Starting bright, ending dim.

Looks like someone wanted to see an R-rated version of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

BRIGHT is written as if J.R.R. Tolkien lived in modern-day Los Angeles, with its gun culture and gangland crime and racism and fairies.

If nothing else, BRIGHT is a semi-original idea (two cops saddled with protecting a girl on the run, with a McGuffin that every villain is chasing her for), filled with good dialogue, great production values and – action movie tropes that dismantle all the built-up love from the creative first act by the time we hit the incessant gunfire and Pretty Orange Explosions of the third act.

Daryl Ward (Will Smith) is a human LAPD cop, partnered with the first LAPD-appointed Orc, Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton). Their partnership is shaky after Ward was shot by an Orc and Jakoby couldn’t catch the perp. (Did the perp really outrun Jakoby, or did Jakoby let him go because it was a fellow Orc?) Tikka (Lucy Fry) is an Elf, on the run from her sister Leilah (Noomi Rapace), who heads a cult of Dark Elves preparing the way for a Dark Lord, with the aid of a “wand” – a sword-like, dripping-glowing weapon that only a “Bright” like Leilah can wield; a non-Bright touching the wand would mean disintegration… and Lucy has taken Leilah’s wand (swaddled in rags), to avert the Dark Lord’s coming.

And Ward and Jakoby find that EVERYONE wants what the wand can give – ultimate power: crooked cops, human gangs, Orc gangs, and Leilah and her super-cool mercenary Elves. While the LAPD pursue Ward and Jakoby on the run from every gang in LA, every gang is in battle with every other gang – and Leilah’s Elves – all hunting the wand.

Tolkien say: Not bad. Now make me care for all these dipshits.

Writer Max Landis (MR. RIGHT) and director David Ayer (SUICIDE SQUAD) have crafted a brave new world onscreen, the opening visuals dropping us furry feet first into a grimy, alternate-universe Los Angeles where Orcs inhabit the role of minorities (with their tagged neighborhood walls and low class jobs); Elves are the 1% (living in exclusive suburbs that tout “Elves Only” signage;) and humans are somewhere in between. Credit where it’s due, as the movie’s world creation is all-consuming; the filmmakers don’t skimp on the Orc prosthetics and makeup, the surrounding environment and tagging looks authentic, the Elves are dressed to the nines (Edgar Ramirez is Elf Kandomere, on the FBI Magic Bureau, sporting a three-piece suit on the job), and the tensions between the “races” is played as only Los Angelenos can, knowing that nothing changed with the election of Obama…

Mmm! Elves in stripper heels!

With a budget of $90 million, BRIGHT is the most expensive Netflix movie made to date, and they pull out all the stops: swearing is at a premium (in the first quiet coffee scene with Ward and his hot blond nurse wife, Dawn Olivieri, they drop more “fucks” just talking about their work day than most gangbangers); the hand-to-hand is creative, almost JOHN WICK (especially from the Elves); a solid nuanced performance by Edgerton through what looks like a stifling full-head prosthetic; Brad William Henke is intimidating head Orc Dorghu, and watch for studied dramatic performances by comedians Ike Barinholtz and Margaret Cho as cops; Tikka reminds us of Leelu in THE FIFTH ELEMENT, as she babbles in Elvish, until she just starts speaking English because the writer ran out of patience; a little TRAINING DAY subplot thrown in (David Ayer, director here, screenplayed TRAINING DAY – did he slap his writer upside the head for stealing his exact subplot from there?); and the arcs of the lead characters – the reconciliation of their partnership, and Jakoby’s acceptance by his race – are played poignantly, with lots of comedic asides as Ward and Jakoby turn up the Riggs and Murtaugh.

Even with good dramatic turns in the storyline, the novelty of the alternate-universe is lost somewhere in the second act, when BRIGHT is subsumed by its tropes. It may be derivative, yes, but could have still stood on its own two feet if it didn’t stoop to…

Magic – that’s great! – who cares? – fuck you!

