Month: February 2023

The Courier

/ Chase Clark / Leave a comment

The Courier is a based-on-a-true-story, Cold War-era, spy drama. Bet you’ve never seen one of those before. This well-tread, trope-riddled film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the true-life electrical equipment salesman, Greville Wynne, who is recruited by MI6 to act as a courier (hence the clever film title) between England and Russia, carrying secret documents back and forth between the countries in an attempt to prevent nuclear war. His Russian contact is Oleg Penkovsky, a high-ranking GRU officer, brilliantly played by Merab Ninidze who also played an interrogator in the similar Spielberg film, Bridge of Spies. And it wouldn’t be a war film without the U.S. getting involved, so Rachel Brosnahan fills out the cast as the fictitious CIA agent, Emily Donovan.

Many comparisons to other Cold War spy films, especially Bridge of Spies, are easy to make, but where this one sets itself apart from the rest of the pack is that The Courier is not boring. Of course there’s still plenty of roundtable dialogue in this movie, and intrigue disguising itself as decent plot, but it’s a tightly-edited feature (running at under 2 hours, unlike the majority of others in its subgenre) that only drags a little in the third act.

Greville is constantly looking over his shoulder for any Russian bogeymen out to get him after he agrees to be a courier, and his paranoia keeps him from being able to relax, even when he returns home to London throughout the picture. Oleg fairs little better, but feigns confidence in their secrecy for Greville’s sake. The bond between these two men carry the film, as there is plenty of time spent on them getting to know one another, experiencing what their respective countries have to offer, and spending time with each other’s families. Even small things like Greville’s emotional reaction to a Russian ballet would make you roll your eyes in a lesser movie, but here it’s given just the right amount of weight to avoid tipping over into shmaltzy.

And in this lies what makes the movie truly enjoyable to watch: while other spy films have played the “there’s good and bad on both sides” angle ad nauseum, The Courier doesn’t overdo it. It lets scenes play and allows the audience to collect what it wants to as it builds toward its melancholic climax. I won’t spoil it here, but suffice to say, “War is Hell.”

The Courier is not without it’s problems. While the script is decent, the dialogue is a little on the nose at times. One early scene is Oleg bringing the CIA and MI6 initial information regarding Premier Nikita Khruschev’s nuclear plans, and Emily Donovan comforts him with a speech about how scared he must be to betray his country, and Oleg nods and says, “Khruschev frightens me. He is impulsive, chaotic – a man like that not have nuclear commands.” Perhaps a true statement, but it sounds like something a 16-year-old Twitter user would say about a certain former American President. A small stumbling block in an otherwise enjoyable historical spy thriller.

Verdict: I think I’m going to keep this one. It may not be one I return to very frequently, but I believe it deserves a spot on any movie collector’s shelf.

And you can add it to your shelf with a copy <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Courier-Blu-ray-Benedict-Cumberbatch/dp/B0914QSRGC/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=the+courier+blu+ray&qid=1692304432&sprefix=the+courier%252Caps%252C230&sr=8-7&_encoding=UTF8&tag=destinedforme-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=f93270044fe798e782abf4bb29115d4f&camp=1789&creative=9325">the courier blu rayfrom Amazon.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

/ Chase Clark / Leave a comment

Ant-Man’s back, baby! Or at least that’s what he tells himself in his internal monologue as the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter plays in the background. The film really wants you to believe that Ant-Man is really and truly “back”. Unfortunately, Quantumania is as much an Ant-Man movie as Civil War is a Captain America movie with it’s need to bridge the gap between the other, bigger events in the MCU, and it causes Scott Lang/Ant-Man to shrink down to microscopic levels in his own title in order to make room for one very interesting villain and two very uninteresting side characters.

Let’s start with the good: Jonathan Majors – a still-on-the-rise star who is talented enough to fill the Thanos-shaped hole in Marvel’s overarching villain department as Kang the Conqueror. Kang is menacing and seemingly powerful until he gets trapped in a Marvel third act, where he is devolved into a hard-hitting boxer that has difficulty getting his opponent to stay down (maybe this was preparation for his upcoming role in Creed III). I realize the reason Kang is so terrifying is because there’s an infinite number of him, all more evil than the last, but it’s difficult to see him as such a threat when he’s been defeated rather easily twice now (If you missed Loki, or any other Disney+ MCU content, I can hardly blame you). Majors does a remarkable job with what he’s given, as does the ever-charismatic Paul Rudd, but to the film’s detriment, they are both given very little.

On to the bad: Besides trying to setup the next two phases of the MCU, Quantumania has to try and give us a reason for it’s own existence. To do this, they give the majority of the screentime to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet Van Dyne (not a problem under different circumstances) and Kathryn Newton’s Cassie Lang. Janet gets to spend the majority of the film in fear of the inevitable third act and talking incessantly about how there’s no time to talk. I guess explanations of her time in the Quantum Realm would make several of the movie’s events unnecessary and would shave off significant runtime – an alternative I would have greatly appreciated. The greater offense, however, belongs to the new Cassie. She’s a rebellious, teenage ne’er-do-well who has to be bailed out of prison for…helping homeless people. Her only real crime is caring too much and spouting off self-righteous and clunky dialogue (“Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening”). She also gets to wash her hands of her own actions because her dad wasn’t around for the five-year “Blip”. Just because it’s eye-rolling in order to set up a mediocre father-daughter reconciliation doesn’t mean it’s not eye-rolling.

Now, for the ugly: I realize there’s a lot of talk lately about the working conditions of visual effects artists, especially ones working on Disney content, but the CGI in Quantumania is absolutely horrendous and cannot be left unmentioned. The Quantum Realm backdrop is incredibly dark and looks like a Jackson Pollock made with only the dullest of browns, violets and reds, but the real offender here is our live-action M.O.D.O.K. Corey Stoll returns after nearly seven years since the first Ant-Man to play the now-deformed Darren Cross, who has been reconstructed by Kang into a pathetic and goofy metal Igor that looks eerily similar to George Lopez’s Mr. Electric in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D. It’s a pointless addition to an unnecessarily jam-packed movie, and the laughs M.O.D.O.K. brings aren’t the laughs the creators are going for. The ones they are going for fall flat, like an attempt to redeem him at the last minute (“I got to be an Avenger”).

The bottom line is that Ant-Man has come a long way from the exciting fight aboard a toy Thomas the Tank-Engine, but unfortunately, it’s in the wrong direction. Long gone are the contained adventures of the littlest Avenger and his quirky sidekicks (the absence of Luis is particularly felt), and here to stay are high-stakes battles for all humanity and lifeless characters here to punch their way into your hearts. Those who still go to the first showing for each formulaic Marvel showstopper off the production line will enjoy this one and what it sets up for the future, but for the rest of us, even a Bill Murray cameo can’t salvage this one.

Rating: 3/10