The Dive is a film that asks the deathless question “What would 47 Meters Down have been like if the filmmakers decided to omit the tacky CGI sharks from the narrative?” As it begins, sisters Drew (Sophie Lowe) and May (Louisa Krause) are heading off to a remote spot off the coast of Malta for a yearly diving excursion and even before they get to the water, it is obvious that there is no small degree of uneasiness between the two. Things get infinitely worse after they hit the water when the collapse of a cliff sends huge rocks plunging into the water with one of them pinning May’s leg, effectively trapping her with only 22 minutes of oxygen left in her tank. Therefore, it is up to the less experienced Drew to get to the surface to retrieve spare air tanks as they try to figure out how to extricate May before all the air is gone. Of course, things aren’t that simple as Drew finds herself facing any number of hurdles as she dives and resurfaces in a frantic bid for help, an episode of the bends and one particularly agonizing moment in which she finds herself forced to choose between getting an air tank to May in the nick of time or using precious seconds to try to get the attention of a fishing boat that is just out of earshot.
The setup scenes are handled fairly well by director Maximilian Erlenwein, who does an effective job of slowly ratcheting up the tension via illustrating the claustrophobic nature of the underwater world. However, once the cliff collapses and the ticking clock aspect kicks into gear, the obstacles that Drew encounters in her efforts to save May become so ludicrous after a while that there are point where the film begins to feel like an exceptionally straight-faced spoof of 127 Hours. (At one point, the trunk of their rental car, holding a much-needed jack, refuses to open and she winds up rolling it off a cliff in an effort to get it open.) The film also falters in the way that it introduces the tensions between the two sisters but then fails to properly resolve them, at least in part because the two leads are both encased in diving gear that limits them during their big emotional scenes. The Dive does have a few strong moments here and there in the early going but it eventually proves itself to be a survival thriller that itself doesn’t quite make it to the end.
Golda arrives in theaters under a cloud of controversy surrounding the casting of the non-Jewish Helen Mirren in the title role of former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, a move that many Jewish observers see as an affront. This is definitely an important point to consider—and we will no doubt get back to it in a couple of months when Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, in which he dons a fake nose to portray Leonard Bernstein—but as it turns out, that issue proves to be the least of the film’s considerable problems.Mirren portrays Meir during a brief but decisive moment in her reign as Israel’s first and only female prime minister, the 1973 Yom Kippur war in which Egypt and Syria launched an invasion designed to reclaim lands seized by Israel during the Six-Day War and shake up the entire balance of power in the Middle East. The story is told as a series of flashbacks inspired by Meir’s testifying before the 1974 Agranat Commission, which was charged with investigating why Meir initially seemed hesitant to act on intelligence suggesting that an attack was imminent and appeared to continually stumble once the invasion began. In her recollections, we witness her as she deals with members of her military, including Mossad head Zvi Zamir (Rotem Keinan), Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger) and IDF head Dado Elazar (Lion Ashkenazi), whose reluctance to act seems to be based at least partly out of their barely-disguised distaste at taking orders from a woman. She ends up getting more support and success from abroad thanks to her efforts to work on war criminal Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber) as a way of ensuring support from Richard Nixon, then caught in the throes of the Watergate scandal.
All the material needed for a gripping docudrama is here but screenwriter Nicholas Martin and director Guy Nativ don’t seem to have any idea of how to mold it into a compelling narrative. As a war film that tries to take us behind the scenes of famous military maneuvers in order to examine how they came to be, it is strangely dull and lifeless as it quickly devolves into a number of seemingly endless scenes consisting of people yelling at each other while puffing away on cigarettes. As a personal drama chronicling Meir rising to the occasion of protecting her country while fending off those who seek to undermine her at every turn, it clearly hopes to be the Israeli version of The Iron Lady but is tepid at best with even a subplot involving Meir battling cancer failing to register as anything other than a feeble ploy to humanize Meir.
The most disappointing aspect of the film, surprisingly, is the strangely misguided and ultimately inert performance from Mirren, usually one of the most reliably entertaining of actresses, even when working with substandard material. Buried under tons of unconvincing makeup and further shrouded by a cloud of cigarette smoke that seems to surround her throughout, she portrays Meir in such a rigidly stoic manner that we can practically see her calcifying before our eyes—there is never any sense of the fire and determination that the real Meir must have possessed in real life. (In one major miscalculation, the film includes a lengthy clip of archival news footage of the real Meir meeting with Anwar Sadat—in that footage, Meir is so engaging and compelling that it will make you wish that the film had just gone the straight documentary route.) The sole scene that works is one in which Meir is asking for help from Kissinger—he tries to duck out on the request by stating “I am first an American, second a Secretary of State and third a Jew” and she tartly replies “In this country, we read from right to left.” Thanks to the tart writing and snappy performances (Schreiber is surprisingly effective as Kissinger and helps spur Mirren out of her torpor for at least a few minutes), this sequence genuinely works and makes you wish that the rest of Golda had followed in its footsteps.
Good news for all of you incredibly fragile guys upset over the mere existence of Barbie and the politely feminist message that it conveyed to its target audience of young women while simultaneously subverting the notions of what one might rightfully expect to see in a film based on a toy line—Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story seems to have been made for and by those who came away feeling butt hurt from that film. All through it, deeply uninteresting guys do all the “cool” stuff (race cars, play games, overcome Level 1 daddy issues) while the few skirts stay to the side and merely gaze adoringly/forlornly at their men in a narrative that is executed with the kind of bland ruthlessness that makes it feel like a marketing campaign for itself, a product that no sensible person would want. Oh, and more shameless product placements than a James Bond retrospective, for those scoring at home. The result is a work so utterly hollow and shameless in its urgent need to pander to its target audience that the only thing that sticks with you afterwards is the cynicism that was clearly the driving force behind its existence.
As coyly hinted in the subtitle, the film is very loosely based on a true story in which an ambitious Nissan executive (Orlando Bloom, looking embarrassed throughout) hits upon the brilliant idea of bringing together the world’s top PlayStation racing game (oops, I mean “simulator”) to test their mettle behind the wheels of actual race cars with the top three becoming members of their race team as a way of getting people interested in cars again. Among the winners of this gearhead variation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a British teenager who needs to convince his parents (Djimon Hounsou and Geri Horner, the former Ginger Spice), the grizzled trainer (David Harbour) hired to get the winners ready for actual track action and, following a tragic accident, that he is indeed good enough to succeed.
Although ostensibly directed by the once-promising Neil Blomkamp, there is never a single moment in the film that appears to have been touched by human hands—it all feels like the creation of a computer program that knows what constitutes a movie but has no clue as to what it is that make them work as anything other than a means by which to sell Sony products. The screenplay by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin is a clumsy collection of hackneyed cliches, the visuals lack any real pizazz and our hero is, frankly, kind of a bore throughout. Absolutely lacking in purpose or a point, Gran Turismo is a race film so utterly lacking in style, grace, humor and excitement that it pulls off the seemingly impossible task of making Days of Thunder seem borderline competent by comparison.