as a powerful young actor. Here he manages to channel innocence, ambition, youthful spirit, fear, frustration, hopelessness, and resolve all through a single densely conceived character. The movie also sports a rock-solid supporting cast in addition to Ehle and Nelson. Jeffrey Wright and Jennifer Hudson are really good as Steve’s loving parents. Just as good is Rakim “A$AP Rocky” Mayers who takes a fairly cookie-cutter bad egg part and makes it interesting. We even get John David Washington in a small but menacing role.

Image Courtesy of Netflix

Clever touches from cinematographer David Devlin help convey the film’s frequently shifting mood. The harsh sterile grays of the courtroom, the glow of the sun beaming through the neighborhood trees, the warmth of home with his family, the cold isolation of prison. Devlin’s camera takes some of the load off of Harrison Jr. by helping the audience to see things the way Steve sees them.

“Monster” is a timely and thoughtful critique of America’s justice system told with startling clarity from the perspective of a young black man. While the movie landscape has been inundated with these kinds of social dramas, Mandler does enough with a well-worn genre and by-the-books premise to make the movie feel reasonably fresh. It doesn’t completely avoid the cringy on-the-nose dialogue (take the soulless white prosecutor eyeing Steven and coldly uttering “he looks the part to me“), but it tells a moving story and is worth watching for the strong performances alone. “Monster” is now streaming on Netflix.

VERDICT – 3.5 STARS

First Glance: “No Sudden Move” (2021)

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HBO Max has dropped the trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s new throwback heist film “No Sudden Move”. The movie features a packed cast that includes Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Jon Hamm, David Harbour, Brendan Fraser, Ray Liota, Amy Seimetz, Julia Fox, and Bill Duke among others. The film is slated to premiere at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival before landing on the streaming platform a couple weeks later. Judging by this first look, we have a lot to look forward to.

Set in 1955 Detroit, the movie follows a group of small-time hoods who are hired to swipe a lone document. Easy, right? Well of course not. Things go sideways fast leaving them searching the city for the one who hired them in hopes of getting some answers. I love the grimy look of the trailer and the all-star ensemble features names that should fit really well in the world Soderbergh is creating. As far as crime dramas go, this could be a really good one.

“No Sudden Move” premieres June 18th at Tribeca and then hits HBO Max July 1st. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.