Passenger 57 (Kevin Hooks, 1992)

When international terrorist Charles Rane (Bruce Payne) is arrested, he is placed on a commercial flight to face charges. What his FBI minders do not know is that Rane's comrades are also onboard.

After they take over the plane, Rane and his lackeys have to deal with an unexpected obstacle - another passenger who happens to be the airline's new security specialist, John Cutter (Wesley Snipes). 

It is amazing how your opinion of a movie can change. Sometimes it just takes time. Or a lockdown. 

I reviewed Passenger 57 a couple of years ago for a feature on 'Die Hard on a... ' action flicks, and I do not remember being that excited about it. I remember catching it on TV once when I was a kid, but on re-watching the film for the article, I was a bit underwhelmed. Coming off of Blade and Snipes' other action vehicles, I was surprised at how small-scale it was - the plane is a regular commercial airliner, and a lot of the action takes place on the ground, a deviation from the Die Hard template that I held against it in the ‘Die Hard on a…’ article. 

Passenger 57 recently popped up on Netflix, and I gave it another shot. Time has been kind because this movie is great.

So many movies nowadays are 2-2.5 hours long, and feature world-destroying villains and computer-generated set pieces. Compared with those lumbering Disneysaurs, Passenger 57 is spry and unpretentious.

This movie is 84 minutes long. Not 184 minutes. 84. I cannot emphasise how much I love this.

It starts, blasts through the bare essentials of character and plot set up, and then we are into the action. While it does not boast the frenetic editing of action films from later in the decade, Passenger 57 moves at a good clip with no dead spots.

And while the movie is smaller in scale than comparable films like Air Force One and Executive Decision, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of a banal domestic flight with the struggle between the OTT terrorist and Snipes’ action hero.

I had dismissed the fairground set piece in my earlier review, but as with the plane, I really enjoyed how straightforward it is - Rane is doing what almost no villain in a ‘Die Hard on a’ movie does: attempting to escape. He only ends up ducking it out with Cutter at the fairground because he is trying to hijack a car in the parking lot. There is no dastardly scheme - he just needs an escape vehicle. 

The one aspect of the film that I bump up against is the way the filmmakers present Cutter's escape as the initial hijacking takes place.

Cutter is in the bathroom when the hijacking takes place, and he sneaks out to watch the action go down and grab the plane phone. Script-wise, this works fine. But with the way it is shot, it always looks like Snipes is in full view of the terrorists. Another element that I noticed was the absence of noise from the engines. He makes so much noise when the terrorists are so close it just comes off really strange. 

That is really the only part of the movie that does not work for me - I do not usually go in for Cinema Sins-style 'logic gaps', but in this sequence, the filmmaking choices threw me out for a minute.

What really elevates Passenger 57 are the performances by the leads. 

As Charles Rane, Bruce Payne is playing the usual cliche Euro-trash villain, but he leans into the character’s most despicable attributes so much it feels like a commentary on the ubiquity of Euro-trash villains in Hollywood action movies.

This movie would still not work however without Wesley Snipes. When he enters the movie, it feels like everything is revolving around him. He is so charismatic I could not believe this was his first action movie.

In some ways, this movie feels like the first chapter in a franchise - Snipes is super-charismatic, has plenty of one-liners and even introduces himself as 'Cutter, John Cutter’, like he is an established character. He is also responsible for all the major turns the movie takes, from forcing the plane to land to foiling Rane’s attempted escape at the fairground. He even does a forward roll before killing a sniper a million miles away. 

While Snipes has kept his hand in the genre since, it is a pity that he never brought John Cutter back to the screen. Here is hoping the numbers on Netflix are big enough to convince some executive to green light Passenger 58.

You can read the article I reference at the start of this review here.

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: The Trollenberg Terror AKA The Crawling Eye (Quentin Lawrence, 1958)

In the middle of the Swiss Alps sits the majestic Trollenberg. A popular site for climbers, the Trollenberg has gained new notoriety when climbers begin to die on the mountain. American scientist Alan Brooks (Forest Tucker) arrives at the base of the peak to study a mysterious fog that is slowly making its way down the mountain.

Are the two phenomena related? 

(spoilers)

I first saw a clip of this movie in Small Soldiers, which I watched when I was really young. The image of a giant eye with tentacles reaching for the camera stayed with me for years, until I stumbled upon the movie about a decade ago.

A UK production based on a TV play (ala Quatermass), The Trollenberg Terror is not a great movie. But it is peppered with fun b-movie touches that make me love the whole thing, warts and all.