Magic: The last resort of the mediocre storyteller. Because everything starts to – in the words of David Byrne – Stop Making Sense. One example: Leilah needs the wand to summon the Dark Lord. Why then, did she give it to an assassin, Larika, to hunt Tikka down? Wouldn’t you protect that thing with your life if you were that fanatic about it? Why chase someone who left your clan anyway, with a wand of ultimate power? Lend out a less precious weapon, dummy! And why wouldn’t Larika – now with a wand of ultimate power – make off with it? Only a Bright can wield the wand, so Larika must have been a Bright – how then, was she found crucified in the house where Tikka was hiding? So much for ultimate power…

Also, Dark Lord is all-powerful, yet needs Leilah and her wand to get to Earth. (Maybe Uber can help. It’s pretty magical how they can pick you up within five minutes from Anywhere.)

Ward, burned and bruised and bloodied from battle, sighs to Jakoby, “Fuck magic!” The ruin of better films than BRIGHT. So what started as LORD OF THE RINGS IN LA ends as ELVISH LETHAL WEAPON. Tolkien not spinning, but laughing.

END

Multiple McAvoy, Numinous Night.

Professor X has been hearing those voices in his head again…

If you like James McAvoy, then you’ll love SPLIT. It stars James McAvoy. And James McAvoy. And James McAvoy. And James McAvoy. And James McAvoy. And James McAvoy. And James McAvoy.

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan returns to form as master filmmaker with his deviously intriguing thriller, SPLIT (as in personality). A showcase for James McAvoy, who tears into his role as Dennis, a person with D.I.D. (Dissociative Identity Disorder, the vogue name for multiple personality disorder), with 23 distinct personalities, who kidnaps three college girls as a sacrifice for a fearsome 24^th personality that he foretells like a harrowing prophecy.

CYNICAL POFFY SEZ: From the outset, the PG-13 rating on SPLIT makes it not as gripping as it could be. When we read of a kidnapped woman “kept in a shipping container and raped every day” in real life, this movie’s tale of kidnapped teen girls that remain untouched reads as weak sauce. Yes, they’re here to be “sacrificed” but that’s a payoff in an uncertain future. And while we wait?… You mean to say that none of Dennis’s many male personalities were “disordered” enough to even touch ‘em up a little before dinnertime?

LECHER POFFY SEZ: The three girls are Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula and Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey. Richardson and Sula are forgettable and replaceable, while Taylor-Joy’s Euro-model perfection and Ace Frehley lips make me wonder who wouldn’t want to kidnap her and keep her in their basement. And touch her up a little before dinnertime…

CINEPHILE POFFY SEZ: Of the three girls, Casey is the social misfit, the recluse. Flashbacks reveal why Casey is guarded, simultaneously giving us clues on how she will survive the ordeal. Night’s writing, with the slow revelation of character and subtle foreshadowing, is once again remarkable.

DR. POFFY SEZ: Betty Buckley is Karen Fletcher the psychiatrist (she was the blond gym teacher in the original CARRIE). She chat-therapies Dennis occasionally, usually in his fashion designer ego, Hedwig. She’s writing a book, and giving speeches, on compelling studies with D.I.D. sufferers: how a lady who was blind for ten years developed sight with three of her personalities – how her optical nerve actually regenerated because of her beliefs!; of some personalities within a sufferer developing diseases, while others remained well… which jigsaws into Dennis’s warning of the Beast, his 24^th personality, a hairy, fierce berserker, “a lot bigger than I am, tall, very muscular…” (um, Wolverine?)

THESPIAN POFFY SEZ: It is in these chat sessions where McAvoy steals the movie. With every hard closeup, we can read Dennis’s personalities battling for primacy, fleeting subversion, prevarication, doubt, hubris, glimpses just under the skin of a person wrought with guilt, paranoia and menace. And when his various personas visit the girls in their basement cell, he brings different accents and dialects, including a young boy and a matronly woman.

LECHER POFFY SEZ: That MILF McAvoy is a hottie – even without a wig.

FANBOY POFFY SEZ: That McAvoy is a hottie, even wearing a turtleneck.

DR. POFFY SEZ: Dr. Fletcher reminds us that “D.I.D. patients have been known to change their body chemistry with their thoughts. Perhaps they are capable of something we are not?”

