Suburbicon Review (2017)

Grade: D+

“Suburbicon” is a frustrating jumble of good ideas that fail to coalesce into a satisfying whole. Directed by George Clooney (with a script by Joel and Ethan Coen, Clooney and Grant Heslov) the picture attempts  (and fails) to juggle two disparate stories: the first is a middling slice of dark comedic noir involving the dissolution of a family in 1950’s suburbia while the other is a potentially compelling social drama involving race and segregation that's given only a few of scenes to unfurl, rendering it hollow.

The crime story gets off to an abrupt start as Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) wakes his young son Nicky Lodge (Noah Jupe) in the middle of the night. The father leads his boy to the living room where his mom Rose (Julianne Moore) and aunt Nancy (also Moore) are waiting with two mean looking heavies who intend to rob their nice suburban house in the town of Suburbicon. The confrontation leads to tragedy and the Lodge family is left to mourn. However, there’s more to the story as Gardner may not be as innocent as he initially seems.

What we have here is a combination of “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” with a hearty shot of Coen Bros-esque black comedy, which admittedly sounds juicy. It’s a shame that the film always feels pressed for time. The mystery unravels so quickly that it increasingly loses potency and eventually fizzles out in an excessively violent last act. The film also takes an extremely dark, psychotic turn in its finale that doesn’t feel entirely earned because of how hectic and undercooked the rest of the plot is. Meanwhile the characters aren’t given a chance to develop. There’s a scene between Gardner and Nicky near the end that would be absolutely bone chilling if Gardner wasn’t such a bland, unmemorable protagonist. A poor mans Jerry Lundegaard from “Fargo.”

The crime story is never unwatchable; there are a handful of gleefully twisted moments and Oscar Isaac shows up briefly to steal the show but nothing sticks in your mind afterwards.

The other storyline in “Suburbicon” (happening simultaneously) is fraught with unrealized potential. It involves an African American family, The Meyers, moving into Suburbicon--a seemingly innocent event that throws the town’s white middle class residents into flux. They thought they were safe from the “dangers” of the city and integration here. It becomes immediately clear that this drama would make for a fresher, more urgent examination of the dark underbelly of suburbia than the second rate Coen Bros. crime film going on around it. All it takes is a black family moving in for white suburbanites to drop their cheerful façade and turn into racist, paranoid monsters. The scenes where the neighborhood succumbs to mob violence are tense and unsettlingly relevant.

Unfortunately, the Coen Bros. crime film takes center stage while this social drama plays out like a painfully shallow, heavy handed aside that could have easily been axed from the final cut. Its so one note and inert that I don’t think you can even call it a “subplot.” It’s a germ of a subplot that’s been dropped into the middle of different movie. The Meyers family, made up of a husband and wife and young boy are cardboard cutouts. Not once does Clooney venture into their house and give us a glimpse into their personal lives and show how they’re reacting to what’s going on around them.

The larger issue here is that Clooney fails to establish a substantial connection between these two storylines. Nicky and the Meyers boy play together a few times and bond while racist adults yell from the streets but these scenes don’t really go anywhere nor do they fit in with the rest of the movie. You feel like you’re watching two different movies. Yet even if “Suburbicon” had been longer and the social drama had been fleshed out more I’m still not sure the two stories would be compatible. They don’t brush up against each other nearly enough, narratively or thematically.

“Suburbicon” basically just puts two underwritten and unrelated narratives on top of each other in the hope that they’ll somehow fit together. On their own, said narratives might have made for good films (the racial drama in particular) but together they make for an underwhelming, disappointing mess.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle Review (2017)

There should be some form of punishment for a director that manages to waste Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry and Julianne Moore in a single movie. Matthew Vaughn is the culprit and “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” is the film.

