Wow. I really wanted to love this movie. Bradley Cooper’s debut directorial performance was so close to perfect and yet so far away at the same time. I admire his vision and ambition for this movie so much that I want to credit it even in the areas it struggled with. Watching it through the lens of a moviegoer looking for an escape rather than that of a wannabe movie critic would have allowed me to see past some of its many errors. Ultimately, however, this film was far too flawed to be a legitimate contender for Best Picture or Best Director, despite what many seem to be already predicting. I will touch on all of the good and all of the bad in what will be one of my more thorough reviews.
Category Archives: Top 10 Movie of 2018
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
Mission Impossible: Fallout could be a template for creating action movies. This is everything you want in a pure action movie, offering the same suspense, mystery, and comedic tones you expect from this top-of-the-line franchise. Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men) reprises his most recognizable character (Top Gun came out over 30 years ago. Maverick is great, Ethan Hunt is the identifiable Cruise character, at least for anyone younger than 35). I’ve spent a good part of the last two decades knocking Tom Cruise for his choice of roles, wishing he would return to the types of roles that earned him three Academy Award nominations between 1990-2000. And honestly, at the time, I thought he was phoning it in for box office dollars. I understand an action flick here and there.
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
Sicario: Day of the Soldado is not so much a sequel to 2015’s megahit Sicario that you must know what happened in the first one to appreciate the second as it is its standalone movie. The only thing you need to know to go into the 2018 movie fresh is that (spoiler) the drug war in Mexico has escalated to the point where the United States government is forced to use questionable tactics that force some of its operatives to question the morality of what they are doing and that the US is aided mystifying man with a unique set of skills but a checkered past named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro – The Hunted, Traffic) whose family is killed after an order by a Mexican Cartel Kingpin named Carlos Reyes. That’s it. This man’s men kill Alejandro’s family, and he wants revenge. If you accidentally read that brief spoiler, shame on you for going at least three years without yet seeing the phenomenal Sicario. And just because I gave a brief spoiler doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out if you have not already.
Adrift (2018)
Meticulously crafted and tenderly executed, Baltasar Kormákur’s (Everest, 2 Guns) Adrift is a journey not to be best on the largest screen you can find at your nearby cinemas. Being lost in the sea is one of my favorite movie subgenres. This movie stands on its own against such classics as The Perfect Storm, Dead Calm, Life of Pi, Lifeboat, All is Lost, The Deep, and even Academy Award-nominated pictures like Cast Away and Life of Pi in the sense that it is based on a true story and that the true story is real in the sense that we know what happened because, spoiler, the survivor lives to tell the story. While such stories as Titanic, The Perfect Storm, Open Water, and The Heart of the Sea are based on true stories and are fantastic movies, there is so much fiction added to these stories because we don’t have full accounts of what did happen because there either wasn’t someone left at the end to give the proper details or there were so many fictional elements added to the anecdotes that the plot from which the movie was based on has been entirely changed. That is not the case with Adrift, which makes this movie great. It isn’t “based on” or “inspired by” a true story. It is a true story; ultimately, that’s what we want.
Tully (2018)
Tully. Wow. Way to toy with me, Jason Reitman (Up In the Air, Juno). I will have a spoilers section for this movie, but I will let you know when it happens. This hit me with an emotional punch. And I say that tongue-in-cheek because I did not find this movie all that emotional. Reitman has a way of writing and directing his stories so that you are wholly invested and don’t need to keep your tissues nearby. Instead, he tells his stories in a way that gets you interested from the get-go, creating characters who you wrote for and then hitting you with a gut punch when you least expect it. Ultimately, this results in his movies staying with you long after most movies you’ve seen have been forgotten. In Tully, he reunites with Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road, A Little Trip to Heaven) when the two team up for the fantastic Young Adult. I wouldn’t say that the Academy has shut out Theron (certainly not in the way that Jake Gyllenhaal has), but to have just two Academy Award nominations (Monster, North Country) is, if nothing else, a little surprising. I wonder if her performance in this film will be enough to land the coveted acting prize, especially with an April release. But she carried this movie in a couple of directions, held together by her evenness and Reitman’s adherence to the story when it felt like things were untangling.