HISTORIAN POFFY SEZ: Is this hypothesis a blanket argument that covers all those tales of metamorphosis from the past to the present? From lycanthropism to the Incredible Hulk? These ideas set our mind free to roam amongst legends and madmen…

CYNICAL POFFY SEZ: In a flashback we see 5-year-old Casey (Izzie Leigh Coffey, sooo pinchable-cheeks-cute), on a hunting trip with her father (Sebastian Arcelus) and uncle (Brad William Henke). And the incident that would drive her inwards… Our minds at first shy away from the possibility that the tale might be heading towards child molestation, but then accept that only horror of this magnitude might explain Casey’s quiet introversion. But again, PG-13 ruins the impact of what might have been a disturbing scene. When Uncle is on all fours, in tighty-whiteys, pawing at the ground, cajoling Casey to do the same, because they’re playing at being “wild animals” – he should have been naked. That’s all. I mean, I don’t want to see a cute little girl being molested, nor do I especially want to see doughy uncle ass, but in a way, the tighty-whiteys were more horrifying for what they say about this gutless hypocritical society…That’s all I’m sayin’… I’m sayin’: Be a man and pull those panties down!

LECHER POFFY SEZ: No one cares where you’re running – as long as you keep bouncing as you do.

CINEPHILE POFFY SEZ: The story weaves in directions unexpected, with surprise after surprise in its final act.

FREUDIAN POFFY SEZ: “The broken are the more evolved; those who have been scarred, those who have been burned. The ones that are untouched are not fit!” Dennis screams his credo into the void—

LECHER POFFY SEZ: —as Casey’s breasts heave with exertion, in their ripped t-shirt, her thighs finally exposed, and we see—

FREUDIAN POFFY SEZ: —Shutup, Lecher Poffy! In an interview, McAvoy makes the interesting point that only one of his many “personalities” was born of parental sex; all the others were born to fulfill various purposes during times of insurmountable psychological stress. To him, the Beast represents the highest form of human evolution (is he talking about the X-Men again?)…

CINEPHILE POFFY SEZ: Only in the film’s coda do we realize SPLIT takes place in the same universe as one of Night’s other films, which lends credence to the Beast. West Dylan Thordson composed this movie’s score, so it is with surprise we hear James Newton Howard’s epic score from that other movie fade in, and we spot a familiar face, who rasps a familiar name. Suddenly, we realize this movie’s central theme echoes that other movie’s theme – of a man finding his true purpose. Maybe he is destined to be the fashion designer; maybe he is destined to be the Beast; maybe he is destined to be Professor X; maybe he is… unbreakable…

END

A Date With Density.

The pitch: Two men get trapped in a mine shaft. Nothing happens. Then they get rescued. The end. The suits harrumph: where’s the drama? The screenwriter and her agent scramble: well, we flash back to generic good times with families and watch the trapped guys banally discuss heroism and loyalty and STARSKY AND HUTCH.

Imagine you’re really really short.

The suits aren’t buying it. The screenwriter and her agent squirm. Seen it a thousand times in movies and LASSIE episodes and probably on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.

The screenwriter lightbulbs. Change “mine shaft” to “World Trade Center.” Suddenly: funding. And now, not only can they append the wholly untrue “Based on a True Story” with impunity, they can also afford Oliver Stone and Nicolas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello…

But it’s still just “two guys trapped in a mine shaft.”

Oliver Stone‘s WORLD TRADE CENTER is not about the World Trade Center. Nor does it posit stances or pose questions on conspiracies, religionism, racism, political ideologies, oil collusion or White House incompetence. Which raises the obvious question: why then make a movie about the World Trade Center at all?

To invoke a known audience. “World Trade Center” has become synonymous with “9-11” (itself a contraction of a culture-shocking event) and both have become shorthand for identifying the modern version of the Common Enemy and proselytizing on courage and heroism and misplaced patriotism. Attaching that moniker to any media – however tangentially – sells tickets.

Now imagine you’re seeing a big ice cream cone.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is about two beat cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) who are trapped in the rubble of Tower 1’s collapse before they even get the chance to rescue one civilian. (Guess we’ve added yet another criterion to the term “heroism”: anyone who intends to rescue people but needs to be rescued himself after doing nothing.)

The first act is restrained film-making at its best, as Stone shows us Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawning like any other mundane workday, New York populace going through the motions of city life. Comparisons with the unobtrusive camera of Paul Greengrass’s superior UNITED 93 are unavoidable, and – like that movie – a vicarious thrill builds in our bones, for we know something that the New Yorkers don’t: that today is going to be so far removed from mundane it will gouge out its own vernacular in history.

