![]() The film itself becomes a series of dazzling distractions as the Protagonist zigs and zags toward his goal. (Dig those suits!) A former football running back, the actor brings a natural athletic grace to the stunts and hand-to-hand combat that forge a visceral bond between his character and the audience. Our hero takes his lumps to find and stop this demi-god, which allows star-in-the-making Washington ( Black KkKlansman, Ballers) to strut his stuff in high style. The Protagonist teams up with Neil (a slyly funny Robert Pattinson) to get to Russian oligarch Andrei Sator - the rare Tenet character with a first and last name - who’s entertainingly hammed into existence by Kenneth Branagh as a Trump/Putin hybrid of unleashed megalomania. In a (mostly) spoiler-free outline: The film’s title refers to a shadowy organization meant to save the world from “something worse” than Armageddon. “Trust the man behind the curtain” would be better advice, since the director stuffs his movie with the “detritus of the coming war” and plenty else to unpack after multiple viewings. A scientist, played by Clémence Poésy as the Q to Washington’s 007, tells him understanding is overrated. ![]() This isn’t Bill and Ted climbing into a phone booth to hang with Mozart and Jimi Hendrix, it’s the future issuing a warning to the present. You might need to brush up on your science to get a handle on the speculative process of inversion, in which an object or a person can have their entropy reversed, thus moving backwards in space while others move forward. Nolan’s mischievous streak gives Tenet a rich vein of humor that covers the bumps in the plot - and one of those bumps involves physics. The white-knuckle tension of the scene is raised to the upper reaches of suspense by the vibrant, vertiginous camerawork of Hoyte van Hoytema, who’s no stranger to this type of spectacle he put in his Bond-movie time back in 2015 with Spectre. Meanwhile, secret agents donning eerily timely PPE are gassing the crowd through venue’s air vents, so they can make off with an asset. The first visual knockout Nolan puts before us takes place at an opera house in Kiev, where a packed audience (remember those?) awaits the show. on September 3rd.) If anything can put movie junkies back in their multiplex seats - masked, of course, and safely distanced - this groundbreaker is the one to do it. (Having already opened abroad, it arrives in the U.S. Tenet - yes, the title is indeed a palindrome - is the first big-budget studio movie (it’s production budget tops $200 million) to open in actual theaters, including IMAX, in the Covid-wraped year of 2020. In his latest, a sci-fi thriller whose action globe-trots across three continents and seven countries, Nolan’s tick-tock obsession hits a fever pitch. He’s a filmmaker who has been screwing around with our ideas about time since his 2001 breakthrough Memento - even his 2017 war epic Dunkirk asked us see the same event from interlocking, rewinding-and-fast–forwarding perspectives. ![]() It’s as if an African-American James Bond, in the person of the sharply bespoke-suited spymaster played by John David Washington, found himself among the mindhunters of Nolan’s 2010 Inception. Actually it’s doing both - and the director-screenwriter is challenging us to try and keep up. It’s pretentious, dry, and it’s 1-hour and 44-minutes of “me time” I can’t get back.You could argue that Tenet, the brain-teasing new blockbuster-to-be from agent provocateur Christopher Nolan, doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going. With Hamburg’s script and the flimsy performances from the main cast, Me Time is another film existing in the Hollywood vacuum soon to be forgotten. Look, I don’t walk into Kevin Hart films expecting anything serious, but would have liked to laugh once or twice. Sure, there is something to be said about the film’s overall theme of not judging a book by its cover or how one doesn’t have to look far for happiness, but it’s buried under outdated gags and fart jokes. There is no substance, just vibes, and it wouldn’t be such a chore if the movie was fun. There are a few funny moments, but it all feels like déjà vu - you’ve seen these same performances elsewhere in another movie, and it leaves Me Time feeling unremarkable. He embarks on a journey of discovery that should be hilarious but instead is the same old shtick we’ve seen repeatedly from Hart and Wahlberg. Sonny doesn’t know who he is outside the family, so he begins to explore what that might be. Me Time is one of those coming-of-age stories for middle-aged men.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |