Fences

Adapting a famous Broadway play into a film is never an easy task. There are always going to be a lot of expectations that come with it. Will the story be faithful? Will the performances live up to those that came before? Not only that, how is it possible to make a film out of a play that takes place on one set? Luckily, Denzel Washington knew the weight of what he was doing when it came time to direct this film.

Troy Maxson (Washington) is a garbage collector in Pittsburgh. He has had a rough life, but has finally settled down with Rose (Viola Davis), whom he has been married to for eighteen years. Together they have a son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), who is being scouted by a college football team. Troy, however, is adamant that Cory get a job that he can apply himself to and not be beholden to the whims of white people. This is something that he has already seen with his brother Gabe (Mykelti Williamson), who suffered a brain injury during the War in the Pacific, and with himself as he tries to get a job as a driver of a garbage truck.

Fences has a bit of genius when it comes to the staging of the action. Rather than the restrictive nature of the stage play being confined to the Maxson's small yard, Washington is seamlessly able to move throughout the house and street out the front. This gives us a lot better understanding of the area in which Troy and Rose live as well as the living conditions of the black neighbourhood in which they live. It is also the way in which the film is able to convey the differences between black and white people. We never see white people in the neighbourhood, they are always shown in other places, places of unknown distance to Troy and Rose's house, but we can only guess there is a large distance separating them.

The performances are the strongest that I've ever seen in a movie and this probably has to do with something that not a lot of other films get to do. The main cast members were actually able to do a Broadway run of the play before they went into shooting the film. And you can tell this with the final product. The sheer intensity of the first thirty minutes of the film comes from so much practice. I was really surprised by Denzel, because I am so used to seeing him in action or crime films. I know he did a lot of serious roles in his younger days, but nothing can prepare you for seeing an overweight and drunken Washington. Viola Davis is even better, as it feels as though the pain she experiences throughout the film is genuine. Finally, Mykelti Williamson is just so amazing as Gabe, and his performance is able to bring out reactions in his cast mates that are just beautiful and telling.

Fences takes place on both a small and large scale at the same time. The story that we are seeing before our eyes may be localised, but the implications were much broader for black people of the 1950s. Fear of white people was completely justified. Denzel Washington does a great job in terms of the balancing act that he had to do and drew fantastic performances from the rest of the cast.

The Magnificent Seven

Seven Samurai is a classic film that has been reimagined in many different ways, as a western (The Magnificent Seven) and a space opera (Battle Beyond the Stars). Many movies, specifically westerns take elements from this movie, but never has it been so blatantly remade. Rather than follow the path of it's namesake, this new Magnificent Seven is a straight remake of Seven Samurai, even going so far to use a watered down version of the classic's screenplay.

The town of Rose Creek is being harassed by Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), a businessman who intends on buying the whole town in order to mine it of all the gold it has. Desperate to save her town, Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) leaves to look for protection. She comes across bounty hunter Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington) who agrees to help but admits that they need more people. They gather a team that includes Faraday (Chris Pratt), a drunken Irishman hustler without the accent, Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), a former Confederate sharpshooter, his companion Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), a Chinese immigrant who is a knife expert, Jack Horne (Vincent D'Onofrio), a mountain man, Vasquez (Manuel García-Rulfo), a Mexican outlaw, and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), a young Comanche warrior who has been exiled from his tribe. Together this band returns to the town to square off against the forces assembled by Bogue.

Because this movie leans so heavily on Seven Samurai it's really hard to reconcile that this movie is trying to be it's own thing. I know it sounds wanky to say that, but if you've seen that movie, you'll understand the parallels. Things like the introduction of characters (especially Billy Rocks' introduction which is lifted straight from Seven Samurai) or the training of the villagers are just so close to the original film. This seemed bizarre to me because the only connection it has to the original Magnificent Seven is the name and setting. Even though it's trying to be Seven Samurai, it manages to miss the mark by trying to be different. Straight away the movie starts with villainy to make sure that they know Bogue is the bad guy, but there's no gentle build up to it. And instead of having a town meeting to decide go for help, the character of Emma Cullen takes it upon herself to go look for help. Peter Sarsgaard's Bogue is one moustache twirl away from being the kind to tie a woman to the railroad and really does look like a discount Paul Giamatti. When it comes to the big battle at the end of the film, the stakes are dramatically lowered because the whole town takes part in it. This takes away from the whole underdog story. The movie also has a few historical problems. First off, the old west was nowhere near as clean as this. I don't mean that everything is super shiny and new, but it is far from the grittiness that we've come to expect from modern westerns like Deadwood, True Grit and Django Unchained. These days you have no excuse to muddy up you actors. Another minor failing I thought the film had was the lack of discussion around Chisolm obviously being a former slave. This movie takes place in the South in 1879. The Civil War would have been too recent an event to ignore and the film even says that Chisolm had been lynched at some point.

