Triple Frontier (J.C. Chandor, 2019)

 

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona. Screenplay: Mark Boal, J.C. Chandor. Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov. Production design: Greg Berry. Film editing: Ron Patane. Music: Disasterpeace. 

Mark Boal’s screenplay for Triple Frontier was kicked around for several years before it was finally made. Originally planned to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Boal’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker and Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty scripts, it was going to star Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp. When that fell through, other directors and other stars were talked about, including Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg, Will Smith, and Mahershala Ali. That it wound up starring Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal is a pretty good indication that filmmakers now have a solid roster of male actors to call on. All that cast shuffling and script massaging may have taken a little toll on the final product, which is a pretty good movie that doesn’t quite have the kinetic charge it needs. The story is about five veterans of the Special Forces who get together to assassinate a South American drug lord and steal the millions he has stashed away. The triple frontier of the title is the Tres Fronteras area where Brazil, Peru, and Colombia come together. The five men have all fallen on hard times after leaving the military. Affleck’s character, nicknamed “Redfly,” the former leader of the group, is trying to make a living selling real estate and struggling with a failed marriage. “Ironhead” (Hunnam) ekes out a living making motivational speeches to new recruits. His brother, Ben (Hedlund), gets a battering as a cage fighter. “Catfish” (Pascal) is a pilot whose license has been suspended because the plane he was hired to fly was loaded with cocaine. Only “Pope” (Isaac) still has military ties: He’s a hired gun for law enforcement organizations. With such varied backstories, the characters in Triple Frontier ought to be more involving, especially when their plan initially succeeds but then falls apart in a grueling attempt to haul the cash they scavenge across the Andes to their escape vessel. There are echoes of much better movies in this one, such as The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948). But Triple Frontier, despite the hard work of its fine cast, seems muddled – and even, dare I say, muddied by the gloomycam cinematography.

Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Thomas E. Sanders. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Fernando Velázquez. 

In Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro takes all the elements of the Gothic romance and turns them up to 11, which is the best thing he could have done with such familiar, not to say cheesy, material. There's the dewy heroine who makes a dubious marriage, the sinister rival female, the doughty but dull spurned suitor, and of course the Old Dark House. This one makes Thornfield Hall, Manderley, and even the Castle of Otranto look like a suburban tract house: It's a great malevolent beetle of a mansion, squatting on a bleak landscape, decaying steadily and grossly while sinking into the mine above which it sits. It's inhabited by the cash-poor aristocrats Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), along with a sizable contingent of ghosts. To it, Thomas brings his bride, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), whose father has recently died (rather violently, as we have seen), leaving her the family fortune. Edith is spunky and imaginative, an aspiring writer of ghost fiction, having had her own encounters with ghosts who warned her to "beware Crimson Peak." What she doesn't know, of course, is that the place to which her husband has brought her is called Crimson Peak, for its blood-red clay, by the locals. Anyway, the truth will out, and in a variety of gruesome ways. What makes the movie work is that del Toro is willing to go over the top entertainingly, stretching credibility to (and sometimes beyond) the breaking point, without smirking about it and camping it up. So we have, for example, a duel between Edith and Lucille, with both wearing flimsy, flowing nightwear. (Kate Hawley's costume designs are splendidly excessive.) We have apparitions in various states of decay and a plethora of insect life. The ghost of Edith's mother appears in a form that looks something like a cross between a tarantula and a woman with dreadlocks. There are vats of disgusting red murk in the cellar in which things are submerged. It's all a bit much, but the actors know how to take it in their stride. Having played Loki in the Marvel movies and the vampire Adam in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Hiddleston in particular knows how to make a character both attractive and disquieting at the same time. Del Toro isn't up to anything of great moment in this movie, but it's good to see the material handled with a distinct sensibility and an avoidance of the tried and true. 

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Angus Macfadyen, Ian McDiarmid, Clive Francis, Pedro Coello, Franco Nero. Screenplay: James Gray, based on a book by David Grann. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Jean-Vincent Puzos. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Christopher Spelman.

A New Yorker profile of James Gray, keyed to the release of his much-anticipated Ad Astra, sent me in search of his earlier films, none of which I had seen. I lighted first on The Lost City of Z, which I had earlier ignored, in large part because of its title: It sounded like one of those campy adventure movies spoofing the genre epitomized by King Solomon's Mines and pretty much done to death by the Indiana Jones series. I admit that the Z in the title also made me think it had something to do with zombies. Anyway, how can we take movies about explorations in the Amazon seriously after Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982)? But The Lost City of Z turns out to be a pleasant surprise: an old-fashioned adventure story played straight and done well. I think it could have used an actor of more heft and charisma than Charlie Hunnam in the lead -- it was originally planned for Brad Pitt (who stayed on as producer after a schedule conflict) and then for Benedict Cumberbatch, either of whom might have filled the part of the obsessive explorer Percy Fawcett better. But Gray handles a sprawling story -- we get not only scenes of Amazonian hardship but also of the Battle of the Somme in World War I -- with finesse.