Crazy Nights
My thoughts on Night Call, One of Them Days, Wish You Were Here and Wolf Man
As the Brussels-set thriller Night Call opens, all-night locksmith Mary (Jonathan Feltre) goes out on a call to help a young woman named Claire (Natasha Krief) get back into her apartment. After he does, she slips out again carrying a garbage bag vowing to be right back but instead, the guy whose place it actually is turns up and things quickly get messy. Before long, Mady is brought before criminal kingpin Yannick (Romain Duris), who informs him that a lot of money is now missing and gives him until dawn to track down both the cash and the girl or else. With the streets of the city already in turmoil due to ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, Mady tries to figure out a way of tracking down Claire and the money before it is too late while at the same time trying to evade Yannick’s men, one of whom (Jonas Bloquet) doesn’t seem too keen on waiting until daylight to pull the trigger on him.
The film marks the feature debut of writer-director Michiel Blanchart and is clearly meant to serve as a calling card to producers to show off his talents as the latest aspirant to the throne of the patron saint of French action cinema, Luc Besson. On a purely surface level, he more or less accomplishes this goal—the film is relatively slick and stylishly made and moves at a fairly quick pace. However, as rapid-fire action films set during a compressed time period go, this is closer to the long-forgotten Patrick Dempsey vehicle Run than it is to Run Lola Run. Even for a run-and-gun genre piece, the scenario that Blanchart has conjured up here is a contrived collection of half-baked ideas, underdeveloped characters and by-the-number action beats and when the narrative does hit upon a potentially clever idea (such as a twist of fate that lands both Mady and his chief pursuer in the back of the same squad car), it immediately squanders it to zip on to the next thing. The film is also kind of gross in the way that it introduces the Black Lives Matter aspect but then only employs it as a convenient storytelling shortcut when needed—most awkwardly as the rationale for why the Black Mady doesn’t contact the police about his plight. The result is a lazy potboiler that takes a promising idea and renders it in such shallow and superficial terms that it actually feels like the bland remake of a much stronger and smarter film
.Another film featuring characters in a life-or-death quest to retrieve a large chunk of missing money, albeit presented in a much lighter form, arrives in the form of One of Them Days, marking the feature debut of director Laurence Lamont and screenwriter Syreeta Singleton. Having just pulled an all-night waitressing shift at the diner where she has been working for years, all that the uber-responsible Dreux (Keke Palmer) wants to do is go back to the crappy apartment that she shares with longtime friend/struggling artist Alyssa (SZA, marking her big-screen acting debut) and get some rest before an all-important job interview. Alas, Alyssa entrusts her sponge boyfriend Keshawn (Rizi Timane) to bring their rent money to the landlord and when he immediately blows it on a dubious T-shirt business, she and Dreux have only a few hours to raise the needed $1500 or else they will be kicked to the curb. Over the course of the day, their efforts lead them to a shady payday loan outfit, a blood bank (which ends messily) and to the top of a power line to try to snag a pair of vintage Air Jordans dangling in the air. They also end up crossing Keshawn’s other girlfriend (Aliza Scott), a local gang leader and each other as the time grows short and tensions between the two threaten to finally boil over.
One of Them Days is certainly not going to go down as anyone’s platonic ideal of a truly inspired comedy—it is somewhat sloppily made throughout, takes a while before the narrative, such as it is, finally begins to kick into gear, and the attempts to tie everything up neatly in the final scenes feel a little bit forced. However, the film does have two things going for it that ultimately make it worth watching. For starters, when it is funny, it is very funny and contains a number of moments where I found myself laughing out loud (there is a bit involving a couple of visits to a Church’s Fried Chicken that is especially hilarious) and which happily do not rely solely on crude, gross-out gags to provide the yucks (though the aforementioned blood bank sequence proves to be both icky and inspired in equal measure). Even better is the smashing comedic chemistry created between Palmer and SZA, who take a couple of all-too-familiar comedic character types and invest real life, energy and humor into them throughout. Sure, One of Them Days begins to peter out towards the end and is not a classic by any means but these two make for such an effective comedic teaming that one hopes to see them together again on the screen as soon as possible
.Charlotte (Isabelle Fuhrmann), the central character of the romantic drama Wish You Were Here, is an aimless young woman dealing with a dead-end job at a tacky theme restaurant and a nonexistent personal life until one evening when she and her roommate, Helen (Gabby Kino-Abdy) meet a lost guy named Adam (Mena Massoud) on the street outside of their building. While Helen get his takeout food, Charlotte gets to spend a magical night with him in which the two form the kind of instant connection that makes Celine and Jesse from Before Sunrise seem awkward and reticent by comparison. The next morning, however, Adam mysteriously turns cold and distant towards her, insisting that what happened between them was a one—night thing and nothing more. This knocks Charlotte, who has instantly fallen in love with the guy, for a loop and she is confounded by his apparent change of heart. Over the next few months, she gradually begins to pull herself out of her funk, pushed along the way by Helen and her own parents (Kelsey Grammer and Jennifer Grey), and even finds a new guy to date in the form of sports mascot Seth (Jimmie Falls). At this point, of course, Adam winds up coming back into her life and when she discovers the full (and inevitably sad) circumstances behind that change of heart, she finds herself compelled to once again fight for their relationship despite the knowledge that, even in a best case scenario, it won’t be for very long.