The first intimation that there is something horribly awry with this particular September 11th is an ominous plane-shaped shadow whooshing over the cityscape…

Stone does not explicitly show airplanes impacting Towers (it would remove focus from his characters), but his scenes of destruction and mayhem are as good as cinema gets. And though there are still whiners puling “too soon,” the audience yet extracts a rubbernecker’s glee from watching this unimaginable tragedy unfold with astoundingly seamless special effects from a Ground Zero ringside seat.

Now imagine you’re Superman.

Stone has also captured excellent performances with the shock, surprise, horror and incredulity of the officers arriving at Ground Zero. Those of us who were not there could never hope to imagine what uncontainable emotions overwhelmed each First Responder’s breast as he gazed up at a tableau which the wildest imagination could never conjure.

And after injecting us into the heart of the action, with a breath-stopping sequence trapping our stars under mountains of rubble, the film – like the World Trade Center – collapses. For there is nowhere to go – literally and figuratively – and it becomes obvious that inexperienced screenwriter Andrea Berloff has formulaically set up a tearjerker just waiting to happen.

There’s a fine line between restrained and boring. And Stone’s hand seems so stultified by the gutless executives who funded this project that he resignedly points his camera over the wrong side of that line. Though he tries to retain relevance to the 9-11 Götterdämmerung (by inserting actual newsreel footage of slimy Mayor Giuliani, faux-President Bush, reports on United Flight 93, the Pentagon crash, et al), even the earth-shuddering impact of the WTC Towers collapsing is soon forgotten when the story turns its focus on the wives of the trappees (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello) and their maudlin, Academy-tilted performances. It turns into just “two guys trapped in a mine shaft.”

The movie also loses what little objectivity it strived for when Jimeno launches into an extended “heroism” speech (which veritably bends over and spreads its cheeks for the hero mongers). Meanwhile, Cage’s initial heartfelt performance of McLoughlin diminishes over time, as he uses up the film’s one allocated swear word (as decreed by the MPAA for PG-13 films) early in his desperation and then becomes non-believable, as no one in this mind-breaking situation ever swears after that one transgression, making it all as painfully PG-13 as any Freddie Prinze Junior debacle.

“What? No conspiracy?”

And while Jimeno has dumb Jesus dreams, McLoughlin inertly flashes back to his four kids with the hands-down hottest MILF in the neighborhood (Bello). The flashbacks are smartly executed: one partner is shown beginning the flashback and as the syrup reaches danger levels, the other partner is shown at the tail end of the flashback, making it seem like both partners were flashing back on the same LEAVE IT TO BEAVER moment. (If any of our lives were half as idyllic as the “real life” characters portrayed in any 9-11 movie, the Muslims who razed the Towers would have defected over to white-bread Christianity millennia ago. Or maybe that’s why they razed them.)

Nothing continues to happen, proving conclusively that not every true story is worth telling.

The rescue of the two men contains its fair share of nail-biting and was apparently instigated by an ex-Marine, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), who abandoned his job in Connecticut and traveled to Ground Zero because “God called him.” (While talking to Karnes, God must have neglected to head on over to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Florida and talk to Bush about the attacks. Without a direct word from God, how could anyone be expected to abandon the compelling Pet Goat to lead a country? Evidently, only after the attacks does God deign to start talking with W.) As we learn of Karnes’s delusional nature (obsessing over Marine ethos to the point of asking to be addressed as “Staff Sergeant”), we realize this is the exact type of bulldog fundamentalist bred by the American Armed Forces, and that it wasn’t God calling him after all – it was his red neck.

Staunch performances by the supporting cast (Stephen Dorff, Frank Whaley, Brad William Henke) add little to the pat formula.

To its credit, the story does not make it seem like rescuing its two stars puts an end to the horror, and the unfinished nature of the rescues and aftermath are noted; Jimeno’s family walk past a wall posted with hundreds of Missing Person flyers, Karnes emerges from the rescue rubble talking of retribution, Dorff’s policeman laments the multitude not accounted for, and McLoughlin himself had to undergo 2 years of medically-induced comas and 27 surgeries – well, that’ll happen when a World Trade Center falls on you. Or maybe he just wanted to look like John Travolta again.

Only 20 people were pulled out of the WTC rubble alive. Only eighteen more True Stories with movie deals to go…

END