The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Domhnall Gleeson. Show all posts

Sunday, 22 October 2017

Movie Review: American Made (2017)

A ridiculously fun yet incredible biographical adventure inspired by real events, American Made is a mad dash across a warped corner of the Cold War.

It's the late 1970s, and Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) is a restless TWA pilot based in Baton Rouge and married to Lucy (Sarah Wright Olsen). Always on the lookout for adventure, Barry is recruited by the CIA's Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) and agrees to start flying covert missions over Central America to photograph communist rebel bases. He establishes a daredevil reputation, connects with a Colombian drug gang (including the soon-to-be notorious Pablo Escobar) and starts to smuggle cocaine onboard the CIA plane, with stopovers in Panama where a young Manuel Noriega gets a cut.

When Barry gets into trouble with the Colombian authorities, Schafer intervenes and offers a new mission: flying guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, a ragtag militia supposedly waging a counterrevolution against the Sandinista government. The CIA relocates Barry and his family to the tiny community of Mena, Arkansas, where he is soon running his own airline, fulfilling the CIA's wacky anti-communist missions but getting insanely wealthy with his expanding drug smuggling enterprise.

Inspired by real people and events, American Made is an it-should-be-too-wild-to-be-true romp through the world of covert CIA missions as the Cold War disintegrated into batty dirty wars. The film is also a fictionalized profile of the actual Barry Seal, a thrill-seeking pilot who found a home in the CIA's anything-goes approach to espionage, and could never resist a little something extra on the side for personal gain.

Director Doug Liman has a personal interest in this slice of history. He is the son of lawyer Arthur Liman, chief counsel for the Senate Iran-Contra hearings. As a result American Made is more patient with historical facts than is typical for Hollywood; the film pauses at the right times and for the right durations for Seal to explain the raging geopolitics and mission logistics, and it's all done in a humorous yet effective tone.

The pace is furious and rich with content. While painting a vivid contextual picture of the times through real footage of Presidents Carter and (especially) Reagan on television selling a sterilized version of the real story, the film gallops from one incident to the next with confidence. Seal hops furiously between hidden Colombian airstrips in the jungle, airdrops over the Louisiana swamps, stopovers in Panama, ramshackle rebel bases in Nicaragua, his rapidly unraveling home life with a wife, kids and troublesome brother-in-law JB (Caleb Landry Jones), and still finds time to build a multi-plane contraband business while evading a host of law enforcement departments.

Tom Cruise is at his charismatic best, the role of Barry Seal fitting his screen persona like a glove: fearless, mischievous and able to talk his way out of most hellholes. Domhnall Gleeson ghosts in and out of the film as only a spy can, while Sarah Wright Olsen gives the long suffering Lucy just a bit of a memorable edge.

American Made features plenty of harrowing flights, but the film is an exquisitely smooth trips.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Wednesday, 19 April 2017

Movie Review: Ex Machina (2014)

A near-future psychological science thriller, Ex Machina peeks into the potential ramifications of evolving artificial intelligence and offers a stark vision.

Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer working for Blue Book, the world's dominant on-line search engine. Caleb wins an employee contest to spend a week at the home of Blue Book's reclusive founder Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). After a helicopter trip Caleb arrives at the luxurious but secluded house, where Nathan gives him his assignment for the week: Caleb is to interact with Ava (Alicia Vikander), Nathan's latest artificially intelligent robot, to determine her level of self-consciousness through a version of the Turing test

Caleb starts spending time with Ava in sessions recorded and monitored by Nathan, and Ava quickly demonstrates that she is indeed supremely capable of displaying human cognition and emotions. Between the sessions Caleb gets to know Nathan, who emerges as a hard drinking, lonely but manipulative genius. When mysterious power outages start to repeatedly disrupt the interactions with Ava, Caleb suspects there is more going on than he initially believed.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, Ex Machina is sparse, sometimes slow moving but always thought provoking. With the sleek look of detached modernity, Garland extends the Frankenstein narrative into the age of advanced robotics, and proposes a viable scenario where unintended consequences, both human and artificial, are the norm. When artificial intelligence includes heightened self awareness and inherent sexuality, the line between intelligent human and intelligent machine begins to blur, loyalties merge, and outcomes are predictably unpredictable.

The film is a three-person (or two-person, one robot) character study set almost entirely at Nathan's house, and the locations are limited to a handful of rooms. Garland effectively designs a theatrical dynamic where the three characters are forced to interact together by choice or design, and the implications of Ava's near-human levels of intellect and emotion are revealed through Caleb's eyes. Ava wastes no time in gaining the emotional upper hand and starts to dominate her visitor's psyche, maybe to get back at her creator or maybe just because she is bored and looking for an escape. Whether Nathan is implicated in her behaviour or simply her inventor is the puzzle that Caleb has to grapple with as the dark side of artificial intelligence evolution starts to emerge.

The film encounters a few substantive weaknesses. In stretching to 108 minutes of running time Garland notably runs out of original ideas about halfway through, and some of the scenes between Caleb and Nathan descend into tiresome drunken stupors. The ending picks up energy but in the wrong direction: Ex Machina abandons its more cerebral pursuits to chase more familiar but less satisfying conclusions. The robots are getting more clever, but the humans sometimes still get stuck in stock territory.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Saturday, 7 January 2017

Movie Review: About Time (2013)

A fantasy romantic comedy and drama, About Time holds promise but eventually gets itself into a hopeless multi-tonal mess.

In Cornwall, England, Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) turns 21 and is informed by his father (Bill Nighy) that the men in the family have the special ability to change their fortune by traveling back in time to any event they previously were part of. Tim has never been lucky in love, and so uses his newly found gift to try and improve his success rate with women. He is nevertheless unsuccessful in his attempts to woo Charlotte (Margot Robbie), the best friend of his free-spirited sister Kathy, better known as "Kit Kat" (Lydia Wilson).

After moving to London, Tim uses his time travel skills to help his father's friend and abrasive fledgling playwright Harry (Tom Hollander) have a more successful opening night. In the process he almost derails a promising relationship with Mary (Rachel McAdams), but then rescues his chances with her by doing more time traveling. Eventually Tim learns that there are limits to what he can and cannot change, and understands the true value of his special gift.

Directed and written by Richard Curtis, About Time starts with possibilities and an amusing attitude, mixing playful British eccentricity with droll fantasy elements. The early stages of Tim's experimentation with time travel are engaging, his clumsy but dogged pursuits of first Charlotte and then Mary full of understated charm and soft humour.

But unfortunately, About Time effectively unravels in its second half. New restrictions and rules on what is and is not possible with the time travel trick are introduced seemingly at random. Tim zips backwards and forwards in time at dizzying speed, and the film's emotional focus is hopelessly lost.

Curtis seems to have partial material for three different short stories, and he bolts them together inelegantly. After barely featuring as a character, Tim's sister Kit Kat suddenly becomes the new focus of attention, before a second jerky gear shift resets the emphasis on the relationship between Tim and his father. The narrative transitions are mishandled and in the process much of the initial charm evaporates, replaced by clumsy attempts at pathos. The film eventually settles for a couple of bland conclusions contradicting much of what Tim achieved with his hopping across time.

Domhnall Gleeson is passable as the slightly gawkish youth making his way in the world. Rachel McAdams, about 35 at the time of filming, mails in yet another perky but relatively trivial performance.

Well-intentioned but overambitious, About Time gets distracted in too many time zones.