Dull, Gray Knight

One of my favorite movies from the 1980s is Excalibur, John Boorman’s re-telling of the Arthurian legend. Before that movie, tales of Medieval knights had pretty much died out after the 1950s, other than in animated movies (The Sword in the Stone) or a musical (Camelot). Boorman infused his film with an organic sensuality and magical energy that blew every cobweb out of the genre, making it fresh and compelling. When it was released, the best-known cast member was Nicol Williamson, but it featured actors who would later become famous: Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, and Ciaran Hinds. Excalibur paved the way for sword and sorcery tales like Ladyhawke and Conan the Barbarian, and it’s questionable that we’d have the Lord of the Rings films or “Game of Thrones” without it.

For that reason, I was eager to see The Green Knight. Based on an anonymous 14^th Century chivalric romance set during King Arthur’s reign, it features the youngest of Arthur’s knights, Gawain, who is also Arthur’s nephew. (Gawain showed up in Excalibur, played by Neeson.) The story has Arthur and his knights interrupted on New Year’s Eve by a gigantic knight all in green, wearing no armor but carrying a huge axe in one hand and a holly bough in the other, riding a green horse. He’s not interested in combat but rather suggests a friendly game – he’ll bear his neck and accept a blow from a knight, if that knight swears to meet him in the Green Chapel a year and a day later to receive a blow in return. Gawain brashly volunteers. The Green Knight bears his neck and Gawain slices the knight’s head off in a clean blow. But rather than die, the knight picks up his head and rides away laughing, after reminding Gawain of his vow.

True to his word, as the anniversary approaches Gawain sets off for the Green Chapel. After having adventures (alluded to but not described) on his way, Gawain comes to a splendid castle. When he explains his mission, the lord of the castle says the Green Chapel is only a few miles away. He invites Gawain to stay with him and his beautiful wife for the three days left before his appointment. After Gawain accepts, the lord suggests a wager: each day the lord will go hunting, leaving Gawain with his wife in the castle. When he returns from the hunt, the lord will exchange whatever he’s caught with whatever Gawain has gained that day. The wife tries to seduce Gawain each day, without success, and all Gawain gains each day is a chaste kiss. Then on the third day, the wife offers him a magical sash of green and gold silk that will protect him from harm. Knowing he must face the knight, Gawain accepts the gift and keeps it secret from the lord. When he faces the Green Knight, he flinches the first time the knight raises the axe, and the second time the knight again withholds the blow. The third time, the knight’s blow lands on Gawain’s neck, but leaves only a small mark. The Green Knight is then revealed to be his erstwhile host, the lord of the castle. The whole test was constructed by Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s witch of a half-sister, designed to test Arthur’s knights. Gawain is ashamed of his deceit, and when he returns to Camelot, he confesses his failure to be honorable to Arthur and his knights. The knights forgive him and following that they take turns wearing the sash as a reminder to always be honest.

That’s briefly the original story, which I can explain without any spoiler warning because any resemblance between the original story and the movie is purely coincidental. Screenwriter and director David Lowery has completely reimagined the story, but in a self-indulgent way that leaves it a confusing muddle. Lowery had made A Ghost Story in 2017, an atmospheric tale of love and loss where the specter looks like the simplest Halloween costume, and recently he did The Old Man & The Gun with Robert Redford. With The Green Knight, he shows an apparent belief that the dark ages were dark because it was cloudy and gray every day. The titular character looks like a whittled-down version of the monster in A Monster Calls, a black walking tree, while Gawain is portrayed as a callow, feckless youth.

Between playing Gawain in this movie and The Personal History of David Copperfield, Dev Patel has made admirable strides for race-blind casting. On the other hand, he must work extra hard to seem callow and feckless, which goes against his natural manner. Lowery has added a tomboyish love interest for Gawain, played by Alicia Vikander who then later plays the wife of the lord of the castle. That could have set up an interesting dynamic, but Lowery mostly ignores it. He adds in events to fill the time between Gawain setting out for the Green Chapel and his arrival at the lord’s castle, but they do little to enhance the story.

