It’s hard to imagine a non-war movie capturing the American zeitgeist as clearly as Up in the Air has. Since we appear to be in a time of endless armed conflict, you can shoot a Middle East-based war movie anytime in the next several years and bank on being au courant. But to have a film about a man who makes his living by taking other people’s jobs away from them appear in 2009 calls for simply uncanny timing. I guess if it had come out last spring it would’ve been even more pointedly dead on, but still…
But Up in the Air has much more going for it than timeliness. The very sharp cast, led by George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, the traveling executioner, and brilliantly seconded by Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, takes the film into bumpy (i.e. emotionally complicated) air space—you’ll want to keep your seat belts fastened.
For starters, Clooney’s Bingham is far from the heartless bastard you’d expect. If you personally are looking for a film that will allow you to vent against the bastard who fired you, you’ll have to wait a little longer. Bingham respects his victims’ dignity, and their pain, to the fullest possible extent. He probably isn’t even lying when he tells them that this termination could be the opportunity of a lifetime. Unencumbered by a job, now they can go out and do what they really want.
Bingham’s pitch is sincere because he sees the encumbrance-free life as a Holy Grail—one that he has himself attained. He lives his life as a free man, “on the road 322 days a year,” and sees no need for personal entanglements.
It’s the job of Farmiga’s character, Alex, herself a beautiful but strangely available road warrior, to eventually crack Bingham’s emotional shell. But in Bingham’s case, “cracking shells” turns out to be as painful as it sounds. He allows himself to become humanized, or “grounded” in every sense of the word, but he isn’t careful to check that none of his miles have expired.
Clooney’s performance is a triumph. He’s had plenty of fun with his pretty-boy image, but for him his impeccable cool has always been a tool, and not his reason for being. This time he shows how that image, which he shares with his character, comes up short as an adult way of life. He lives his life in the not-so-great indoors and his good looks are starting to be a memory. He looks physically bruised, even slightly beaten—but his pain comes from the inside.
This is the story of a man who gets the point, who understands that he’s been terribly mistaken, but that realization comes too late. He’s still wracking up the miles when the final credits roll.
Movie Review
Action-packed Kraven the Hunter showcases gritty Marvel antihero
One of the oddest things about the blockbuster era we live in is that while Disney owns the rights to the majority of Marvel comic book characters, Sony Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man and any affiliated characters. Since they’re sharing Spider-Man himself with Disney, Sony has been trying to capitalize on those rights by making stand-alone films using niche characters that only comic book fanatics would know.
Having exhausted Venom and whiffed on attempts with Morbius and Madame Web, they’re trying again with Kraven the Hunter. Also known as Sergei Kravinoff, Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a self-styled vigilante who, as the film tells it, travels the world exacting vengeance on the truly bad people of the world. He’s the son of Nikolai (Russell Crowe), a hard-edged Russian oligarch, and brother to Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who is relatively weak compared to the rest of his family.
The origin story has Kraven gaining his animal-like powers - including super-strength, speed, and jumping abilities - as a teenager from a mysterious serum given to him by a girl named Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) after he was mauled by a lion. The two maintain a tenuous partnership as adults, with Calypso helping him hunt down other villains like Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).
Directed by J.C. Chandor and written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, the film looks and feels enormously lazy, something made merely to hold on to potentially valuable intellectual property. Other than the tense family dynamic between the Kravinovs, little makes sense in the story. Kraven has an indecipherable moral code that has him going after poachers - because he’s part lion? - in addition to other high-powered criminals, with no clear goal except to … get back at his father?
The laziness extends to the action scenes, which feature Kraven being mostly impervious to any damage, whether it’s hand-to-hand combat, knives, or guns. The CGI-heavy scenes don’t even allow moviegoers to enjoy an R-rated bloody free-for-all, as all of the blood splatter is computer-generated, too. Since apparently one Spider-Man villain is not enough, three others make appearances with abilities that are under-explained and CGI that is poorly done.
That’s not even counting Calypso, another Spider-Man villain whose purpose in this film is nebulous at best. Her early connection with Kraven is so coincidental as to be laughable, and her continued reasons for helping him as an adult strain credulity as well. The only saving grace of her presence is that the filmmakers don’t try to shoehorn romance into the plot; perhaps they’re saving that for the (inevitable?) sequel.
Taylor-Johnson has had one of the most prolific-yet-anonymous careers in modern Hollywood, with appearances in big films like The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, and Tenet that have made very little impact. Even as the star here, he fails to hold your attention, with the story and visuals doing him no favors. DeBose has followed up her Oscar win for West Side Story with schlock like I.S.S., Argylle, and this, which doesn’t bode well for her career. At least Crowe gets to chew the scenery.
With a contractual inability to mention the name “Spider-Man,” movies like Kraven the Hunter exist in a weird area that forces filmmakers to make up stories for characters to which most people have no attachment. And just like Sony’s previous efforts, it is a very poor way to spend two hours in a movie theater; avoid at all costs.
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Kraven the Hunter opens in theaters on December 13.