Watching Guardians of the Galaxy was a bit of a weird experience for me. For the first time in over ten years, a scene made my heart leap into my throat and I found myself thinking, "Man, I want one of those!" It was an arrow that an alien whistled at to control. With a tune more than a little similar to Ave Maria, he wastes a field of enemies in seconds. It's a movie made for twelve-year-olds, and I cannot stress this enough. I'm not saying this movie is targeted at twelve-year-olds, I'm saying that it is made for twelve-year-olds. The Goonies was made for twelve-year-olds, and the reason we can enjoy it just as much as the twelve-year-olds is because there's always a part of us that's still twelve. Marvel's Cinematic Universe was built on a risk. Not many people knew who Iron Man was before Iron Man. But nobody knows Guardians of the Galaxy. This was a make or break situation for the studio. Casual movie-goers who are sitting on the fence, starting to feel alienated by all of the, well, alien stuff happening in the over-arching narrative, are going to be swayed one way or the other by this movie. Then again, was it such a risk? Marvel approached Guardians of the Galaxy the same way they approached Iron Man: Get a good director, get good writers, get good actors and watch the money come in. James Gunn has done something special here, though, something that nobody has yet done. What I'm about to say, I do not say lightly: James Gunn has made The Goonies for this generation.
All superlatives aside, James Gunn was a weird choice for me. Not that I, like you, knew who the Guardians of the Galaxy were before this movie was announced. The announcement that it would be a humourous, slightly sarcastic and more importantly, fun, super hero flick was promising, but James Gunn? His two previous movies, Slither and Super, were very well made, but they, Super in particular, were cynical to the point of alienation at times. I was afraid his attitude would bleed into Guardians of the Galaxy and create a movie that thought having fun was making fun of the fun-lovers. I was wrong. The movie opens with a young Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) in a hospital, listening to a mixtape made for him by his mother, who is dying of cancer in the opposite room. She passes before he takes her hand. Later, Quill, now a galactic thief who prefers the name Star-Lord, has been arrested and sees a prison guard listening to his tape player. He confronts the guard, who's far more interested in Blue Swede's Hooked on a Feeling. Even without the opening scene as context, it's pretty clear that this item is something beyond dear to Star-Lord. In another movie, this would have been a moment of power for the protagonist. Here, the guard beats Star-Lord into the ground with an electric rod as Hooked on a Feeling bleeds into the soundtrack and we're walked through the prison in question, as inmates beat each other mercilessly, someone tearfully watches a video recording of her family on the outside and our so-called heroes continue to fail. It's the absolute perfect balance of sarcasm and sincerity.
Guardians of the Galaxy's other greatest strength is that, for a film with a gun toting raccoon, none of its characters become gimmicks. The gun-toting raccoon has some of the film's most emotionally heavy moments, in fact. What's the last super hero movie you can recall in which all five of its protagonists cry at least once? These characters are monumentally flawed. They murder without a second's hesitation. Star-Lord risks freezing to death in deep space to save the life of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), only to try and use it as a pick-up line seconds later. A scene that, traditionally, would feature the hero finding the right combination of words to stir his team to go once more unto the fray here turns into a negotiation session to try and stir his team into just "giving a shit." This is followed by the classic slow-motion hallway scene, in which the team walks to certain doom. But here, one is yawning, one's wiping his nose on his arm, the other is pulling at his crotch. It seems simple, but the key to good characters lies within their ability to be relatable. The reason most people can't get into Superman is because he's so far and away from who we are. Comics writer Grant Morrison had to give Superman mortality and a death clock before he became interesting. Even the villain of Guardians of the Galaxy, Ronan (Lee Pace), has more development than most. He stands in defiance of his superior to pursue his dreams of being a genocidal freak, and when he stands against Drax (Dave Bautista), who wants to see him dead for killing his family, he exudes menace with a personality. "I do not recall killing your family," he says as he pushes his boot into Drax's face. "And I damn well won't recall killing you." Star-Lord spends the whole film trying to get anybody to call him by the nickname his mother had for him, and when the man with the gun in front of him says, "It's Star-Lord", he beams and says, "Finally." It's not played for tears, but we feel moved anyway, because every facet of the film is tying back to characterisation. Hell, the talking tree man, Groot (Vin Diesel), who can only say, "I am Groot", ended up making me cry for the simple fact that the writers refused to not let anyone have their moment.
