"The Death of Robin Hood" - What's the opposite of hitting a bullseye?

The more I think about The Death of Robin Hood, the more I realize it's not a good movie. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of components that will at least make film nerds gush. The cinematography is good. The sound is good. The locations in Northern Ireland they used for filming are beautiful. The costume design is fantastic. And the performances from Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgard, and Murray Bartlett are great. As for the single most important reason a movie exists - the story - there will be no gushing.

The premise of the movie is simple...what if all the stories about Robin Hood were lies? What if Robin Hood was just a thief and murderer who just liked robbing and killing? The plot of the movie is to just show us the final days or weeks of Robin's life. It's right there in the title. And it's also a metaphorical title. With the revelation that all the heroic stories of Robin Hood and his merry men are lies (robbing the rich to give to the poor), we're getting the death of the legend of Robin Hood as well. Maybe there's an interesting story in there somewhere, but if writer/director Michael Sarnoski was aiming for it, he missed. Missed badly.

The biggest hurdle the movie has to clear is that the entire audience knows Robin Hood as a hero. It's a tall order to convince people that Robin is actually an evil brigand and make a compelling story about that version of Robin Hood. Which is probably why the movie didn't really try. Oh, it gives a token effort every now and then. But it becomes painfully clear midway through the film that not even Sarnoski has much interest in going down that road.

That token effort is most apparent in the first act of the film. When a young, freezing lady stumbles across Robin (Jackman) in the hills and tells him that Robin protects these hills, Robin responds by telling her he knows Robin and all of the stories are lies. Then, he kills her in defense when she tries to stab him in his sleep. Turns out Robin killed her family and she wanted revenge. The next morning as he is burying her body, the camera pans out to reveal a great many graves. Turns out quite a few people have attempted the same revenge and lost.

Sometime later, Little John (Skarsgard) shows up asking for Robin's help. Stay with me on this - John killed a man named Edward, assumed Edward's identity, has been living on Edward's farm with a wife and daughter, and the family of the real Edward has come back and taken his wife and daughter hostage. I think John's wife was actually Edward's wife, maybe the daughter as well? It's really murky, but John seems to be genuinely fond of them. Anyway, this leads to two brutal and grisly action scenes and Robin nearly being killed. The point of these scenes is to establish how many people want Robin and friends dead, but also to assure the audience that Robin (and John) isn't all bad. He's just trying to help his friend get his family back. Is that so wrong?

When Robin awakes, he finds himself in a priory on a remote island, his injuries being tended to by prioress Sister Brigid (Comer). This is where the movie and Robin get really introspective. The final two acts feature zero action scenes and a heaping pile of soul-searching. Robin makes some noise about being haunted by all the killings, though not to Brigid whom he's told his name is Randolph. A local leper (Bartlett) occasionally pops up to mildly taunt Robin with wise-sounding advice as Robin rehabilitates his injuries. Little Margaret (John's daughter) ends up on the island, further softening Robin's hardened demeanor. Brigid masturbates in a cave. Robin agrees to tend to the fruit trees on the island and hunt game to help feed the local residents. What's that - repeat that one before the fruit trees? Yeah, that happened. This is an A24 movie; of course there are weird scenes like that.

That cave scene is a good example of the myriad half-baked things the plot throws at the audience without ever going back to explain them. The unexplained part isn't the self-service part, it's why in a cave? We're told that Brigid is an almost magical healer, implying something supernatural. There's an object in the cave that could be an altar and that scene made me think we were going to find out Brigid is a witch. Then again, in another scene, we find out she's widowed and her children are dead, so maybe that object is her dead husband's grave? Or her childrens'? I told you - A24 movies are weird.

There are several unanswered questions like that, but none of them lead to the audience becoming invested in the plot or the premise. We're just waiting to for the film's title to be fulfilled. You know - the death of Robin Hood. In a much smarter movie, Robin's past and lies converge in a climax that includes his mythical bow and arrow skills. That the leper plays a much more important role in the plot than faceless dispenser of proverbs and adages. That maybe John's daughter is the ultimate dispenser of justice instead of being a cheap plot device to manipulate the audience's view of Robin. That Brigid is far more than just a healer. Instead, we get an ending that isn't just unsatisfying, but an ending that undermines its own premise. If only it had just stuck with weird, we might have cared about the death of Robin Hood. Both literally and metaphorically.

