Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni in It Ends with Us
IT ENDS WITH US
You have to imagine that it's a good day to be in the Ryan Reynolds/Blake Lively household. Presuming the décor is phenomenal, I guess you could say that about every day. But in addition to Reynolds' Deadpool & Wolverine, with $54 million and change, topping the box-office for the third straight weekend, Lively's debuting romantic drama It Ends with Us finished a strong second with $50 million. This makes the stars the first married couple to boast a weekend's number-one and -two domestic grossers since Bruce Willis and Demi Moore managed the feat with 1990's Die Hard 2 and Ghost. Not only that, but with Lively also appearing in her husband's film as “Ladypool” (she's masked, so we'll take her presence on faith), she can brag about being featured in both current draws. So congrats, Ryan and Blake, and I'm happy that one of your movies actually deserves to be a big hit! For the record, it ain't the comic-book one.
I'll quickly add that It Ends with Us isn't necessarily great. It is, however, a crowd-pleaser that's strong and sincere and unexpectedly touching … and unlike the latest Deadpool, at least it makes a modicum of sense. (This isn't quite the same thing as being believable, but you can't have everything.) In director Justin Baldoni's adaptation of Christy Hall's massively popular 2016 novel, with Hall herself serving as screenwriter, Lively plays our Boston-based lead, and because she has the wildly unlikely name of Lily Blossom Bloom, she obviously wants to open a flower shop. As indicated, in the opener, by Lily's trip to her father's funeral – a ceremony she ditches upon realizing she has nothing nice to say about the man – our beautiful, seemingly self-assured heroine is Hurting. Yet things start looking up for Lily when a quiet rooftop evening leads to a sudden, steamy flirtation with Ryle Kinkaid (director Baldoni), a gorgeous neurosurgeon with a sense of humor, impressively sculpted three-day stubble, and, from what we can tell, a temper.
Lily's very first sight of Ryle, in fact, finds the doctor grunting in frustration while kicking a chair three feet from its initial position. Yet while some/most would consider this action the reddest of flags, it quickly breezes past Lily, and before long, she and Ryle embark on a passionate affair. With the aid of her new bestie Allysa (Jenny Slate), who of course happens to be Ryle's sister, Lily's flower shop opens, and business is soon booming. So are the loud warning signals after Ryle's short fuse again comes to the fore, most of his anger and jealousy prompted by the presence of handsome Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), Lily's former high-school boyfriend who of course is now the proprietor of Lily's and Ryle's favorite restaurant. Yet if you presume that It Ends with Us is going to turn into a simple, unsurprising saga about which hottie Lily will wind up – the temperamental doctor with the washboard abs or the sensitive restaurateur with the sweetheart smile – that's actually not what's in store. I mean, it is a little. Hall's tale, though, is more admirably complex than that, and it's her script's character complexity, and the tough-minded performances bringing it to life, that help make up for most everything in the movie that might make you roll your eyes.
That's not a short list. Moving past the ridiculousness of “Lily Blossom Bloom” (a name that Lily herself wisely recognizes as silly) and the soap-opera readiness of “Ryle” and “Atlas,” Baldoni's film is frequently like the very blueprint for Romantic Drama 101. There are gauzy montages for days and twee acoustic ballads on the soundtrack. There are awkward, and awkwardly timed, flashbacks to the days of Lily's and Atlas' youth – although playing the teen version of Lily, Isabela Ferrer is an uncanny match for Blake Lively, right down to the mole on her right cheek. (Weirdly, as the teen Atlas, Alex Neustaedter suggests a young James Marsden, while adult Atlas Sklenar more closely resembles a baby-faced Russell Crowe.) As lit by cinematographer Barry Peterson and costumed by designer Eric Dama, every scene looks like it could've been pulled fully formed from the pages of a particularly high-end lifestyle magazine; even Lily's flower shop, with its dying-petals aesthetic, is unspeakably chic. And probably because he's also the director, you can't help noticing how very, very many flattering closeups of Baldoni we're treated to. Sure, Ryle is one of the romantic leads, and it's not like Lively and Sklenar are left wanting for camera time. But you'd think Baldoni might've at least given his relentless glamour shots a rest after Ryle proves to be a potential creep.