After the aforementioned opening scene of Guardians of the Galaxy, I was a little worried I was sitting down to another super hero movie that was going to take itself too seriously. Within less than two minutes, the film's over-sized title was splashed on the screen, while down at its last tenth, Star-Lord was dancing in an empty cavern to Redbone's Come and Get Your Love, and I knew I was watching something special. Like the movies Star-Lord would have grown up watching before being abducted into space, Guardians of the Galaxy uses sad scenes not to make you feel sad, but to make you feel more for the characters. Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) sits down at the end of a battle, puts his over-sized gun on the ground beside him and starts to cry. Drax the Destroyer sits beside him and pets him, something that takes Rocket by immediate surprise. It's clearly something that he's never experienced before. God, you couldn't stop my tears. But it's an event with an affectionate smile on its face. I was happy to cry. It doesn't quite escape the one problem inherent to the Marvel movies. Though each film introduces a different world-destroying object, with the overall aim of them coming together to make the Infinity Gauntlet for The Avengers 2, in movie speak, it means that every film has a token MacGuffin. They handle it the best way possible here, though. Tying into the film's prevalent cynicism, none of the protagonists give a shit. Star-Lord literally refers to it as the Maltese Falcon, and quasi-villain Yondu (Michael Rooker) starts speaking gibberish to get another character to stop talking when he tries to dump exposition on him. I imagine it would have been tempting to play it safe with Guardians of the Galaxy, to merely pepper the self-referential humour into it the same way Thor: The Dark World did. Instead, they latched onto it with full conviction, delivering a movie with five violent, cynical, morally-questionable jerks that it then asks us to fall in love with. But we do, because as Star-Lord says, "I may be an a-hole, but I'm not 100% a dick." It's also, verbose character analyses aside, a ridiculously entertaining good time at the movies. Marvel have been putting out quality films one after another, but they've finally made one that's going to be memorable. My inner twelve-year-old could not be happier. Go see it. See it twice.
How good it feels to watch a good movie. Watching Calvary made me realise how often I have to work to find something I enjoyed about a film. So many of my opinions start with "I enjoyed it, but..." or "There were some good qualities to it, but..." or "It was fucking balls." If you don't intend to finish reading this review, at least finish this sentence: Calvary is excellent and reminded me why I'm still desperately in love with this medium. I hesitate to use this phrase, because it sounds like a dopey marketing line, but there are three criteria for a film to wholly win me over: I want to cry, I want to laugh, and I want to think. I don't know about you, but that's why I go to the movies. Calvary opens with the line, "I first tasted semen when I was seven years old," spoken by an unseen man in a confessional booth to Brendan Gleeson's Father James Lavelle. It's a small collection of words that cuts deep with implication. Cue the tears. Father Lavelle pauses before replying, "Certainly a startling opening line," with just the right amount of suggestion that this movie might be aware that it's a movie. Cue the laughter. What follows is a recount of a five-year-long period of sexual abuse at the hands of a catholic priest, a priest who has since passed away. But this victim's thirst for vengeance hasn't gone away. "There's no point in killing a bad priest," he says. "I'm going to kill you because you're innocent." Because he wants to be heard, his story told, whatever the cost. Cue the thoughts. In five minutes, I got everything I search for. And merry fucking Christmas to me, there was still another 95 to go.
The Catholic church hasn't been the most popular of late. As more and more evidence of its countless covered-up incidents of child abuse has been revealed, the church has found itself at the ire of much of the world. I think one of the reasons I love Calvary so much is that it has the stones to stand bravely in front of the angry mob in defence. Father Lavelle theorises in one of the film's later scenes that people spend too much time focusing on sin, and not enough on virtues, going on to cite forgiveness as a particularly underrated quality, which stems from the film's central idea that spirituality and faith have never been the problem. Organisation of them has. Father Lavelle certainly isn't a perfect man. His daughter's attempted suicide stemmed from his abandonment of her following the death of his wife/her mother. During a conversation with a boy considering joining the army, he puts forth his belief that joining the army during peace time is psychopathic, and the action only of someone who wants to know what it's like to kill someone. Putting aside the fact that the boy is considering joining the army to quell his violent thoughts towards the women who reject him, this is a powerfully judgmental attitude for a man whose career is built upon leaving judgement to the big guy in the sky. But in the end, he's just another flawed human trying to do his best in a world that wants to see him suffer like it suffers. The film begins with him receiving the knowledge that he will be dead in seven days. He's pretty sure he knows who it was on the other side of the confessional booth, but that doesn't stop him from conducting his regular business of wandering through his small Northern Island community desperately trying to fix the broken lives surrounding him. And while these pathetic miscreants need his help, they refuse to show it. A pleasant conversation with a young girl is interrupted by her father, horrified that her daughter found herself alone with a priest. Because he's seen the news. He knows what every priest is up to. But it wasn't Father Lavelle who shipped priests out to the missions after they were caught touching children. It was the church. The same church that Father Lavelle goes to in order to seek guidance about his would-be assailant, that bogs him down in the politics and nuances on the confidentiality of a confessional. The same church that provides him with an assistant that understands nothing of the people in the community and strikes like a rattlesnake at the first sign of a rich man offering them money. In a drunken stupor, Father Lavelle asks him why he's even a priest. The next morning, his assistant is heading back to the city and says he didn't realise he hated him so much. "I don't hate you at all," he replies. "It's just you have no integrity. And that's the worst thing I could say about anybody." Notice he didn't say faith, or belief. Almost as if God, or what God represents, is what comes after you've sorted out becoming a decent human being.