At its best, “The Golden Circle” (a sequel to “Kingsman: The Secret Service”) is a goofy, kinetic spy action/comedy that pokes fun at and gives the middle finger to the “Bond” franchise. It’s gleefully violent and vulgar, sometimes unnecessarily so. There are a bevy of nifty high tech gadgets to get the characters out of just about every tight situation, and the costuming is exquisite.  “Kingsman” can be fun and delightfully eccentric but like a lot of sequels it falls into the trap of redundancy and tedium, among other issues.  Vaughn and co writer Jane Goldman try to expand the “Kingsman” universe and introduce new characters in the process but fail to do anything substantial with them; hence my suggestion in the first paragraph.  Jail time might be a little harsh, perhaps a fine?

Events pick up pretty much where the first “Kingsman” left off. Young Eggsy (Taron Edgerton, charming and sincere) is enjoying his life as a secret agent as well as his relationship with Swedish Princess Tilde (Hanna Alstrom). However, things go immediately wrong when all the Kingsman headquarters in London are bombed by a drug lord named Poppy (Julianne Moore). With nowhere else to turn, Eggsy and fellow agent Merlin (Mark Strong) head to America to join forces with The Statesman, an American spy organization. Here, Eggsy also encounters his old friend and mentor Harry (Colin Firth) who he thought had died.

Operating out of Kentucky and using a whisky distillery as its front, The Statesman are like the Kingsman except that they wear cowboy hats and boots, and drink whisky instead of scotch or martinis. The organization is run by Champ, (Bridges) along with under agents Whisky, (Pedro Pascal) Tequila (Tatum) and Ginger (Berry). In theory, this seems like a fun way to expand on the “Kingsman” mythology but Vaughn lets it go to waste.

The scenes that take place in Kentucky at The Statesman headquarters often play out like a stilted product placement for a fictional brand of whisky. * Meanwhile our new southern fried agents are given very little to do. What’s the point in having Tatum play a cowboy spy named Tequila if he’s only going to be in a few scenes? The lovely, molasses mouth Bridges is reduced to thankless cameo status and Berry’s part as an agent frustrated with her role in the organization is even more thankless. There are large stretches of the picture were Berry and Bridges are absent for unexplained reasons. The Statesman material is occasionally funny but we’re just not given enough and therefore it doesn’t really cohere with the rest of the picture.

Ultimately, “The Golden Circle” pivots into a tedious and overlong rehash of the first film, with Eggsy, Harry and Merlin having to infiltrate Poppy’s layer and save all of humanity. Edgerton, Firth and Strong have a great onscreen repartee like they did the first time around and the surrogate father-son bond between Eggsy and Harry can be poignant but what’s the point in introducing this new spy organization if you’re just going to treat it like a one dimensional narrative detour and then fall back on what you already did?

Moore is given a little more to do and for a while her eccentric outcast CEO turned drug dealer is compelling. Poppy lives in undiscovered ancient ruins in Cambodia that she’s outfitted with a 1950’s American aesthetic—an authentic 50’s diner, a bowling alley etc. She has a superficially cheerful, high voiced demeanor that masks a psychopathic interior. Poppy can be downright terrifying but even she fails to meet her full super villainess potential as Vaughn curiously throws her under a figurative bus, having her meet a frustratingly anticlimactic fate.

I could go on. Vaughn tries to balance spy action/comedy with a heated but half-baked critique of America’s ongoing war on drugs (and the layers of hypocrisy that go along with it) with mixed results. The political commentary is intriguing yet unfocused and like The Statesman stuff it doesn’t always jell with the rest of the film. There’s a reoccurring Elton John gag that’s funny until it’s beaten into the ground. The romantic subplot involving Eggsy and Tilde is consistently tepid and is resolved via the underwhelming damsel-in-distress device. You can probably sense the reoccurring theme of female characters being given the short end of the stick in this film. There are good elements to be found in “The Golden Circle” but by and large it contains a lot of missed potential.

C-

*Turns out it’s a real whisky; a spinoff of Old Forester produced in partnership with the film. More here in this New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/27/business/media/statesman-bourbon-kingsman.html?mcubz=0&_r=0