Edge Of Darkness (2010)

Edge Of Darkness is Death Wish in slow motion.  It’s a routine revenge thriller that deludes itself into believing it has more emotional and intellectual substance than it actually possesses.  But at least the hero gets closure this time.

That long forgotten Mel Gibson charm is evident during its opening few minutes.  When we first meet him, he’s delighted to be reunited with his grown daughter.  But when he sees her vomiting right by the open passenger door of his unmarked cruiser, he is worried.

“I’m not pregnant, dad,” she reassures him.  And indeed, she is not.  But she can’t stop puking.  And her nose keeps bleeding.

Right before she’s about to tell him the serious danger she’s in, she is brutally murdered right in front of him, a not-so-discreet drive-by.  His fellow officers believe it was a tragic mistake, that he was the one targeted for assassination.  Both the audience and Gibson know better.

The once loving father immediately turns into a psychotic right-wing fascist.  (Talk about typecasting.)  Initially discouraged by his department to step back, Gibson convinces them he should stay on.  He lets them believe in their bogus theory which gives him free reign to terrorize his daughter’s enemies and her grieving boyfriend.

When he finds a gun in her old bedroom, he traces it back to her lover.  Rather than call ahead or arrange some kind of clandestine meeting, he picks the lock of his apartment not knowing the paranoia awaiting him on the other side.  One pointless fight scene later, he’s given some of her belongings and the key to her apartment.  Her laptop is missing.

In some ways, Edge Of Darkness is an Idiot Plot, a film where if the characters behaved more logically all their problems wouldn’t take two hours to resolve.  Gibson’s daughter does not immediately tell him why she’s in trouble.  She could’ve done so in his car.  God knows if she stayed inside his house a little longer, she’d have time to get at least the basics out.  It isn’t until more than an hour later that a friend of hers conveniently hands him a couple of her homemade DVDs that will incriminate her shady employer and correctly predict her fate.  You think, because of the urgency of the matter, this might’ve been alluded to much earlier.

Danny Huston, once again playing an even-tempered heel, is that shady employer, the head of Northmoor, a mysterious research & development company that with airtight political protection and corrupt security goons is able to secretly develop nuclear weapons that supposedly won’t be traced back to the American government.

I have questions.  Who asked Huston to do this?  Why is this happening in the first place?  How is he personally benefiting from an unused stockpile?  Yes, he has an amazing view of Boston from his office but so what?  He’s a ruthless industrialist without an equally nefarious co-conspirator.  He needs an evil plot but the movie fails to give him one.  Then again, because he’s so inept, he needs all of his messes cleaned up which takes up a lot of valuable plotting time.

When Gibson pays him a visit, he plays dumb and is overly sympathetic.  The 30-year veteran who used to have a spotless record (ha!) isn’t buying it.  There’s a very strange moment later on when Gibson pulls Huston’s car over, climbs in the back seat where he’s sitting and points his gun directly at his face.  If the purpose of this whole mission is simple retaliation, why doesn’t he pull the trigger right then and there?  And why doesn’t Huston with all his legal and political protection file a complaint against him?

That brings me back to the murder of Gibson’s daughter.  The hit is made to look like a tragic mistake.  But Gibson realizes that no one is looking to pop him.  He has no enemies.  (Really?)  Considering who he is and the resources at his disposal, wouldn’t it have made more sense to off him, too?  If the point is to make it look like he was the real target, wouldn’t the death of his daughter be seen as unfortunate collateral damage and not overly suspicious?  Wouldn’t it be a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?  Isn’t permanent misdirection the ultimate goal?

From time to time, a very mellow Ray Winstone shows up.  I don’t understand his deal.  He’s seemingly on Team Evil but is really on Gibson’s side.  He’s supposed to kill him but never does.  Instead he gives him leads and warnings.

Winstone has one thing in common with him.  They both suffer from hallucinations.  Gibson keeps seeing his daughter when she was a cute, giggly kid and having conversations with her voice.  Winstone can’t sleep because he’s jolted by the yelling of his father who’s been dead for 40 years.  Oddly, he never seems tired.

Like Gibson, Huston is reluctant to kill his rival, too.  Late in the film, two goons suddenly show up at his house and taze him.  He wakes up handcuffed to a gurney in some abandoned basement at Northmoor.  He easily gets out of the predicament before any further damage.  That’s two more missed opportunities.  How are these assholes still on the payroll?