Still, it's amazing how little of that matters in light of everything It Ends with Us gets right. Primarily, I'm talking about Lively, who rarely gets the chance to sink her teeth into material this meaty. From your first minutes with Lily, you like and empathize with the woman, and by time she and Ryle are flirting on that rooftop, I'd argue that it's hard not to fall in love with her. (Lively has a beguiling natural laugh that's put to excellent use in this sequence, especially when Lily reveals that she presumed Ryle's whole “neurosurgeon” thing to be complete b.s.) Yet Lively has more than presence and appeal in Baldoni's film – she has power, and it's employed for a number of scenes, including a rather harrowing “seduction” attempt, in which Lily is utterly terrified. Blessedly, however, Hall's material doesn't restrict Lively's emotional force to Lily's victimization. She's controlled and convincing at every juncture, and not once does Lively resort to melodrama. Hall's plotting may be contrived, but the actor's engagement with that plotting feels unerringly real.
The overall performance excellence extends to Shlenar and Baldoni, who were responsible for the two instances in which I reflexively teared up: the former with a painful admission about Atlas' youth, and the latter, far more surprisingly, in Ryle's reaction to an unanticipated kindness. Even when Ryle was at his worst, there was never a moment in which I wanted any of our three leads off-screen, and we're given additionally welcome portrayals in the inspired teaming of Slate and Hasan Minhaj, as well as Amy Morton's soulful turn as Lily's damaged mother. I probably shouldn't use that adjective specifically for Mrs. Bloom, though, because Slate's and Minhaj's characters aside, everyone proves damaged in It Ends with Us. The beauty of Baldoni's and Hall's movie – and, for its fans, perhaps Hall's widely adored novel, too – lies in the laudable depth with which its traumas are explored, and the honorable subversion in the material leading us to expect one thing while delivering something entirely different, and far richer. For all the blithe and vacuous romantic dramas foisted on us, I actually cared about the people in this one, and knowing that Hall wrote a sequel to her literary smash, I'm now actively hoping that this team's efforts don't end with Us.
CUCKOO
Has there ever before been a more fittingly titled movie than writer/director Tilman Singer's Cuckoo? Because this thing is crazy. Insane, Loco. Days after seeing it, I still can't definitively tell you what it's about. Or rather, I can, but can't give you a firm description regarding what the plot is about. From what I could tell, the film concerns a clandestine operation in the Bavarian Alps in which birds are scientifically morphed with humans in some kind of bizarre hybrid experiment designed to create a … . What? A race of super-powerful women whose shrieking is apparently enough to bend and repeat time and space? I mean … maybe. I'd ask you to check back with me later, but that would suggest that I intended to watch Cuckoo a second time. Once was kinda fun, but it was definitely enough.
Fulfilling the promise of her exceptional Euphoria work and then some, Hunter Schafer plays Gretchen, an anguished 17-year-old forced, after her mother's passing, to live with her father Luis (Marton Csokas), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and young, apparently mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu). For the next several months, their home will be in a resort town in the Alps while Luis and Beth work on the construction of a new hotel, and before long, Gretchen secures a reception job at another hotel – one that makes the Overlook look damned near cuddly in comparison. The staff is surly. The grinning hotel manager (Dan Stevens' Herr König) is sketchy as eff. Guests have a habit of wandering into the lobby and randomly vomiting. And there appears to be a psychotic woman on the loose nearby, as well as a constant screeching heard from the neighboring forests. What has Gretchen inadvertently gotten herself into? And why does nobody seem to care about her recent string of stalkings, gruesome injuries, and flashes of déjà vu that keep ending in violence?
Ya got me. Narrative sense doesn't appear to be of much interest to German director Singer, and when he finally does begin to explain things with about 20 minutes left to go in his bucolic freakout, the information we get is so tortured and confounding that it would've been preferable to get no info at all. Yet before Cuckoo effectively crawls up its own ass never to see daylight again, there are at least a dozen genuine scares, impressively loud bangs to make you jump (including a glass-door collision that made patrons at my screening audibly gasp), bizarre and memorable imagery aplenty, and the eternal awesomeness of Schafer, whose portrayal is like the human equivalent of a frayed nerve.