Rather than try anything like the original ending, Lowery steals the format of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” but the scene is so drawn out and painful not only Gawain would choose a quick blow from an axe, but so would the audience watching this mess. While it’s been garnering some good critical response, don’t believe it. Let The Green Knight be lost in the mist of history – it more than deserves that fate.

Bourne Again

When The Bourne Identity came out in 2002, it recreated the spy thriller for the new millennium. Director Doug Limon brought an independent film touch to the genre, with hand-held cameras and jerky motion – Limon didn’t let the cameraman see the rehearsals so he wasn’t sure who was talking next and often had to catch up. Limon also had a more jaundiced view of spies, partially from his father’s experience as the chief counsel for the Iran-Contra hearings in the 1980s. He took the first third of the source book and threw out the rest, so screenwriter Tony Gilroy rewrote the story based on an outline created by Limon. There were problems with the production because the executives at Universal didn’t like the look of the film, and re-writes and re-shoots put the film $8 million over budget and a year late for release. Because of this, when the sequel was in pre-production Limon was shut out from directing again.

Once released, The Bourne Identity was a solid it with a worldwide gross of $214 million, and it made Matt Damon an action star. For the sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, producer Frank Marshall brought in Paul Greengrass, whose visual style and independent roots lined up well with Limon’s, but who could handle the action with ease and bring the film in on budget and on time. 2004’s Supremacy was an even bigger hit than Identity (and my personal favorite of the series), and 2007’s Bourne Ultimatum had the biggest box office of them all. Greengrass and Damon, working with Tony Gilroy and Greengrass’s regular collaborator Christopher Rouse, managed to avoid the third-movie-of-a-trilogy curse (see X-Men: The Last Stand for the original cast and X-Men: Apocalypse for the reboot class). They also upped the action by introducing parkour to film for physical chase sequences. The next Bond film, Casino Royale, showed the series’ impact in its imitation of Bourne’s action sequences.

With Ultimatum the producers finished the original three books written by author Robert Ludlum, though beyond the titles and main character the last two films bear almost no resemblance to the novels. (The use of an adhesive thumbprint in Supremacy is in the book.) They crafted a satisfying finish to the series, and Greengrass and Damon moved on. But just like the nine subsequent novels the Ludlum estate published, written by Eric Van Lustbader who’s a decent thriller writer in his own right, the studio wanted to continue to capitalize on the story. They had Gilroy both write and direct The Bourne Legacy. While it took place at the same time as Ultimatum and shared some of the same characters, Gilroy didn’t attempt to imitate the Bourne series film style. It wasn’t as successful as the Damon movies, though Universal is planning a sequel with star Jeremy Renner.

Now nine years after Supremacy, both Greengrass and Damon are back for the eponymus Jason Bourne. For the first time Gilroy didn’t do the script, ceding those duties to Greengrass (who previously scripted his movies Bloody Sunday and United 93) and Rouse. While a novel series can extend through dozens of books, it’s much harder to accomplish that with films since you only have two-plus hours to tell the story rather than 90,000 plus words.

The plot of Bourne expands on the original three movies. Julia Stiles returns as Nicky Parsons, who’s been off the grid since the end of Ultimatum. She hacks the CIA and discovers a new black ops program that does for surveillance what the previous programs Treadstone and Blackbriar did for active espionage. While in the files she also discovers more information about Bourne’s background and how he was recruited. She heads to Greece to connect with Bourne, unaware that the head of the CIA (Tommy Lee Jones) has had his assistant Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) plant a tracking virus in Nicky’s computer. The CIA sends an asset left from the Treadstone project (Vincent Cassel) to deal with Nicky and Bourne.

In some respects the plot feels like a trash bag ad where they stuff more into a bag that’s already full. The bag holds in this case, but just barely, and if they intend to do a fifth Damon/Bourne film they’ll need to use a fresh bag. That said, the film does have its pleasures. As with the previous movies, the action flows from Greece to Berlin to London before its final reckoning in Las Vegas, though it’s never a travelogue like the Bond films. Greengrass finds common streets where he frames his action, and even manages to turn down the gaudy bright lights of Vegas to create a world of shadows and menace. Once more the physical action is intense and exciting, especially the extended sequence in Greece where Bourne and Nicky try to escape the CIA with a motorcycle run through an austerity riot.