Rating: Ask for twelve dollars back after you finish gushing over the film nerd stuff.

“Nosferatu” - Let bygones be bygones.

Movie theaters are not the best places to take a nap. There is a screen with bright light reflecting off it, loud noises often emanating from all around the room, and other people around you. On the flip side, it is a dark room, with very comfortable temperatures, and, in some theaters, plush seats that recline and heat up. For me to doze off during a movie in a theater, I usually have to be really tired or the movie has to be incredibly boring or uninteresting. While I didn’t fall completely asleep during Nosferatu, I threatened it many times.

That’s not to say Nosferatu is a truly boring movie. It has plague rats, jump scares, a damsel in distress, a creepy vampire, and Willem Dafoe. On paper, that’s the opposite of boring. Yet I found myself fighting to keep my eyes open at multiple times. And I wasn’t that tired from a normal day at work.

I think the main problem for me is Nosferatu is a throwback film to a very bygone era that I’m not interested in revisiting. The original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a German silent film appearing in 1922. That’s not a typo. Today’s Nosferatu is a remake of a literal one hundred-year-old movie. And the remake isn’t a reimagining so much as it’s a straight remake, just with that newfangled sound technology to capture actors actually speaking. Or screaming. There’s a quite a lot of screaming.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this new Nosferatu feels like it was made one hundred years ago. Many of the film techniques - like straight shadows of hands and silhouettes to elicit terror - are reused to great extent. Much of the film is either straight black-and-white or using filters that wash the color out so much it might as well be black-and-white. And so much of the movie is shot in near darkness. Look - I get it. Not being able to see what’s happening induces fright, but for me it also induces heavy eyelids.

The other problem is the story is missing an element to tie everything together. The vast majority of the original film’s story (stolen from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) stays intact. Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) Hutter are recently married and trying to build a life together. Thomas is sent to Transylvania to assist Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) in closing on some property in the German town Wisborg where the Hutter’s live. As a younger girl, Ellen had been stalked by Orlok and Orlok’s goal in moving is to take full possession of her. While Thomas is away, Orlok is able to haunt Ellen’s dreams again, causing strife with Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), the Hutters’ friends who agreed to house Ellen while Thomas is away.

The story continues with Thomas’ harrowing escape from Orlok’s castle, Orlok’s voyage on a ship to Germany where the entire crew dies and the ship wrecks in Wisborg’s port, and Thomas enlisting the help of Dr. Siever (Ralph Ineson), Friedrich, and Professor von Franz (Dafoe) to hunt down and kill Orlok. What’s missing from the original story in this remake is Ellen never discovers a book on vampires (one that Thomas originally finds in Orlok’s castle) that informs her how to rid the town of Orlok. This is a key thread through the original story because it provides discovery for both Thomas and Ellen and becomes the reasoning behind their actions. In the remake, von Franz exposits all vampire knowledge to the other men, but never to Ellen, so Ellen has zero agency through the entire film. Like how Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark has no bearing on the fate of the Nazis, we could remove all of the non-vampire men from Nosferatu and the story would still end the same way - with Ellen and Orlok’s final consummation. The difference is Ellen is an unwilling participant this time around and that’s pretty boring.

I want to stress that Nosferatu is not a bad movie. I can appreciate how much effort went into it to capture the feel of a one-hundred-year-old movie. I enjoyed the performances from the actors, particularly Dafoe and the always amazingly terrifying Skarsgard. I could have done without the bombastic sound threatening to split my skull at times, but I get why it was done that way. It’s just none of those things were enough for my interest to sink its teeth into and keep my eyelids from having a mind of their own.

Rating: Ask for five dollars back in today’s money.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” - One thousand assassins dead, a zillion more to go.

“Once you kill him, then what?” a friend asks John Wick (Keanu Reeves). Great question. In the never-ending kill-box that is the John Wick universe, that question is the only time the franchise seems to realize that it has yet to include any kind of coherent plot. The first movie at least had a motivation for all the killings, as weak as that motivation was. Conversely, the sequels have all been bloodbaths solely for the sake of well-choreographed, long-cut bloodbaths, predicated on a vague set of rules that nobody has bothered to spell out. As far as we know, the answer to “then what” is more sequels with more killing because that’s the only thing that happens in Wick-land.

(SPOILER ALERT - LOL.)