Shortly after her murder, Gibson has to go identify his daughter’s body at the morgue.  Before she’s cremated, her ashes eventually dumped out in the ocean at the edge of a beach, Gibson decides he wants a lock of her hair.  This turns out to be a very important decision.

Gibson learns the hard way why his daughter was feeling like shit.  (It also inspires another question.  Why was she shot when she was gonna die anyway?)  That’s when he has his Fuck It! Moment.  Staggering toward his enemy’s lair, it’s assassination time.  When it’s over, he makes another fateful decision.  It makes sense but I didn’t care.

Edge Of Darkness was released ten years ago to very mixed reviews.  It’s too long, too familiar, too preposterous, unmoving and at times, seriously off-putting with its misogynistic violence.  One of Gibson’s sources is viciously attacked by a car as she exits another.  It’s needlessly gruesome and exploitative.  Yes, a number of men get popped in the eye.  We’ve seen that many, many times.  But this is worse.  Somehow the source survives but with serious life altering injuries.  I found it more upsetting than Gibson’s daughter’s murder because it literally comes out of nowhere.  Totally gratuitous.

Liam Neeson could’ve easily played Gibson’s role.  How is this angry father any different from the vengeful ones headlining Cold Pursuit or the Taken trilogy?  As for Gibson’s performance, his on-again/off-again Bostonian accent is often distracting.  (It sometimes sounds Australian.)  His propensity for sudden violence and crooked police tactics more revealing of his ultraconservative politics than his character’s devotion to his daughter.  He’s very fortunate that Huston’s nuke tycoon is too dumb to take seriously.

It’s purely coincidental that the movie was released the same year Chelsea Manning performed a heroic public service by exposing serious war crimes by the American government.  Despite being psychologically tortured on two different incarcerated occasions and attempting suicide several times, she has survived and will hopefully fully recover from her latest ordeal.  Without her courage, we wouldn’t know how awful the American war machine continues to be.

In Edge Of Darkness, Gibson’s daughter is a whistleblower in her own right.  And like Manning, there’s no way to hold her company accountable without breaking the law.  But unlike her impatient father, extrajudicial violence is never an option.  She offers no threats, just the careful gathering of evidence despite strict corporate surveillance.

However, the movie suggests that the villains are too powerful to be reined in by the legal system which explains the insane finale.  Suddenly, we’re witnessing an urban western fueled by Darwinian impulses and not a courtroom drama.

All of this leads to this inevitable final question.  If Gibson got those incriminating DVDs at the start of the movie, rather than near the end, would he have gone to the press sooner, especially if he wasn’t living on borrowed time?  I’m not convinced the answer is yes.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, March 21, 2020
7:23 p.m.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2

Lou is still an asshole.  Jacob is still lazy.  Nick remains a plagiarist.

Five years after Hot Tub Time Machine, three of its lead characters haven’t really changed.  The fourth, Adam, is conspicuous by his absence.  (John Cusack apparently shot a cameo that was omitted from the theatrical version but included in the unrated home video cut.)

The horrifyingly obnoxious Rob Corddry is back as Lou, the once suicidal Motley Crue obsessive turned unlikely rock god and domineering tech mogul.  Thanks to altering the events of 1986, Jacob (Clark Duke) is now his son.  Although they sort of reconciled at the end of the first movie, their relationship is once again strained.  Jacob is essentially his butler now.

Meanwhile, Craig Robinson’s Nick, the former dog groomer once unhappily married, resentful and wrongly suspicious of his wife, is still making hits through the existing work of others, despite not always remembering proper titles (Feelin’ Like Teen Spirit? Stay (I Kissed You)?) or even the correct lyrics.  (What’s with all the half-hearted spoofing?)

During a break in shooting the video for Stay (which starts with a similarly cute, smoky grey cat in a familiar wicker chair), the real Lisa Loeb shows up simultaneously marveling at Nick’s audacity while being justifiably offended by his shameless thievery.  (He even wears her leopard print glasses.)  Maybe he’s taken this too far finally.  His knock-offs are terrible, after all.  It’s unfathomable he would become a star because of them.  William Hung is owed an apology.

At an annual party at Shangri-Lou, pun-addicted Lou’s Trump-like home base, he gets brutally shot in the crotch by a mystery man no one has ever seen before.  In a fit of desperation, Nick and Jacob drag his dying carcass to the secretly and conveniently re-located hot tub time machine which does not send them into the past as before but, like the second adventure with Marty McFly, into the coming future.  How is he still alive ten years later?