On this viewing, I did feel the lack of forward momentum. The movie was made on a low budget, and the filmmakers do not really take the action out of the hotel lobby. What helps the movie's pace are a couple of vaguely suspenseful moments (including a surprisingly graphic murder with a pickaxe) and a peppering of odd moments.

There is a subplot involving a young psychic (played by Janet Munro) who starts to pick up messages from the unseen threat up the mountain. While the movie is slow and stagey, some of the oral storytelling is quite effective - especially when the psychic starts narrating one of the invisible enemies' attacks from their POV. 

I grew up listening to tapes of old 40s radio shows, and scenes like this carry a similar atmosphere. It might not be cinematic, but it worked for me. 

The most effective element of the movie is the fog that precedes and obscures the film's antagonists. You can see the influence on John Carpenter's The Fog, and the filmmakers behind The Trollenberg Terror milk a lot of suspense from the fog machines, particularly once the third act creaks into view. 

The third act is where I rediscovered my love for this movie. The Trollenberg Terror spends most of its runtime teasing some great 'terrifying' monstrosity, and finally turns from a pretty staid drawing room mystery to a OTT fifties monster movie, complete with a collection of bug-eyed nasties that resemble Shuma-Gorath from the Street Fighter/Marvel game.

If you like monsters, and fifties special effects, you will find a lot to like in the final 15 minutes of The Trollenberg Terror. While it is hokey, it is genuinely exciting. 

I probably have not sold this movie very well, but it is only 84 minutes long and available for free on the internet so...

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: Kiss The Girls (Gary Fleder, 1997)

When his niece goes missing, detective Alex Cross (Morgan Freeman) is drawn into the hunt for a killer who is collecting women who fit his specific idea of perfection.

When Kate (Ashley Judd) escapes the killer, Cross partners with her to find the killer and rescue the other women he has kidnapped before it is too late.

I read Kiss The Girls last year. I have never read James Patterson before, but the premise sounded interesting and I think was fooled by the fact that it had been made into a movie. 

I have now watched Kiss The Girls and I feel the same way about the movie: the premise sounded interesting and I was definitely hoodwinked by the assumption that the movie would be better than the book.

Kiss The Girls is the kind of potboiler that makes for a good genre movie - take the premise and the characters, strip out any extraneous stuff and flesh it out. As a cinematic thriller, Kiss The Girls comes off a bit inert.

This whole movie feels like a desiccated meal. All the components are there, but it needs water and heat to expand. 

I have a hard time pinpointing what is off about Kiss The Girls. The pace never racks up and the tension is never really there. There are sequences which should be scary, but they never quite pick up the way the filmmakers think they do.

With regards to the book, I found the characters uninteresting and plot over-complicated. The movie does a pretty good job of translating the story, but the only real improvement is the performances by Freeman and Judd, who make Cross and Kate credible.

Judd has a potentially meaty role as a woman who refuses to be defined by her experience. This is an interesting idea, particularly when most of the men around her seem to want to write her off, or bundle her away. This feels like a teaser for a more nuanced and deeper character study, and this movie is not that interested in building on Kate in a way that does not fit the formulaic plotting.

As far as the filmmaking goes, it is fairly by-the-numbers. There a couple instances of slow motion which come off as cheesy rather than effective (Double Jeopardy suffers from a similar use of the technique). Overall, I found the aesthetic of Kiss The Girls more interesting as an artefact, the fossil of a genre that has more-or-less migrated off the big screen to the small one, mostly in the form of the Law & Order spinoff SVU or Criminal Minds.

There is probably interesting essay in there, but it will take a meatier movie than this one to get me to delve into it.

IN THEATRES: Unhinged

On a bad day, single mother Rachel (Caren Pistorius) gets on the wrong side of another driver (Russell Crowe), who turns his sights on destroying everything she holds dear. 

Race with the Devil, Road Games, Breakdown, Duel... 

There have been some great thrillers involving cars. I have a soft spot for this type of movie - there is something so stripped down and visceral about limiting the story to the road. 

I do not watch trailers, but I caught a snippet of Unhinged and I got excited. Crowe's casting sounded good (and almost a comment on his real-life actions), and the film looked like unpretentious fun.

Unhinged rides the line between a character study of the motivations that turn men into spree killers and a trashy slasher. The filmmakers' inability to figure out which side to lean on means the film is completely unremarkable. I was struggling to remember it half an hour after leaving the theatre.

The film tries to contextualise Crowe's Tom Cooper as a man broken by the rat race and America’s healthcare crisis. However, the character is so cartoonishly evil in his ability to destroy the protagonists’ life that it is hard to buy.

