Crime/Heist

dir: Todd Phillips

2024

It seems like no-one was meant to enjoy this flick. That would seem to be a strange thing to say about any flick, generally, but this flick seems so deliberately intended to undo whatever the first flick did that it seems bizarre that executives would have agreed to spend $200mill to make it and then another $100mill to market it to the world. There are few bus shelters right now in Melbourne that don’t have that film’s poster on them. They paid some sell-out muralist to cover a whole side of a building with an image of Joaquin and Gaga on it, several storeys high in the CBD.

But then, what about the film they made? I don’t know, as in I can’t pretend to have any secret knowledge of why they did what they did with this film, but I have to assume that this is exactly the film Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix wanted to make. The first one made over a billion dollars. Joaquin got a shiny golden award for Best Actor for that film.

It feels like whatever they wanted people to think about Joaquin and the character in the first flick had to be the opposite of what they get here in this anti-sequel.

Allow me to reiterate that I loathed that first film that was very successful. I did not loathe it for its success, but because I thought it was a facile and ludicrous rendering of a character (one that I don’t really care for anyway, regardless of which version is portrayed).

dir: Josh Margolin

2024

I loved the absolute heck out of this film. I love every impulse behind it. I love that June Squibb is still alive in her 90s and could star in the flick, and do so incredibly well as the main character Thelma. I love that Richard Roundtree, legend of Blaxploitation cinema, the one the only Shaft, has a major role in this and that it was his last movie.

I love that the director is joyously paying tribute to his own grandma, being the Thelma from the movie’s title, who is still alive to this day at 103.

That’s not the same as saying that this is based on a ‘true’ story. The deliriously beautiful thing about the flick is the way it constructs something that seems like or feels like a heist flick, yet uses the low stakes befitting its characters to full comic effect. And yet the music /score doesn’t know that, and therefore barrels along like it is that high stakes heist flick.

It’s brilliant. Our protagonist, being Thelma, rolls over a bed, or evades someone on a mobility aid scooter, and the music accompanying the scene makes you think she’s robbing the vaults at Fort Knox or pulling off a caper the Ocean’s Eleven chumps wouldn’t dare to try.

It is ironic that one of her inspirations in the story is seeing Tom Cruise running and doing stunts, and being told by her grandson that “he does all his own stunts”, that inspires Thelma to do more than the people around her expect her to be capable of. Mission: Possible is what she believes in.

Despite being in her nineties, Thelma is active, energetic and walks around under her own steam. She lives alone, and not in assisted living, or some other euphemism for an old folks home, which is itself a euphemism, for those places we park the olds before they finally depart from this mortal coil.

dir: Christos Massalas

2022

What is this film about…

I’m not entirely sure. It’s maybe about a bunch of people who have ended up as outcasts, of a sort, who gravitate to a mothballed theatre called the Broadway, somewhere in Athens, who get through life as petty criminals.

But that would be a simplistic rendering. The main character is Nelly (Elsa Lekakou), or at least I assume she’s the Main Character because she often shares her thoughts with us, the shmucks in the audience. She seems like she gives zero fucks about anything, but I think that might not be entirely true.

She implies that she is fleeing from a wealthy family, for reasons that are not shared with us, so she doesn’t do what she does, whether it’s stripping or aiding the other pickpockets, for the money, per se. She doesn’t have expensive habits, since her one vice seems to be petrol sniffing.

I have to admit that I was stunned when that was shown, but then I remembered that Greece has been an economic basket case for decades, and then it made perfect sense. If petrol is about 2 euro a litre in Greece, and she only needs to half fill a small bottle, she can get a numbing buzz for a few cents at a time, which lasts days and days.

Please don’t see this as endorsement: I’m still horrified.

When hired goons turn up where she works, and try to manhandle her, a steely eyed grey haired crim called Markos (Stathis Apostolou) knocks them about and “rescues” her. In her voiceover, she relates to us her general luck in getting out of sticky situations: someone always comes along and rescues her, which she is tired of, because for once she wishes she could be the one doing the rescuing.

dir: Robert Lorenz

2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this story 14,000 times before.

An aging hitman decides he wants to stop killing people for money. But then something happens, and he has to kill more people, and then probably dies or stops killing people at least for a while.

Sound familiar? What if I told you it starred Liam Neeson? Wouldn’t you then say “you’re lazily describing every film Liam Neeson has been in for the last twenty years?”

And you would not be wrong. Ever since Taken convinced every middle-aged, middle-class dad that they, too, could torture and kill dozens of criminals if one of their kids were kidnapped, even lacking that special set of skills, Neeson has been the lead in these violent actioners that try to argue that a man in his 70s can still kick arse.

I admit that there are some fit men in their 70s. They shouldn’t be fighting people. They shouldn’t be punching people or kicking them down escalators or anything. They certainly shouldn’t be wrestling with other younger men. They should be wrestling with their consciences, with moral dilemmas, with their regrets.

This steady progression of dumb action flicks that he’s been in, including ones recently that account for his age, and one in particular called Memory where he plays a character with Alzheimer’s, makes you wonder why Neeson is in so many films every year. Why not take a break?

This is not a dumb action flick. There’s very little action in it, and there’s no need for stunt work, or for Neeson to risk throwing his back out or straining himself too bad.

And yet he still plays a chap who up till recently has killed men for money. In Ireland, of all places.

This flick is set in 1975, in County Donegal, so it’s one of those rare instances where a film has characters in Ireland talking about the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants.

It’s also a rare flick where the ‘bad guys’ are IRA terrorists.

I mean, I thought they were all saints, serving their noble cause.