She and Stevens, bless them, also provide opportunities to giggle, which Stevens does with his malevolent Dr. Strangelove-ian quirkiness, and Hunter by reacting to the madness like the madness it is. After Gretchen asks Herr König what, precisely, her family is doing in this well-tended Bavarian nuthouse, the honey-voiced weirdo replies with an insinuating “Your family … belongs here.” Taking a perfect pause before gesturing to the man with “See?!?” unmistakably implied, Schafer earns Cuckoo's heartiest laugh by voicing what everyone in the audience is thinking: “That's a f---ing weird way to put it!”
THE INSTIGATORS
With all due respect to the city and its adjoining boroughs, is any American accent, at least on screen, more inherently entertaining than a Boston accent? (If only the dialect-free characters in the Boston-set It Ends with Us had realized this.) With those distinctive vowels and dropped “r”s that can make “F--- ya muthah!” sound like both the meanest and funniest of put-downs, you can generally have a decent time at any Bostonian-crammed movie no matter what's being said. Happily, in director Doug Liman's The Instigators, what's being said is already mighty amusing, and the chuckles are intensified by the regionally specific speech employed by leads Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (both Massachusetts natives), as well as by comparative posers Michael Stuhlbarg, Paul Walter Hauser, Ron Perlman, and the London-born Alfred Molina and Toby Jones. Even though Liman's film is hit-or-miss as a comedic crime caper, I could've listened to these guys natter away all day long.
Its script written by Affleck and Chuck Maclean (and with Damon and Casey's big brother Ben among its producers), The Instigators opens with a juicy hook. Boston's mayoral election is underway, and presuming that he knows who'll emerge victorious, Stuhlbarg's local crime boss Mr. Besegai orchestrates a scheme to rob the victory party for Perlman's incumbent mayor – a bash at which there'll be untold wads of “charitable donation” cash for the corrupt politician. One of Mr. Besegai's flunkies (effectively played by rapper Jack Harlow) recruits two locals willing to pull off the heist: Damon's Rory, an earnest, down-on-his-luck military vet with no prior criminal record, and Affleck's Cobby, a sardonic dirtbag with a court-mandated breathalizer on his motorcycle. Needless to say, and beginning with an underdog besting Perlman's mayor in the election, the robbery doesn't go according to plan. What I didn't see coming was the plan failing in the film's first 20 minutes.
From there, The Instigators morphs into a loose, rambling buddy comedy between characters who aren't – and, refreshingly, never will be – buddies, with Rory and Cobby forced to evade law enforcement and assorted hired goons while refusing, beyond common sense, to let go of their dream of a huge payoff. (One of the men on their tail is played by Ving Rhames, whose back-of-the-head arrival is reminiscent of Marsellus Wallace's in Pulp Fiction, but without the Band-Aid.) Consequently, Affleck's and Maclean's screenplay boasts a lot of balls in the air, and it's somewhat bothersome that so many of them don't fall so much as vanish. Stuhlbarg and Molina, as Mr. Besegai's assistant, exit the premises with about a third of the movie to go, their storyline arcs never close to completed. Hauser's crooked cop has barely been introduced before he, too, is ousted. The great André De Shields' salty tavern owner appears due for a climactic punchline that never comes. And despite The Instigators' realist bent, a number of conceits seem almost laughably impossible to buy. I suppose you can rationalize Hong Chau's psychiatrist being so concerned for Rory's mental health that she allows herself to be taken as a conspiratorial “hostage.” Yet was her med-school training really so extensive that she's wholly confident in removing a bullet from Cobby's shoulder? And would the FBI really allow her to play hostage negotiator, complete with helmet and flak jacket, for such presumably violent offenders?
If you think about Liman's film for more than a few minutes, practically its entire structure crumbles, and Damon appears strangely disconnected from his material, as if no one told him whether Rory was meant to be shrewd as hell or dumb as a box of rocks. (To be fair, his dialogue doesn't make it an easy guess.) Affleck, though, is mostly a low-key riot in Cobby's offhanded sarcasm and attempts to make Rory – or really anyone – laugh; Liman brings his action-flick elan to several chase sequences and unexpected encounters (Rory and Cobby are forever walking into rooms that they decidedly shouldn't enter); and the supporting case is a continual hoot even when their roles make little earthly sense. Plus, ya know, the accents. I knew precious little about The Instigators before entering the auditorium … and perhaps should've done some advance research, as I didn't realize the film began streaming on Apple+ the same day it debuted at Moline's newly opened VIP Cinemas. Still, it was nice to re-enter the under-new-management cineplex again, and Liman's latest, over a profanely breezy 90 minutes, is certainly worth the venue's admirably low ticket pricing. It's a wicked bahgain.