It’s now 2025.  The most popular TV show is Choozy Doozy, a program where the studio audience suggests “challenges” for desperate celebrities stupid enough to be booked for such public humiliation.

Cars are like drones but fully automated.  They drive themselves and if you piss them off, they’re granted permission to kill you.  What happens if they’re refused such authority?  What’s stopping them from going rogue?

You don’t wanna know what a Dick Pad is.

Searching for the elusive Adam, now a best-selling science fiction author, leads the trio to his son (Adam Scott), a super square on the verge of being married to the hot blond chick from Community.  When the foursome ends up at Choozy Doozy, Nick is the unfortunate torture victim awaiting his punishment.  No longer a reliable hit machine, he’s now famous for a stupid novelty song that spawns a forgettable dance craze.

Because this franchise hates gay people, the audience votes for him to have sex with a man.  Well, not physical sex, virtual reality sex.  The gag is the audience member who made this victorious suggestion has to be his partner.  Once again, Lou and Nick find themselves in a compromising position which plays off their deep discomfort with male intimacy (although Lou does repeatedly say “I love you” in a foolhardy attempt to lessen the tension).  Like the almost blow job in the first film, there’s a last minute reprieve.  A perfectly timed “lifeline” affords Lou a last-minute opportunity to replace himself with someone else.  Nick is not so lucky.

Besides the needless homophobia, there are a startling number of rape jokes.  The Choozy Doozy incident is referred to as such even though technically there is no actual assault.  Just after they arrive in 2025, thinking Lou hasn’t survived the trip, Nick hopes “he’s raping some angels in Heaven.”  Lou has a painting of himself sexually assaulting a tiger.  Why?  To demonstrate man’s “power over nature”.  Did Harvey Weinstein write the screenplay?

As expected, while the search for Lou’s shooter results in dead ends and false leads, we eventually learn who is the most angry at him.  Considering what happens late in the film, it makes perfect sense.  Too bad he survives.

Honestly, it’s hard to care for these characters when they bully each other so much.  In the first film, when they went back in time, we see them as they always are.  But when they look in the mirror, they see their younger selves like the rest of the world.  In number two, these number twos are startled by their future, older appearances.  Jacob is bald (and apparently the new CEO of Lougle), Nick is greying slightly and Lou has a Daniel Bryan beard.  They roast each other in increasingly unfunny ways and it all just seems so mean and tired.

Speaking of mean and tired, there’s a running joke involving Nick & Lou’s harsh reaction to Jacob bringing up the show Fringe in comparison to their dilemma of possibly living in an alternate reality.  They start improvising a soul song, You’re A Fucking Nerd.  The tune and the lyrics are always the same.  Like the movie itself, the result is always laughless.  Jacob only gets really mad in the final sequence.  He’s more tolerant than I am.

When the characters aren’t slamming each other, they’re trying to reconcile, just like the earlier installment.  But the movie hasn’t earned the right to be serious and sentimental when it prefers relentless cruelty the rest of the time.  This whole dishonest enterprise is so goddamn distasteful.

By the time we reach the end, Lou makes peace with Jacob’s mom and suggests they both clean up and ditch their respective drug habits, Nick agrees to cut back on his implausibly thriving career to spend more time with his always loyal wife and a now supremely confident Jacob, who has his own addiction issues, somehow manages to convince a previously disinterested coat check girl to suddenly make out with him.  Wishful thinking writ large.

Not content to rewrite the trajectory of their own pathetic lives, the trio then proceed to go back in time to fuck up several historical events like the self-serving glory hogs they are.

Someone blow up that fucking hot tub before they do any more damage.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
2:02 a.m.

Hell Fest (2018)

Every horror film has doomed characters, foolish people who unwittingly walk into dangerous situations they could’ve easily avoided.  They are almost always warned ahead of that fateful moment by someone smarter than them, usually a more observant pal or a “crazy” old man, that unstoppable evil is lurking and they should steer clear.

In Hell Fest, future victims are asked to sign a waiver.  I can’t think of a bigger red flag.

Hell Fest is a traveling scare park where customers, mostly thrill seeking teenagers, pay minimum wage workers to terrify them.  Unfortunately, the scare is always the same.  A costumed nobody in make-up or a mask popping out of nowhere to make them jump out of their skin.  It’s hard to believe this is a profitable business.  It’s no wonder certain patrons are indifferent and annoyed.  Why are they even here?  Even the DJ sucks.

We meet three young couples who have VIP passes which means line cutting privileges.  They walk around greatly amused by the set up and are often easily freaked out.  Their standards are too low.

