Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is having a very bad week in Angel Has Fallen, presumably the last chapter in the series that includes Olympus Has Fallen (2013) and London Has Fallen (2016). President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) has offered him a promotion to head of the agency, which his wife Leah (Piper Perabo in the thankless helpmate role) would love but would take Mike out of the thick of things—no easy transition for an adrenalin junkie who is used to being the one guy who can save the world. Plus, he’s having concussion-related migraines that he’s told no one about as he’s become one of those doctor-shopping pillheads in search of relief. Plus, he reunites with his long-estranged father who turns out to be Nick Nolte and not the Nick Nolte of The Prince of Tides and Affliction, but the Nick Nolte with the crazed eyes in tabloid mug shots (but the paranoid old coot, character name Clay, does have a way with incendiary devices). To top it all off, someone has tried to kill the president in a tech-savvy Rube Goldberg operation with a flamboyant body count and a tight frame around Mike. Angel has fallen, indeed.
Lean into the ridiculous premise, just go with it. Angel Has Fallen masquerades as an action thriller, but it is less that and more of a guilty pleasure in the way that movies with big explosions, raging gun battles, and other forms of cartoon violence so often are. It’s often funny and the humor isn’t completely unintentional—there is no way Clay Manning is meant to be anything more than a cross between the Tasmanian Devil, Yosemite Sam, and the Unibomber (the last acknowledged by Mike). The plotting is negligible. There is, after all, only one way for this to end. Mike isn’t going to fall on a grenade, after all. (Or is he?)
And anyone familiar with the cast will have sussed out who the evildoers are before the story has even engaged, further deflating what little suspense the movie has. These guys are good, even great actors, but they are so often cast for their talent for gleefully inhabiting the roles of the absolute scum of the earth. Their characters’ motivations are pretty transparent, too, although it really seems as if one of them had just upped his dose of Viagra, bought a sports car, or joined a paintball team, a lot of the mayhem could have been avoided. But then there wouldn’t be a movie, now would there?
It’s the dog days of August, the month studios dump product deemed defective on multiplex screens in hopes some will somehow capture an audience, anyway. Kind of like the movie versions of seconds, items offered as is, buyer beware. Angel Has Fallen falls neatly into that category, but it might just be one that sticks. Is it good? No. Is it amusing? Heck, yeah. And when else are moviegoers ever going to get to see the awesome sight of Gerard Butler and Nick Nolte lolling in sensory deprivation tanks? Some things are just worth the price of admission. –Pam Grady
Stealing a beer from my uncle’s fridge and running off to share it among the four of us behind the nearby grammar school used to be a thing for me, my two cousins, and my little sister (who we were corrupting, since we were tweens and she wasn’t). Then one day when they were going to come to my house for a sleepover, we stashed a beer in my sister’s purse where my mom discovered it. Busted. Sleepover canceled. Beer filching days over.
In a key moment of Wild Rose, aspiring country singer Rose-Lynn Harlan (Jessie Buckley) travels to London—probably the farthest she’s been outside of her hometown of Glasgow—to meet one of her heroes, real-life BBC The Country Show radio host Whispering Bob Harris—who tells her that if she is serious about making it in country music she needs to write her own songs. It is a suggestion that flummoxes her; she feels she has nothing to write about. She can’t see what the audience sees: Her life is a country song. And so is this movie, the story of a working-class heroine who can’t seem to get out of her own way, whose life would utterly defeat most other people, but whose hope and big dreams remain undistinguished.
Rankin-Bass probably doesn’t have cause for action, but it is impossible not to feel the influence of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in this fourth Toy Story adventure. The world Woody (Tom Hanks) stumbles on where toys go unloved and unwanted is not an island nor toy world unto itself, but a dusty antique store where toys go unloved and unwanted. For Woody, beginning to contemplate his own obsolescence and a time when no child will call him his own, the place is a revelation. If this is truly Woody’s last roundup, he goes out in a blaze of laughter and tears.
Nicolas Brown adapts Sean B. Carroll’s book The Serengeti Rules, at once paying homage to the five scientists at the heart of it, and explicating their theories in a handsome, engaging documentary. Like so many environmental docs that have come before it, it identifies a threat to our planet, in this case, the degradation to our natural world that ensues with the loss of biodiversity. But unlike so many films of its nature, it is more hopeful in tone. The scientists know what needs to be done to cure this particular malady; the trick is getting it done. The Serengeti Rules serves as a clarion call for action.
Fun fact: When Renaldo and Clara, Bob Dylan’s sole (and notoriously unsuccessful) foray into narrative filmmaking—a nearly four-hours-long fever dream combining vignettes with concert footage–opened in San Francisco in 1978, it was at the Castro Theatre. It is only fitting then that Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese that employs that same footage should have its one and only San Francisco screening before settling into its home on Netflix at the Castro. Complete with tastings of Dylan’s Heaven’s Door whiskey line, which is somehow perfect. The film, up to a point, anyway, is delicious. And so is the booze.
Anyone expecting Rocketman–a film about the life and times of Elton John, executive produced by Elton John and produced by his husband David Furnish—to be a rock star’s vanity project, will be disabused of that notion in the dramatic musical’s opening scene. That’s when Elton (Taron Egerton), arrestingly attired in a skintight, bright orange jumpsuit with feathered wings and topped off with devil horns and rhinestone, heart-shaped glasses, bursts into what is unmistakably a 12-step meeting, sits down, and confesses to a long list of addictions. No, Rocketman is not a vanity project; it’s an anti-vanity project, a lacerating portrait of the artist as a young, self-loathing man. It is a movie that defies expectations, revealing the emptiness and inner turmoil hidden beneath such a glittering career.
Nearly 28 years ago, on Dec. 23, 1991, three little girls died in a fire in Corsicana, TX. In short order, the authorities declared the blaze an arson and identified the children’s father, Cameron Todd Willingham, a local ne’er-do-well as the killer. Fifteen years later, the state of Texas executed Willingham by lethal injection. Those are the bare bones of the case that serves as the basis for the Edward Zwick’s (Blood Diamond, Defiance) new film, Trial By Fire, a tense true-crime drama that argues that an injustice has been done and an innocent man executed. Jack O’Connell as Willingham and Laura Dern, as Elizabeth Gilbert, a playwright who worked on behalf of Willingham’s exoneration, lend their considerable talents to a riveting tale of justice denied.