Short Takes: Zombieland Double Tap, Motherless Brooklyn, Midway, Parasite

I’m afraid I need to play catch-up after seeing a half-dozen movies in the last two weeks. With a couple of films I want to see arriving each week through the end of the year, I don’t want to fall too far behind with my reviews. Here are my thoughts on four movies.

Zombieland: Double Tap

A sequel separated by a decade or more from the original can be a dicey proposition. For every Incredibles II or The Color of Money, there’s a Zoolander II or Rings. Thankfully, Zombieland: Double Tap is firmly in the former group. Original stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin reunite with director Ruben Fleischer to make a movie that builds on the original while recapturing the anarchic comedy mayhem that made the first film a major success. Part of the story was inherent with the cast, since Breslin is no longer the tween of the first film. Her leaving the nest to discover her place in the apocalyptic world sets the story in motion.

The cast is expanded with Rosario Dawson as an Elvis-loving hotel manager and Zoey Deutch as a ditzy blond who’s somehow managed to survive in a mall through the years since the zombies showed up. There’s also a fun moment when Harrelson and Eisenberg meet their literal match in Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch).

Both Zombieland movies are very bloody versions of Roadrunner cartoons with higher body counts, as if George Romero overdosed on laughing gas. Still, they’re raucously fun and funny, and if you liked the original (or the other great zombie-comedy, Shaun of the Dead) you’ll thoroughly enjoy Double Tap.

Motherless Brooklyn

If you’re a fan of the 1999 novel that won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Gold Dagger, you’ll likely want to skip this movie. If you haven’t read the book, you’ll find Motherless Brooklyn is a decent mystery that could be a love child of Chinatown. The film was a passion project of Edward Norton, who not only stars but wrote the screenplay and directed the film, yet apart from the main character and a couple others, everything else in the film is different from the book.

That starts with the setting in 1950s New York. Lionel Essrog (Norton) suffers from Tourette’s, a disorder that causes tics as well as verbal outbursts. He works along with a couple guys for Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), a low-rent detective who supplements their income by running a car service. Lionel’s challenge interferes with his work, but Minna knows he has a gift that makes up for it – Lionel remembers everything. When Minna’s killed on a job, Lionel and the others must figure out not only who did it but why. The investigation involves a ruthless builder (Alec Baldwin), his estranged architect brother (Willem Dafoe), a neighborhood organizer (Cherry Jones), and a woman fighting to preserve black neighborhoods (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).

At almost 2 ½ hours, the film meanders a bit, but sparkling performances from the entire cast help.

Midway

Roland Emmerich is known for disasters – movies of disasters (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) and disastrous films (1998’s Godzilla, Independence Day: Resurgence, 2012). With Midway, he’s turned his view to military history, but he still managed to tell the story of two disasters – one for the Americans, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the other for the Japanese with the Battle of Midway, during which three of their aircraft carriers were sunk. While the war lasted another three years, but after Midway the Japanese turned from offensive operations to defensive.

Similar to Tora, Tora, Tora, Emmerich balances the story from the viewpoint of both nations. A bridge between them is provided by Patrick Wilson, playing naval intelligence officer Edwin Layton. A prelude has him in Tokyo in the late 1930s, discussing with Admiral Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) what could cause war between the two nations. In December 1941, Layton is at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese launch their surprise attack. Advances in special effects allow Emmerich to create a pulse-pounding scene, in particular with the hellish destruction of the Arizona. Overall, the history of the battles, along with the Doolittle raid on Tokyo a few months after Pearl Harbor, are shown with historical accuracy, though the times in between battles are flat and pedestrian.

The film is filled with stars, including Woody Harrelson (again) as Admiral Nimitz, Dennis Quaid as “Bull” Halsey, and Aaron Eckhart as Jimmy Doolittle. Ed Skrein, Luke Evans, and Nick Jonas portray pilots and gunners in the torpedo and dive bomber squadrons posted on the USS Enterprise. Everything covered in this film has been filmed before, with the previously mentioned Tora Tora Tora, Michael Bay’s ponderous Pearl Harbor, which also covered the Doolittle raid, and an all-star Charlton Heston version of the climatic battle, also named Midway, released in 1976. The film doesn’t really add anything to the telling of the stories.

Parasite

Korean director Bong Joon Ho is one of the more interesting auteurs currently working in film. He’d broken out with The Host in 2006, a low budget and highly effective creature feature (not to be confused with the 2013 adaptation of a Stephanie Meyer novel that wasted Saoirse Ronan). His first English language film was the dystopia-on-rails story Snowpiercer. With Parasite, you think he’s decided to do almost a situation comedy for the first hour. By then it’s too late.

The film focuses on a poor family in Seoul – husband, mother, grown daughter and son – trying to get by anyway they can, including folding (badly) pizza boxes. Their fortune begins to change when a friend of the son offers to let him take over his job when the friend heads overseas to college. He’s been tutoring the daughter of a wealthy couple in English, and the son’s experienced enough to handle it. Seeing the luxury in which the other family lives stuns the son, and through some brazen lies along with sabotage of prior employees, the other three family members find work in the house. But then the plot twists in surprising and, in the end, devastating ways.

Parasite unanimously won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes Film Festival, and it likely will pick up an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. While you think the title refers to the poor family, Bong Joon Ho takes the theme in an unexpected direction. It’s a movie that you won’t easily forget.

Minor Destruction

Roland Emmerich has destroyed Washington, DC more times than anyone. He’s done it via death ray (Independence Day), ice age (The Day After Tomorrow) and flood (2012). With his new movie, White House Down, he underachieves, in that he only destroys parts of the city this time out.

Channing Tatum plays John Cale, a former marine who’s now a Capitol policeman working security for the Speaker of the House Eli Raphelson (Richard Jenkins). Raphelson helped him get the job as thanks for saving his son while in combat in Afghanistan. Cale dreams, though, of becoming a Secret Service agent. He’s a divorced father whose daughter Emily (Joey King) is a political junkie and supporter of President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx). When Cale gets an interview with the Service, he calls in a favor to get his daughter a pass so she can accompany him.

The interview, conducted by the assistant head of the White House security team, Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), doesn’t go well. Finnerty was Cale’s college girlfriend and remembers how he was then. Cale tries to convince her that he’s changed, that he’s become more responsible and serious, but his record derails his quest for the job. Finnerty has just returned from an overseas trip with the president, so the head of the detail, Martin Walker (James Woods) orders her to take the rest of the day off. Walker has been in charge of the protection detail for decades, but is retiring in a few days.

While they’re leaving the White House, Emily spots a tour starting, and prevails on Cale to let them join it. At the same time, a man dressed as a janitor rolls a cleaning cart to the center of the floor beneath the Capitol rotunda and then runs away, escaping the massive explosion that happens moments later. In the White House, a group of repairmen supposedly upgrading the home theater system reveal themselves as mercenaries under the leadership of Stenz (Jason Clarke). They take out most of the Secret Service agents in the building and access the Service’s armory, then use snipers on the roof to shoot the agents on the grounds and cover the entrance of the rest of their team. Emily gets separated from Cale, who’s taken hostage by the mercenaries along with the rest of the tour group. Cale manages to escape and comes looking for Emily, but instead he saves President Sawyer from a traitor in the Secret Service. Cale has to keep Sawyer out of the mercenairies’ hands and somehow save Emily, as well as figure out the reason for the attack.

This is, of course, the second similarly themed movie to be released this year, after Gerard Butler’s Olympus Has Fallen a few months back. I’d enjoyed that movie, which had a fairly serious tone. White House Down won me over, though, through its humor and its completely over-the-top plot that keeps the action coming hard and fast throughout. It does owe a lot to the granddaddy of all locked building hostage dramas, Die Hard – it even has a wry computer hacker as part of the mercenary team – but they say mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery. They flatter Die Hard a lot.

Tatum does well in the role of Cale, especially handling the physical aspects of the role. Emmerich does find a way to get him down to his t-shirt, another bit of flattery for Die Hard and a treat for the ladies. There are nods at Obama in Foxx’s portrayal of Sawyer, down to chewing nicotine gum to keep from smoking, and he and Tatum play off each other well. Gyllenhaal has a more cerebral role, but she’s an actress who can communicate that even without saying a word. Her battles are with words and against men in the Pentegon Situation Room.

Movies like this are a race where the director is trying to outrun the audience’s sense of reality. If he can keep both the action and humor coming at the audience rapidly enough, they will ignore reality, and the director wins. That’s the case with White House Down: as you walk out of the theater you know it was completely unreal and over the top, but for the 131 minutes you were sitting in your seat, you didn’t care.