Crowe does a good job in the early scenes, playing Cooper's simmering rage just right. 

But once the chase begins, his performance begins to feel silly, all the nuance shaved and moulded to fit the generic villain template.

The big problem with Unhinged is how rote and unoriginal it is. From beginning to end, nothing about Unhinged feels fresh or surprising. It does not help that the movie is dour.

Not that this movie should be light in tone, but there is such unrelenting meanness - and a predictability to the thriller mechanics - that make it kinda bland. There is a consistent grimness to a lot of average thrillers nowadays - I felt it with some of the Screen Gems and Blumhouse movies I have seen -  and Unhinged falls into the same mire.

I watched a TV movie a couple months ago with a similar premise. Entitled Death on the Freeway, it is about a serial killer in a van who waits until he gets cut off by a woman driver and then will try to run her off the road. even though it is directed by Hal Needham (Smokey and the Bandit) that movie actually found a way to write a thriller that had a good sense of suspense AND made the villain's actions part of a broader commentary on the misogyny the lead character faces. 

Compared to that movie, Unhinged is a leaden mess that lacks the intelligence to integrate and expand upon its themes, rather than use them as a jumping-off point for generic plot mechanics. 

NZIFF 2020: The Long Walk

An old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) finds his way back in time and tries to prevent the death of his mother, However, every time he returns to the present, he finds himself in a new present, one with its own surprises... and terrors. 

The above is a terrible plot summary, but I am willing to sacrifice it since this movie deserves to be seen with almost no knowledge.

I picked this movie without knowing that much about it, other than it was a Laotian time travel movie. And it turned out to be a wonderfully twisted surprise.

Written by Christopher Larsen and directed by Mattie Do, The Long Walk exists somewhere between time travel and a ghost story, as our protagonist seeks to fix an event in his past, while being haunted by the restless spirits of the departed.

Considering the film is set in the future, it is a joy at how effortless it is in introducing the viewer to the world. Taking the various genre components on their own, it would be so easy to see a version of this movie that was weighed down with exposition (particularly a Hollywood version). 

The story is almost entirely visual, yet without any obvious stylistic signifiers to identify the shift between past and present. The filmmakers trust that we can put together when something has changed, and I never felt confused or discombobulated - only when that is the intended effect.

Anchored by the minimalist gravitas of Chanthalungsy, the film is quiet and increasingly unsettling. I would not call it a horror movie, although there are horrifying implications and some disturbing imagery. 

The central conceit has elements which have been done before, but here it is accomplished in a quietly devastating way, that leaves almost everything up to the viewer.

The Long Walk is one of the most surprising and enjoyable experiences I have had at the movies this year. I just wish I could have been in a theatre to enjoy it.

Related

The Surrogate

The Kingmaker

Double Jeopardy (Bruce Beresford, 1999)

A woman is accused of killing her husband. After learning he faked his death, she breaks out of prison to find him and get her son back.

On her tail is a veteran parole officer who begins to question her guilt...

I have been circling a couple of ideas for mini-runs on the blog. One idea I was circling were 80s-90s thrillers. I tried to boil it down to a key theme, but I could not fixate on a set genre or series of conventions: should I look at courtroom thrillers? government conspiracy? serial killer? erotic?

One thing I noticed was how Ashley Judd’s name kept cropping up - I had forgotten how she had carved a niche for herself as a lead in mid-budget studio thrillers with high concepts.

Double Jeopardy might be the one with the longest tail, at least in terms of its central premise.

I remember the trailer for this movie coming out and people making of fun of the premise - I seem to remember a lot of conversations in the years since its release of people pointing out how poor its legal understanding is.

If this movie were better and made even half a decade earlier, then it might have been able to survive.

This movie is kind of disappointing. Maybe it is a bit early to reveal my overall thoughts, but there is no cutting it with this one.

It feels by-the-numbers from top to bottom. The execution is fairly pedestrian, with some clumsy uses of slow motion  that I could not ignore.  

Even Tommy Lee Jones's casting feels like a cliche - he is playing a role that feels like a distaff version of Sam Gerard. He is watchable but the performance feels more like a rehash than a fresh spin. His casting also felt like a fatal flaw, since it just highlights how great The Fugitive is.

It also seemed like this movie feels a few years too late. Aside from The Fugitive, it feels like a blander re-run of the kinds of man-on-the-run, domestic-bliss-gone-to-hell thrillers that were popular in the late 80s and early 90s. 