BORDERLANDS
Look, I get it. I get why Cate Blanchett agreed to headline director/co-writer Eli Roth's big-screen video game Borderlands – and for reasons beyond what Blanchett told Empire magazine was “COVID madness,” with filming completed more than three years ago. (It should be noted that principal photography on Roth's production ended even before its star began filming TÁR, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival in September of 2022.) Blanchett gets to shoot guns and operate a flamethrower and perform all sorts of physical stunts not required of her in The Aviator, Blue Jasmine, and all three Lord of the Rings. She gets to commandeer high-profile IP, and with a distinctive look: a shock of flamin'-hot red hair against her traditional raccoon-eyeliner makeup. She gets to use her lowest vocal register, which is pretty damned low, while muttering chestnuts such as “I'm gettin' too old for this shit” and “We're gonna need some wheels.” But the saddest thing about the Borderlands experience is how quickly you forget that Blanchett is even there – and she's there all the time.
You can't ignore Blanchett's intimidating presence and cheekbones, nor her natural authority. Yet given her increasing emotional remove from what's going on here, it's almost as though the actor is Jedi-mind-tricking us, and herself, into being forgotten. She provides everything this dipstick sci-fi action adventure requires, and Roth's film is no doubt immeasurably more engaging than it would've been had, say, Milla Jovovich assumed leading-lady duties as Lilith, the bounty hunter who returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter (Ariana Greenblatt's annoying, exhausting Tina) of the galaxy's ruthless ruler (Edgar Ramírez's Atlas … who isn't to be confused with the heartthrob Atlas in It Ends with Us). Blanchett is at least smart enough to know that we know she's slumming, and there's a certain degree of amusement, initially, in seeing the two-time Academy Award winner bathed in monster piss and sharing wisecracks with a motorized helpmate voiced by Jack Black. (As much as I wanted to loathe this mechanical chatterbox appropriately named ”Claptrap,” I gotta admit that Black's fawning/bitchy readings, every so often, did make me chuckle.)
Roth's film, though, also forces Blanchett to emote from time to time, and that's when it becomes clear that neither the star nor the supporting cast nor director is remotely invested in this picture's fate – and good for them. As co-written by “Joe Crombie” (apparently an alias for the non-credited Chernobyl writer/director Craig Mazin), Borderlands is an impenetrable mishmash of genre tropes and allusions to far better movies. There are insultingly direct lifts from, among many other injured parties, the Star Wars franchise, the Mad Maxes, and the Resident Evil series, and I'd argue that Borderlands' approximation of George Lucas' Cantina is, in itself, enough for a defamation lawsuit. (I'm leaving out the similarities to Denis Villeneuve's original Dune because, as with TÁR, this thing completed production before Dune was in theaters.) Blanchett, consequently, winds up looking like the sanest of the bunch for refusing to take any of this tripe seriously.
Of course, that's no help to an audience that, God help them, might want to take the film seriously. And even the most forgiving of genre fans might easily buckle at the film's staggeringly bad green-screen effects, as well as the monster appearances straight out of Ray Harryhausen (but without the charm) and the maniacal psychopaths that don't seem deranged so much as empty vessels there for the shootin'. When I wasn't occasionally yawning or giggling at Black's admirable too-much-ness, I'm pretty sure my expression throughout Borderlands was one of stunned, mouth-agape incredulity, and that's not considering the thorough waste of talent demonstrated in the casting of Ramírez, Kevin Hart, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis. All three, like Blanchett, will doubtless go on to better things. But while I was thrilled about Michelle Yeoh's Oscar victory for Everything Everywhere All at Once, and equally ecstatic that Curtis won Supporting Actress for the same film, a part of me is now wishing that TÁR's lead had won the Oscar instead. Imagine the bitchy kick it would be, now, if post-ceremony photos suggested Blanchett and Curtis whispering to one another: “Let's pray that Borderlands never gets released.”