The Magnificent Seven isn't just a steaming mess though. It does have some good elements. The action is exactly the kind of thing you want to go see with this kind of movie, lots of old timey bullets, explosions and tomahawks. The chemistry between Chris Pratt and Manuel García-Rulfo is off the charts and just a joy to watch. Fun fact: when you can't put swear words in a movie, have the Mexican guy call everyone cabron (fucker in Spanish). Vincent D'Onofrio's choice of a squeaky whisper is hilarious and almost made me laugh every time he said something. Although I found it hard to believe that Ethan Hawke's former Confederate soldier would be friendly with Chisolm, the addition of his PTSD from the Civil War was a nice touch. The ending was a nice touch because it was more in keeping with it's source material than a conventional Hollywood ending.

This movie has quite a few ups and downs so it's quite hard to say whether or not I liked it. Within the first five minutes I thought I had written it off as a horrible movie, but it wasn't horrible. Instead it just hung in a strange limbo between good and bad. While the bad parts don't detract from the movie itself, they do serve as a distraction.

The Equaliser

This review was written by our new recruit Saul, who is going to start writing for us every so often. - Jack

In recent years, Denzel Washington has established and slowly disintegrated his status as a badass action star in films like Man on Fire. And with director Antoine Fuqua, the pair have attempted to recapture the magic of the Academy Award-winning Training Day. Spoiler alert, they haven't. What they have done is create a solid, slow-paced action-thriller that gets progressively more random and inevitably settles down in mediocrity.

The Equaliser follows Robert McCall, a quiet, private and apparently ex-military middle-aged man working in a hardware warehouse store. Much of the first half of the film is spent following him through his daily routines, his work and his friendships there (specifically Ralphie, who Robert is helping to become a security guard), and a local coffee shop where he visits nightly to read and talk to under-age prostitute Teri (Moretz). McCall loves to help people out, and this eventually evolves from helping train Ralphie and encouraging Teri, to murdering her pimp and taking on an international criminal organisation.

The way in which The Equaliser implodes is indicative of a lack of concrete and original ideas, as though several pages of the script went missing and the director attempted to improvise in the missing parts. There is obvious vision for how the beginning will work, and how he becomes a hero for hire, but as the Second Act looms and the plot thickens, ridiculousness seeps in to worrying degrees, slowly consuming the film from the inside out, leading into an ending nearly fully detached from the first half. The positives of this film are, without a doubt, the establishment of McCall and his primary nemesis, Teddy/Nikolai, played by Marton Csoskas. Most of this is accomplished solidly without being too overt, there's little-to-no explicit mention of McCall's military service in the first half, but it's also glaringly obvious, mostly through Washington's commendable characterisation. And Russian enforcer Teddy is introduced as an enigmatic, intelligent, cold and dominant figure in the wake of the first action sequence, and during the second act explodes into violent acts that are not unlike Ryan Gosling's Driver character from Drive, cutting a fearsome path through his early scenes.

However, the film falls apart in so many ways that it beggars belief. Characters appear and disappear with little-to-no explanation or introduction, Chloe Grace Moretz's Teri literally vanishes after the first action scene, rendering any and all setup for her to be the Jodie Foster to McCall's Travis Bickle instantly null and void. Whatever good that began with McCall and Teddy's characters soon evolves into a pissing contest for emotionlessness, which even the movie explicitly mentions at one point. Character motivations and relations feel random and convenient, McCall is both invincible and omnipotent, and aside from brief moments in the climax, there is literally zero threat to McCall throughout the film. He nonchalantly dispatches henchmen with such amusing ease that rarely is it even shown onscreen for fear of boring the audience. And it's almost painfully nostalgic how the primary goons are tattoo-covered, muscly Russians with skull fetishes, perhaps indicative of a re-emerging trend in action films.. And on the technical side, the score and direction are so painfully "middle-of-the-road 2000's action" that, save for one GORGEOUS dissolve emphasising Teddy's dominance over the city of Boston, they hardly deserve a mention.

All in all, this is the cinematic equivalent of slowly watching a ball of yarn roll around the floor and untangle itself, eventually revealing itself as an assemblage of mediocrity, with brief, seemingly accidental moments of brilliance and beauty. Unfortunately, ridiculousness, and lack of emotion and motivation ruin a movie that had the potential to be much more than a good film gone bad. Wait for the DVD release.