At the end of JW3, NY Continental Hotel Manager Winston (Ian McShane) shot John off the top of the hotel and the inexplicably-not-dead John is spirited away in secret to the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), who was also left for dead. JW4 starts off with one of the worst openings I’ve ever seen - John punches a board wrapped in rope, the Bowery King walks and shouts his way to John’s secret location, and terrible music overlays it all. Once there, the Bowery King shouts, “is the king ready?” and holds up a new suit for John. The camera quickly zooms in on John, then cuts to the title screen. Embarrassing barely scratches the surface when describing this atrocity of a scene.

Shooting John was supposed to clear Winston in the eyes of the Who The Fuck Is The High Table, but arbitrary assassin rule ID.10.T states “LOL. JK.” Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard) punishes Winston by blowing up the NY Continental and killing his concierge Charon (Lance Reddick). Just like Santino blowing up John’s house in JW2, destroying the NY Continental seems like the dumbest possible way to coerce people in the assassin industry to help you.

This scene is also where we meet the Harbinger (Clancy Brown), another High Table representative who is half umpire, half lawyer. Another running theme of the Wick-iverse is barely defined characters, and Harbinger is tissue paper thin. Considering how supposedly inviolate the rules of this world are, I thought Harbinger The Umpire Lawyer was going to restore order and enforce the rules. Instead, he proves to be meaningless.

Cut to the Osaka Continental Hotel, where manager Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada) is going about his duties with his concierge/daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama). Yet again, we are presented with a Continental Hotel manager (the fourth, by my count), who shirks the consequences of breaking the rules to help John. Plus, we have Gramont’s men conducting business on hotel grounds, which is supposedly the most hallowed rule of them all, casually deeming the hotel no longer sacred ground simply because they suspect John might be there. Remember, the franchise’s entire *ahem* plot is based on John being hunted for breaking rules, yet over and over we see different parties breaking rules and betraying each other. As Chandler once said on Friends, “the rules are...there are no rules.”

Since the screenplays of the entire franchise can fit on a single coaster with room to spare, that leaves nearly the entire running time for action sequences. The good news is the quality of these scenes is still very good. They are still exquisitely choreographed and shot with long takes to give the audience what they came for. The bad news is the action scenes go on forever, bludgeoning the audience with them even more than in JW3. Imagine playing a first-person shooter video game with no cut scenes. Just waves and waves of enemies across multiple locations for the movie’s runtime of 169 minutes. That is not a typo. JW4 is nearly three hours long, but feels closer to thirteen.

While I am a big fan of great action scenes, every one of them was at least ten minutes too long. Again, that is not a typo. There are four major action scenes that wallow in bloodshed, each more tedious than the last as they stretch on into oblivion. I became so bored during them that all I could think about was where the hell were all these assassins coming from. And why. JW1 and JW2 established John Wick as a terrifying and near-mythical assassin known to everyone. Yet, the moment a contract on his life is put out there, literally every assassin in the world tries to kill him. I would have loved to see just one assassin look at their phone and go “meh, no.”

To be fair, an assassin called Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson) kind of says no to the contract. This is not satisfying. I’ll skip the descriptions and just tell you that Mr. Nobody has a killer dog as a partner and some other assassin dude that joins them is blind (Donnie Yen). That is all. Pew, pew, pew. Stab, stab, stab.

Like the Scream and Fast and Furious franchises, John Wick has abandoned competent writing in favor of indulgent fan service. How does John survive dozens of bad guys shooting at him? He holds his ballistic suit jacket in front of him. Why do bad guys immediately die when hit by a car, but John can walk away from the same? Because he’s the main character. How is the NY Continental still standing after we literally see it demolished from Gramont’s window? Physics. Silly stuff like that plus zero character development and no plot is why I stopped being amused by this franchise before the credits rolled in JW1.

And so we come back to that original question - now what? The end of JW4 seemingly wraps up the kill-John-Wick-for-breaking-the-rules plot (I’m not spoiling if John dies or not, but the duel at the end gives John his freedom from being hunted, dead or alive). It would be naive to think Lionsgate won’t make JW5 if JW4 makes a profit (there are two spin-offs in the works as well). It would also be naïve to think that in this barely developed, contradictory assassin world there isn’t another person with a grudge against John or IOU from John that can be turned into seven more hours of John mowing down hundreds of other assassins. But if my phone does chirp with a message that JW5 is coming, I might just have to say “meh, no.”

Rating: Ask for seventeen dollars and your coaster back.