Uncharted (Ruben Fleischer, 2022)

 

Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, Steven Waddington, Pingi Moli. Screenplay: Rafe Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway. Cinematography: Chung-hoon Chung. Production design: Shepherd Franklin. Film editing: Chris Lebenzon, Richard Pearson. Music: Ramin Djawadi. 

Tom Holland is such a likable actor, with true screen presence, that I wish him well in his attempts to venture beyond the Spider-Man franchise. But Uncharted won’t do. It’s action for action’s sake, scrapping all laws of physics and probability for the sake of its thrills. I mean, it opens with a sequence that features Holland’s Nathan Drake on a string of cargo bales that are dangling from the back of an airplane. Drake jumps forward from bale to bale, defying gravity and wind speed, even though the same wind keeps sweeping his pursuers off to their doom. I knew from that moment that the only thing to do was relax and treat the movie like the live action equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon, the ones in which Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and remains suspended in air before he notices what he’s done. I’ve suspended disbelief for many scenes in an Indiana Jones or James Bond film, but Uncharted tested my limits – and failed. Still, Holland does what he can with the material, and he’s fun to watch doing dumb stunts. Mark Wahlberg is there for the buddy movie aspect, and Antonio Banderas is wasted in the role of the villain. Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle play treacherous women, and even though Ali’s and Holland’s characters share a room and a bed in one scene, there’s scarcely a hint of sex and romance. It’s all based on a series of video games that I haven’t played, and I guess there was some resistance to the film from those who have, but mainly about the casting choices. 

Locke (Steven Knight, 2013)

Tom Hardy in Locke

Cast: Tom Hardy, voices of Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Ben Daniels, Tom Holland, Bill Milner, Danny Webb, Alice Lowe, Silas Carson, Lee Ross, Kirsty Dillon. Screenplay: Steven Knight. Cinematography: Haris Zambarloukos. Film editing: Justine Wright. Music: Dickon Hinchliffe.

A man driving on the highway alone at night, talking to people on the car phone. It's the stuff of which radio dramas like the 1943 Sorry, Wrong Number were made -- or might have been, if there had been car phones in the 1940s, the peak era of radio drama. Sorry, Wrong Number was "opened up" to show other characters than the woman on the phone when it was filmed by Anatole Litvak in 1948, but Steven Knight's Locke remains alone in the car with its title character, played by Tom Hardy in a performance that leaves no doubt that he's one of our best actors. But the actors whose voices are heard in the film, including Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, and Tom Holland, are just as compelling in their performances. The chief objection made by critics is that Locke is basically a "gimmick" film, that there's no reason why Knight shouldn't have shown the people on the other end of the line -- or whatever passes for "line" in the era of mobile phones. It's a tour de force that keeps the camera trained on Locke for the film's entire 85 minutes, with only occasional cuts to the surrounding traffic, and it's an added departure from the expected to cast an actor known mainly for his work in action films in a role that puts him in one seat for the whole movie. But I think Knight and Hardy make it work splendidly, focusing our attention on the character of Ivan Locke, and the decision he has made to abandon both the important construction project he supervises and the family gathering to watch a big soccer match on TV in order to drive to where a woman with whom he had a one-night stand is giving birth to his child. Knight hasn't really solved all the problems of motivation that he should have: The decision to have Locke deliver a series of monologues directed at his dead father, who abandoned him and his mother, feels contrived. But there's real drama in the conversations with Donal (Scott), the inexperienced and rather feckless man he has left in charge of the crucial concrete pour, with the hysterical Bethan (Colman), who is giving birth to their child, and with his wife, Katrina (Wilson), to whom he is just now confessing that he slept with Bethan. Best of all, Knight has the good sense not to provide closure to Locke's story: When we leave him, he has a marriage in ruins and a baby to help support, and he's been fired from his job. But because we have spent so much time face to face with Locke, and because Hardy has so deftly created the character, it's easy to sense that he's capable of surmounting these problems. 

Spider-Man: Far From Home (Jon Watts, 2019)

Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Far From Home

Cast: Tom Holland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Zendaya, Samuel L. Jackson, Jon Favreau, Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, Tony Revolori, Angourie Rice, Remy Hii, Martin Starr, J.B. Smoove, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Cobie Smulders, Numan Acar. Screenplay: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers. Cinematography: Matthew J. Lloyd. Production design: Claude Paré. Film editing: Leigh Folsom Boyd, Dan Lebental. Music: Michael Giacchino.

Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire are fine actors, but neither of them made the role of Spider-Man their own the way Tom Holland has done. His training as a dancer helped him get the moves right for the stunts as Spider-Man, and he's the right height (five-eight) and age (early 20s) to keep him credible as the adolescent Peter Parker. Beyond that, he's a gifted actor, more than holding his own in scenes with veterans like Samuel L. Jackson and Jake Gyllenhaal. It's hard to know what Marvel Studios will do when Holland eventually ages out of the role. He's the main reason I liked Spider-Man: Far From Home much more than the usual superhero movie. He makes the slam-bang special effects tolerable. It helps, too, that he's up against one of the more engaging villains in the genre, Gyllenhaal's Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio. Gyllenhaal -- who was once considered for the role of the webslinger in Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004) when Maguire was sidelined -- makes the seduction of Peter Parker into handing over the gizmo that gives him power credible, and then does a fine job of unveiling Beck's bad side. But mostly it's Holland's ability to sustain Peter's boyish gullibility, and his reluctance to give up his teenage life (and his pursuit of Zendaya's MJ) to become one of the Avengers, that brings the implausible superhero to life. The screenplay is efficient and sometimes witty, often at the expense of Peter, who gushes "Oh, I love Led Zeppelin!" when Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) plays a track by AC/DC and who gets zinged by Nick Fury (Jackson) with "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Stark said you wouldn't get that because it's not a Star Wars reference."

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.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017)

Jacob Batalon and Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Homecoming

Peter Parker / Spider-Man: Tom Holland
Adrian Toomes / Vulture: Michael Keaton
Tony Stark / Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr.
May Parker: Marisa Tomei
Happy Hogan: Jon Favreau
Ned: Jacob Batalon
Liz: Laura Harrier
Michelle: Zendaya
Pepper Potts: Gwyneth Paltrow
Aaron Davis: Donald Glover
Flash: Tony Revolori
Herman Schultz / Shocker #2: Bokeem Woodbine
Anne Marie Hoag: Tyne Daly
Abe: Abraham Attah
Coach Wilson: Hannibal Buress
Principal Morita: Kenneth Choi
Mr. Harrington: Martin Starr
Mrs. Toomes: Garcelle Beauvais
Mac Gargan: Michael Mando
Jackson Brice / Shocker #1: Logan Marshall-Green
Karen, the Suit Lady (voice): Jennifer Connelly

Director: Jon Watts
Screenplay: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers
Cinematography: Salvatore Totino
Production design: Oliver Scholl
Film editing: Debbie Berman, Dan Lebental
Music: Michael Giacchino

Although he looks closer to 21 (his real age) than to 15 (his character's age), Tom Holland makes Peter Parker into a charmingly geeky and impulsive adolescent in Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Homecoming, the latest iteration of the comic book hero, and I think the best. It benefits greatly from a good and refreshingly multiethnic cast, and most of all from Michael Keaton's participation as Adrian Toomes, whose work clearing up the rubble from the Battle of New York, which we saw in The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), allows him to salvage some alien technology and turn himself into a supervillain called Vulture. So far, this is standard superhero movie stuff. What makes it fresh is that Toomes is also the father of Liz, a girl on whom Peter has a crush, leading to the best scene in the movie: the moment that Toomes realizes that the boy who is taking his daughter to the homecoming dance is actually Spider-Man, with whom Vulture has already tangled. It elevates the familiar teen-movie awkwardness of meeting a girlfriend's father into something deliciously awful. Both Keaton and Holland make this mutual recognition scene a small classic, more memorable than the big chopped-up, noisy, CGI-flattened action sequences. (Although even there, I admired the wit of the scene in which Spider-Man tries to use his webbing to glue the halves of a bifurcated Staten Island Ferry back together.) The set-up for the film is that Peter, after being mentored by Tony Stark in the conflict at the center of Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2016), has his head full of glory and plans to join the Avengers. But Stark wants him to grow up, and insists that he stay in school -- a STEM-focused high school in Queens for budding geniuses. He can become "the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in his down time, handling bicycle thieves and purse-snatchers, but nothing more than that. He does have a fancy new suit, but its powers are limited by a "training-wheels protocol." Naturally, Peter and his best friend, Ned, who discovers Peter's secret identity by accident, manage to hack into the suit's wiring and disable the protocol, launching the naïvely ambitious superhero into a world of trouble. I enjoyed Spider-Man: Homecoming more than the usual comic-book movie because its hero's dilemmas are familiar real-world ones, unlike those of gods like Thor and Wonder Woman, visiting aliens like Superman, rich dilettantes like Iron Man and Batman, or time-shifted science projects like Captain America.