For Damon the character is like a favorite suit, perhaps a bit worn and shiny but still a good fit. I enjoyed the interplay of Jones as the classic CIA officer and Vikander as the new generation. I missed the emotional resonance that I believe Gilroy brought to the other Bourne films, since you see it in his other films like Michael Clayton and State of Play, but Gilroy was tied up with the new Star Wars prequel Rogue One as well as Damon’s next film, The Great Wall.

Still, in spite of its weaknesses there are enough strengths with Bourne to make it worth seeing. It could have been a second chance at the third-movie-of-a-trilogy curse, but once again Greengrass and Damon have avoided that trap.

Don’t Cry UNCLE

The original series “The Man From UNCLE” was supposed to be TV’s answer to James Bond. It did boast some formidable guest stars, including Boris Karloff, Raymond Massey, Steve McQueen, Yvonne de Carlo, and John Carradine, and featured scripts by writers like Robert Towne and Harlan Ellison. As it went on, though, it slipped more and more into a parody of the genre, with campy villains and over-the-top stories. However, it was in competition with “Batman” and there was no way it could out-camp the caped crusader, so it vanished from the airwaves.

Now it has become another early TV show remade for the big screen, always a risky proposition. For every The Fugitive or Get Smart, you have several  Dark Shadows, Lost in Space, or Starsky and Hutch level movies. It’s hit-or-miss, with a lot more misses than hits. Fortunately for The Man From UNCLE, Guy Ritchie was both in the director’s chair and collaborated on the script (with Lionel Wigram, who also produced with Ritchie, working from a story by Jeff Kleeman and David C. Wilson). Ritchie knows how to blend humor and adventure, as he proved with Snatch and the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes. The story is set in the early 1960s, when the Cold War almost went hot, and Ritchie mines the history and the visuals of that time beautifully.

The characters of Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin are fleshed out a bit more than they ever were in the series. Solo (Henry Cavill) isn’t just a secret agent but also a thief who’s working for the CIA rather than sitting in jail – which basically makes this a remake of “It Takes a Thief” as well. In contrast Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) is a straight-laced and lethally strong KGB agent al a Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love, but played for comedy rather than menace.

In the opening sequence, the two are antagonists as Solo seeks to extricate a young female car mechanic named Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) from East Berlin. Gaby’s important because her father, a nuclear physicist, has gone missing, and the CIA wants her help to find him. Solo manages the extraction with a great deal of daring do mixed with suavity, leaving Kuryakin embarrassed and itching for revenge. The next morning Solo and his boss have a meeting at a West Berlin café – with Kuryakin and his handler. The two spy agencies have decided to work together to stop an independent group led by the Italian heiress Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki) from getting their hands on an A-Bomb. After a rough introduction, Solo, Kuryankin, and Gaby head for Italy.

Cavill handles the role of the charming rogue/ruthless spy with aplomb, and can throw away a line with the best of them. Hammer must be thankful for a role that will make moviegoers forget about The Lone Ranger, and he’s a great foil for Cavill while still excelling at the physical demands of the role. Vikander and Debicki both look like they stepped out of an early 1960’s movie directed by Fellini or De Sica, though they’re both better actresses than models from that era. Vikander has passion and fire, while Debicki plays an ice queen on the surface though hot-blooded beneath.

There are as many wise cracks being shot off during the film as there are bullets, but it never slips into parody like the original series. The edge of danger keeps the plot and the quips under control. Special kudos must go to production designer Oliver Scholl and costume designer Joanna Johnston. They perfectly present the early 1960’s world with the sets and costumes.

While it doesn’t transcend its roots as The Fugitive did, The Man from UNCLE does improve on the original rather than just packaging it as nostalgia. It also works as a decent spy adventure, and there are enough twists and turns to make it a fun ride that’s worth the trip.