The film marks the feature directorial debut of actress Julia Stiles, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Renee Carlino, the author of the book on which it is based, and the results are a mixed bag at best. Like many actors stepping behind the camera for the first time, Stiles focuses more on the performances than on establishing a unique cinematic style. To that end, she gets decent enough lead performances from Fuhrmann and Massound as well as nice turns from most of the supporting cast as well (Grammer is especially good as Charlotte’s doting father). The problem is that while the chemistry between the two leads certainly registers, it isn’t enough to make up from the overly familiar and occasionally tedious narrative that seems jerry-rigged from any number of similar tearjerkers and which leans more towards soap opera theatrics than to the potentially interesting nuances regarding the characters that occasionally bubble just beneath the surface but which wind up going frustratingly undeveloped. Wish You Were Here is by no means the worst tearjerker that you will ever see and Stiles shows just enough skill as a director to make you want to see what she can accomplish with stronger material but in the end, it proves to be a tale more tedious than tragic
.As Wolf Man, the latest attempt by Universal Studios to jump-start the lycanthropic cinematic sub genre that they invented back in the day with such classics as Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man, begins, Blake (Christopher Abbott), a failed writer and stay-at-home dad, learns that his estranged and long-missing father—whose particular toxic brand of parenting has left him with his own barely contained rage issues—has been declared legally dead after vanishing from the remote cabin in the Oregon woods where they once lived. Along with his wife, breadwinner journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner), and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth, Blake sets off to the cabin go through his dad’s things and finally put a close to that painful chapter of his life at last. This proves to be a big mistake as they are attacked by a wolf-like creature that chases them through the woods until they reach the safety of the house. Unfortunately for all involved, Blake was scratched by the creature along the way and over the course of one long night with the beast on the outside trying to get in, he finds himself slowly and ickily beginning to transform as well and struggles between wanting to protect his loved ones and allowing the monster lurking within him to burst out at last.
The film was written and directed by Leigh Whannell, whose previous film, The Invisible Man, was an inspired fusion of a classic Universal Studios horror icon, contemporary real-life terrors and state-of-the-art visual effects that proved to be one of the most effective and genuinely scary movies of recent years. Not only does Wolf Man fail to live up to the standards set by that earlier film, it doesn’t even live up to the studio’s long-forgotten 2010 attempt to reboot the franchise with Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt. That film wasn’t very good, to be sure, but it at least had a couple of nicely atmospheric moments of period spookiness and some nifty makeup effects from the legendary Rick Baker going for it. Here, the screenplay is a thin conglomeration of half-baked ideas that pointedly eschew all the traditional bits of werewolf lore without offering anything of interest in its place, blandly uninteresting characters and stabs at psychological complexity that end up being spelled out for everyone via clumsily on-the-nose dialogue before descending into a series of virtually dialogue-free sequences in which Abbott is either struggling with the other werewolf (no points for guessing who that might be) or his inner demons while Garner is struggling to look as if she is actually interested in what is going on around here. As for the moments involving the transformation from man into hideous creature (which is admittedly not that great of change when Christopher Abbott is involved), while the prevalence of practical effects over CGI is admirable, what we see here still pales in comparison to the still-stunning work that Baker did in An American Werewolf in London nearly 45 years ago. All bark, no bite and destined to be forgotten long before springtime comes around, Wolf Man may not be the worst wolfman-related film that you have ever seen (especially if you have seen An American Werewolf in Paris or any of the lesser sequels to The Howling) but it will go down as the first major big-screen disappointment of the new year.