This movie is rated R, but it just comes off too clean and sanitised. This woman's whole world is turned upside down, but aside from Judd's performance, I never felt the jeopardy (har har) of her situation.

I will say, I picked this movie because Ashley Judd was in it, and I am glad she was because she was kind of the guiding star through the blandness.

Focusing on Judd, I really enjoyed her performance. She is a little too intelligent to play the young ingenue bride, but once the character has gone through her prison sentence, she really clicks.

I like angry Judd - she has a terseness and sarcastic edge that works for the character. I wish the movie was a bit smarter and complicated. Her escape from justice and tracking down of her ex husband is the most enjoyable part of the movie.

Bruce Greenwood is such a great actor, and I had totally forgotten that he was in this. There is a grizzled gravitas to him that has made him great for authority figures and presidents. Every time he speaks it sounds like he just came in off a prairie. There is a weird decency to him that should be boring, but there seems to be a self-awareness to him that makes him magnetic. 

To cut to the chase, I was looking forward to seeing that quality subverted here. He was also far younger than I had seen in other roles - I was expecting it to be more of a noir set up, with Greenwood as a homme fatal ala Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. This movie has no time for character - Greenwood does a good job here but he is a bit limited by the cookie-cutter bad guy role.

A cookie cutter thriller with some solid performances, Double Jeopardy is perfect Netflix fare. Take that whatever way you want.

Primal Fear (Gregory Hoblit, 1996)

Flashy lawyer Martin Vail (Richard Gere) is defending a young man who has been accused of killing an archbishop. When he realises that his client has a split personality, Martin has to work out a strategy that will enable him to save him from the death penalty.

I remember the poster from this movie being in my English teacher’s room. The only other thing I knew about it was that it brought Edward Norton to Hollywood’s attention. This is a long way of saying that I have had no real interest in watching this movie.

However, I have been re-visiting thrillers from the 90s and this one was on Netflix.I also really like Richard Gere as an actor, particularly when he plays morally complicated men. I have had no strong desire to watch this movie, but Gere's name drew me in.

The parts of this movie are great.

Gere plays a flashy lawyer who juggles love of the money and press with a desperate need to believe that his client is innocent. It is a contradiction that the script does not make that believable, but Gere’s slickness and faux charm makes it almost believable.

The big obstacle he faces is also intriguing: because criminal proceedings have been initiated, he cannot plead an insanity defense. This forces the character to think outside of the box, and use what he knows of the prosecuting attorney and legal grey areas to engineer a positive outcome for his client.

Looking at the cast for this movie, I was reminded of how prestigious these kinds of adult thrillers were. They were basically high-class versions of genre movies - peppered with violence and sex, but packed with big name actors and filmmakers. it is a genre that is basically dead at the multiplex.

While Norton got all the plaudits at the time, the performer who really popped for me was Laura Linney as Gere's rival, Janet Venable. She  is in her own struggle with the corrupt DA who wants to use the case for his own interests, and Linney plays that struggle so well, despite some of the gymnastics the script forces her through.

Here is where I have to clarify my own feelings on the movie as a whole, because I think Linney's character is a big part of it.

Despite the things I mentioned, I had a bit of trouble getting into this one - there is a weird flatness to the direction and the story's stakes that I could not get a finger on.

I think there is something missing from Gere's character - script-wise not in terms of performance. I never believed the contradiction of this character. There is a moral dimension to his lawyering (that's a verb) which i just could not believe.

Gere is presented as such a facile and manipulative figure for such a long portion of the runtime that the revelation that he wants to believe that people are innocent just comes off as self-serving. The film wants to present a character who has lost himself to the darkness, but has a kernel of decency that he holds onto. However, he never comes across as anything other than an ambulance chaser.

 

Ebert said this movie mistakes extra subplots for complexity and I would agree. I think the filmmakers are trying to present Gere's character as a sympathetic figure through his support of a former client who is trying to keep his restaurant - but it just feels incidental.

Tying it back to Laura Linney's character, I felt like the movie gives a stronger sense of the pressure she is under. We get repeated scenes of Janet having the corrupt states attorney (played by Frasier's dad, John Mahoney) threatening her. Her interactions with Gere's Vail also come off as one-sided. She has no power, and part of Vail's strategy is to use that against her.

In turn that nudges him away from coming off as 'complicated' to just a bad guy. Which robs the final twist of its impact.

Primal Fear is not bad. But it is a perfect example of the kind of middle-of-the-road adult thriller that they do not make any more. I would recommend it over the other 90s thriller I'm reviewing this month. There is a bit more meat on the bones here.