They enter a series of confining house mazes where a pre-taped announcer (the original Candyman Tony Todd who also makes an on-camera cameo) repeatedly welcomes their descent into hell and congratulates them for escaping safely after more workers and props repeatedly and predictably thrust themselves into the open on cue.  (Watch out for that doorway laser.)  The kids have fun until the girls separately walk into a classroom as part of something called Deform School.  (Hell Fest must be owned by The Cryptkeeper.)

All of a sudden, another girl shows up begging for help.  A masked man with a knife is not far behind.  The girls with the VIP passes tell him where his next victim is hiding.  He drags her out.  Two of the young witnesses are impatient and move on.  But the last one stays behind.  She wants to see what’s next.  It’s not part of the show and she immediately knows it.

She will encounter that masked man over and over again.  He never says anything.  He just stands and stares.  I have to say I don’t like his mask.  It’s not frightening but it does look a little racist.  And why is he always humming Pop Goes The Weasel?  Pick a better tune, bitch.

Everywhere she turns, there he is.  In the only really effective moment, one you still see coming, she finds herself in the bathroom drying off.  As we cut between her and the seemingly empty facility a couple of times, it is on the third such edit that she is in fact not alone.  There he is within inches.  The ultimate sidler.  He teases the audience with his slowly outstretched hand but goes no further.  A couple of cuts later, a vanishing.

Let’s talk about that for a moment, the reluctance of the killer.  Look, I get it.  Sometimes the hunt is better than the actual kill.  You want your victim to know who is ending their life.  But he’s not consistent.  When one kid goes looking to steal a stuffed animal he can’t win legitimately at traditional ring toss games to impress his love interest, the one being stalked for the rest of the movie, there’s the masked man, The Other, blocking his path, tripping him and eventually squashing his old bean.  No hesitation whatsoever.

But despite having ample opportunity to off his new gal pal, the killer suddenly and inexplicably resists doing what comes naturally.  Even when she locks herself into a bathroom stall, at no time does he simply kick down the door and do the deed.  Nope.  He just shakes the door like a maniac for a bit until she slides into an adjacent crapper.  You’re telling me he’s not strong enough to rip it from its hinges?

Oh yes, before that he does try grabbing her head while standing on top of another toilet.  But he’s not exactly determined or anything.  Even Michael Myers wasn’t this lazy.  He had a scarier mask, too.

Telling a security guy is useless.  He thinks it’s just an overzealous worker doing what he’s paid to do.  And she did sign that waiver after all.

Her dimwitted friends are no better.  When the killer steals a bunch of newly pressed photos the aforementioned amorous couple makes while smooching in a photo booth, one of their pals trails after him openly demanding he return them.  When he goes into hiding humming that shitty song, she ultimately backs off.  He ends up dropping a strip in the bathroom later on.

It isn’t until the very last stages of the film when the killer stops being discreet that a panic erupts, the number of dead teenagers grow and the Final Girls (yes, there are two this time) stupidly get themselves trapped in a horror maze I thought they’d already been through because, aside from the Tunnel Of Love-inspired ride, they’re all pretty much indistinguishable.

Hell Fest is Halloween meets The Funhouse.  To say it is derivative and uninspired is to be redundant.  The villain is nothing, a mystery man with no intrigue and no real motive to kill so many stock characters.  In order to enter the park, you have to go through a metal detector.  The Other (an homage to The Shape) does set it off during his security check but he carries no weapons.  He doesn’t need to.  There are plenty at his disposal.  Because of the remarkably lax security, it’s no surprise he’s gotten away with murdering teenagers for years.

The three couples are just good looking, mostly oversexed props to chase down and annihilate although I did like Amy Forsyth who plays one of the survivors.  We’re thankfully past the era of sexist males with overly tolerant girlfriends.  But I’m not sure making the women the bigger horndogs here makes any real difference, nor does the diversity.  They’re all still one-note archetypes.

Aside from pointing out sexual harassment briefly, the film could’ve easily been made in the 80s.  It’s abundantly obvious how much of a throwback it wants to be.  But it doesn’t put in the work to stand out on its own.  Like the Hell Fest attraction itself, it has no clue how to scare us.  I was just as indifferent as some of the characters.  We haven’t had a popular slasher franchise since the uneven Scream quadrilogy which is why despite being stabbed in the stomach we still have our indestructible antagonist available for a follow-up.

Hell Fest ends with a weird revelation.  It should’ve concluded with a class action lawsuit.

Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
11:51 p.m.