Buzz Blog

The Accountant 2 **1/2
See feature review. Available April 25 in theaters. (R)

Havoc **1/2
Director Gareth Evans can claim two of the most creatively brutal action movies of the century in The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2, which is an awfully high bar to hold anyone to—but when a movie isn’t offering much else, that’s the bar we’re gonna end up using. Crunching punches, meat cleaver lacerations and plenty of fluorescent-red blood surround the story of Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy), a dirty cop in a determinedly unnamed city who tries to save Charlie (Justin Cornwell), the son of the corrupt businessman/mayoral candidate (Forest Whitaker) to whom he’s indebted, after the youth is misidentified as the killer of a Chinese mafia boss. Evans unspools a tale with plenty of opportunity for conflicts, between the mobsters, Walker’s fellow dirty cops (led by Timothy Olyphant), an actual good cop (Jessie Mei Li) and more, making for a sometimes unnecessarily complicated narrative. We’re really here for the … well, the havoc, after all, and Evans gets rolling right away with a terrific car chase, then hits his stride during an extended three-front war at a nightclub where Walker is trying to save Charlie and his girlfriend (Quelin Sepulveda). But the action stuff, while fairly relentless, just isn’t particularly inventive most of the time, leading to a kind of numbing sameness to scenes of bodies riddled with bullets. By the time the various attempts at redemption arcs unfold, Evans has managed to make 100 minutes of carnage feel a whole lot longer. Available April 25 via Netflix. (R)

The Legend of Ochi **1/2
It should come as a relief when a family-friendly film doesn’t completely turn into the copycat of other family-friendly films that it initially seems to be, except that I’m not sure this works as anything distinctive in its place. Set on an island in the Black Sea, it finds the local population in a long-standing conflict with mysterious simian-like beasts called ochi, until an adolescent girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) finds a lost and injured infant ochi and becomes determined to return it to its tribe. Writer/director and music video veteran Isaiah Saxon creates a wonderfully distinctive sense of place suggesting a world trapped in the past, and crafts some striking images to accompany the wonderfully tactile quality of the creatures. But while there’s clearly an attempt at creating an emotional center in the idea of familial conflict—as Yuri struggles in relationships with her angry father (Willem Dafoe) and absentee mother (Emily Watson)—none of those notions ever quite build the emotional resonance that feels promised by David Longstreth’s swelling score. It’s also kind of difficult getting a sense for whether the ochi are merely misunderstood and defending themselves—a How to Train Your Dragon-type dynamic—or are genuinely a threat to people in a way that can’t be tamed. The result is something that’s occasionally fascinating in its uniqueness, yet ultimately more theoretically satisfying than truly cathartic. Available April 25 in theaters. (PG)

On Swift Horses ***
There’s a moment late in this adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s novel so unexpectedly heartbreaking that it mostly cancels out all the ways in which it feels kind of familiar. Set in 1957, it follows the interconnected stories of two people—Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), newly married to Lee (Will Poulter) and discovering the thrill of horse racing in post-war California; and Julius (Jacob Elordi), Lee’s itinerant gambler brother—dealing with same-sex attraction at a time when it was still “the love that dare not speak its name.” While all three lead performances are solid, elements here definitely feel reminiscent of other stories of pre-Stonewall queer experience like Brokeback Mountain and Carol, dealing with the furtive glances and coded behavior required to survive. Yet director Daniel Minahan and screenwriter Bryce Kass find wonderful details—like Muriel hiding her cigarettes from Lee in the one place he’d never look, her box of tampons—in a narrative that recognizes the thrill of addictive behaviors like gambling as a substitute for repressed desires. It all builds to that aforementioned late sequence, one that evokes a scope of lost lives and lost loves far beyond the specific central characters of this story. Even as On Swift Horses tries to offer a sense of hope and new beginnings, it’s honest enough to pay tribute to people who never had a chance for either one. Available April 25 in theaters. (R)

The Shrouds **1/2
David Cronenberg has spent his 50-year filmmaking career immersed in body horror, which would seem like solid preparation for addressing death artistically when it hits close to home—except that in this case, it feels like he gets lost in the weeds of his own grief. Cronenberg’s on-screen avatar—right down to sporting a similar spiky gray pompadour—is Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a tech entrepreneur whose mourning for his dead wife Becca (Diane Kruger) has manifested itself in an innovative technology allowing people to continue viewing their deceased loved ones as they decompose in the grave. That feels like an absolute sweet spot for Cronenberg, and he does find some masterful ways for folding the fragility of the human body via illness and injury into the way we can start to disappear even before we’re gone, both from our loved ones and from ourselves. Yet that potentially rich blending of deep sorrow and cringe-inducing moments shifts to a conspiracy narrative involving secret medical research, Becca’s look-alike sister Terry (also played by Kruger) and Terry’s twitchy ex-husband (Guy Pearce) that just doesn’t go anywhere it could have gone in understanding the need to latch on to improbabilities to make sense of the emotionally unacceptable. The abrupt ending might be true to unresolved feelings, but it also shows that Cronenberg is better when he’s giving concrete form to the notion of falling apart. Available April 25 in theaters. (R)