The thing is, Father Lavelle never explicitly states during the film that he even still has faith in God. He could be forgiven for not. Calvary takes place in modern-day Ireland, a country in a deep financial crisis. The people Father Lavelle spends most of his time with are the people most affected by this recession: those that can't leave. It's through these people that we run a gamut of caricatures representative of an entire disenfranchised people. There's the married man who accepts and encourages his wife's unfaithfulness because it's the only way they can remain happy, who happily plays a game of chess with the man his wife is sleeping with. There's the atheist doctor who questions Father Lavelle's faith by telling him the story of one of his patients: a young girl whose surgery was botched, who woke up deaf, dumb, blind and paralysed - unable to scream, as he puts it. There's the American author who wants to kill himself before old age robs him of dignity. There's the homosexual rent boy who tries to make others uncomfortable to hide his own insecurities. There's the young man serving a life sentence in prison who is desperate for forgiveness not from remorse, but fear in what death brings. And so on. One of them is the aforementioned victim of sexual abuse with a gun in his hand, but in reality, they've all been raped by their country and the faceless ones that run it. Even the one person in the community that is able to leave isn't really able to escape. Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran) seems to be embroiled in the series of banking scandals that accompanies Ireland's financial woes, but he knows he's going to come through it relatively unscathed, because why wouldn't a rich man get off scot free? This prompts Father Lavelle to ask why he's bothered to call upon him if he doesn't feel guilty. "I don't feel guilty," Michael replies. "But I feel like I should. Same thing, isn't it?" And then he pisses on a priceless painting in front of Father Lavelle just to show that he can. That's a pretty good summary of his interactions with the people of his parish. They desperately want help, but they don't want to admit it. And the only person that can help them is a representative of a dying organisation that is just as sinful as everyone else. Father Lavelle sits in a bar, and the bartender casually says, "Your church is on fire." Everyone gathers at the flaming building, though not to show support or farewell their second home. They gather to watch a building burn and to see if this man has broken yet.
About halfway through Calvary, Father Lavelle is visiting the aforementioned young prison inmate, Freddie Joyce (Domhnall Gleeson), who speaks of the girl he cannibalised. "She said she'd been abused before. So I said, "Well, once more isn't going to make any difference, then."" It ran my blood cold. He says he becomes God when the light in their eyes goes out. "No, you don't," Father Lavelle replies. "No, you don't." Freddie follows this up with a beg for forgiveness. This fucking piece of shit wants forgiveness. But doesn't he, like all people, deserve at least the chance to say he's sorry, if he truly thinks he is? "God made me, didn't he? So he understands me. He must do. Don't you think?" Father Lavelle gives one of his few insights into his faith. "I think if God can't understand you, Freddie, no-one can." With procedural grace, Calvary concludes with the reveal of the man who wants to see Father Lavelle dead. It may come as a surprise to you. To me, he was representative of the entire community. Father Lavelle asks his assailant why he had to kill his dog, an act that stands out as particularly horrific in a film that wallows in the depths of humanity. The gunman is mortified. "Why would I kill a dog? I love dogs." And in that moment, utterly true ugliness is revealed. People will hypothesise the identity of the dog killer, but to me it doesn't matter. In the same way that this man is representative of the community, the killer of Father Lavelle's dog was all of them. And in the face of his death, he couldn't even attribute the loss of his companion to the result of a mentally-imbalanced sexual abuse victim. There was someone much more level-headed in the community who just wanted to see him suffer. Perhaps like they were suffering, perhaps not. But the movie isn't content to end there. The gunman asks if Father Lavelle cried for his dog. He replies, "Yes." The gunman asks if Father Lavelle cried for the children raped by the Catholic church. He replies, "No." And, if I'm being honest, neither did I. When the innumerable counts began to pour out, I recognised it as loathsome, I felt sick and disgusted towards an organisation abusing its power, and then I moved on. As did Father Lavelle. It took a gun being pointed in his face to take notice. But even then, what will this do? What will it achieve? Calvary is content not answering this question, or any of its questions. It brought them up. The rest is on us. So what do you believe?
We abuse the phrase, "Inspired by true events". A lick of similar events does not warrant marketing your film as more truth than fiction to the point that it needs proclamation of such. Do you know what the true events of The Conjuring were? A bed lifted a bit and a married pair of exorcists kicked the spooky ghosts out, a far cry from the dead dogs and demonic possession put behind the disclaimer of truth. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. Purporting your film to be grounded in truth is a surefire way to drive sales up, and The Conjuring was a fantastic horror flick that may not have been as successful otherwise. But you don't get one without the other, and "Inspired by true events" has also been slapped on Deliver Us From Evil to drive sales up, though not to expose quality, but to make bank on a bad movie. I'm a fan of writer-director Scott Derrickson. He's steadily built a career on offering different horror films. In 2005, he made The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which was as much a horror movie as it was a courtroom drama, and in 2012, he made Sinister, an overwhelmingly bleak ghost story with expertly-crafted scares and excellent use of Super 8 film footage. Deliver Us From Evil continues his trend, though only on paper. It promotes itself as a blend of procedural cop dramas and exorcism movies, which, to its credit, it is. It's also everything that is wrong with both.
Joel McHale is in Deliver Us From Evil. Anyone who's seen the TV show Community will immediately recognise him as its protagonist, Jeff Winger. For a show built upon the idea of breaking down and parodying genre, it's more than a little ironic that in Deliver Us From Evil, he plays the wise-cracking cop sidekick with a death clock above his head so straightfaced. Perhaps if the movie had at least a degree of self-awareness, it would have been digestible. But it approaches its watered-down stereotypes with such conviction in the hope that on premise alone, it's a success. Rather than build upon the strengths of its genres, it falls entirely on their tropes. Three soldiers read some Latin on a wall in Iraq and bring a demon back to New York, which proceeds to spread the word and murder some folk. Police officer Eric Bana is put on the investigation, and he just so happens to have lost his faith, so of course he doesn't believe in any of this "exorcist mumbo jumbo crap". You can see the end of the film as soon as it begins, and predictability is an instant killer in mystery and horror movies. The thing is, if it sought to examine or deconstruct the tropes inherent to these genres, it could have been great. But there's a scene in which Eric Bana goes to see one of the possessed, who's been locked in a jail cell marked "Crazy Person". She's clearly under the influence of something other than your run-of-the-mill heroins. Her eyes are not a human colour, her face makes scurvy look like a mild skin condition and she keeps drooling a thick, goopy, grey liquid. Her voice is not a human voice. There is something clearly and obviously not human about her. But Eric Bana is completely shocked when she flips out and bites a chunk out of his arm. When he's the only one noticing flash images of bleeding people and the sound of children laughing when he and his partner are viewing CCTV footage and he doesn't immediately assume something supernatural is afoot, it's all serving to make its reliance on stale genre all the more apparent.
It's not entirely without merit, however. The demon is a huge fan of The Doors, for one. It exclusively uses the lyrics and music of Jim Morrison and Co. to screw with Eric Bana, at times to genuinely unsettling effect, so if you find yourself wishing you were stubbing your toe on a corner repeatedly rather than watch this piece of trash, you can ease the pain a little with the knowledge that there's a good song just around the corner. Also, bizarrely, the third act of the movie is really good. And that's not by comparison. It's the one moment during the whole film that the merging of both genres is done to good effect. The main possessed man spends most of the film possessing others, wearing hoodies and taunting Eric Bana's daughter by scratching her floorboards. And then a traditional haunted house scene of objects acting independently is punctuated with a home invasion and kidnapping. This is followed by a scene in which the spooky dude is standing ready and waiting in Eric Bana's home, making delicious dark threats. His body is covered in phrases and symbols scratched into his skin. And Eric Bana finally realises that in his disbelief, he is powerless, and he lashes out violently. Something snapped in my head and I realised I was enjoying it. This is followed by the film's climax: a step-by-step, true to life walkthrough of an exorcism that mirrors a cop drama's interrogation scene. The exorcist explains all of the different stages they will go through, and they proceed to do just that. He taunts the demon, the demon taunts back, it gets violent, he gets the demon's name and with that, expulsion. In the same way that a cop and his suspect trade veiled threats that escalate to violence, until the cop gets his information - the name of a demon, in this case. And then the movie ends. It's not often that a film's last third redeems its first two, and it certainly doesn't here, but if you make the mistake of sitting down to this cinematic turd, rest assured you can wake up in the last half hour.
All of this is to say if you can even be bothered to sit down to it in the first place. Don't mistake my praise for an overall statement of enjoyment. I did not enjoy Deliver Us From Evil. It's the worst thing you can say about a film: it's boring. Films regularly take dull topics and present them in a way that defies our preconceived notions and alters our perceptions. Deliver Us From Evil doesn't care enough about you to even try. It's a cop drama that forgot to include a mystery. It's a horror movie that forgot to include scares. Or maybe it's choosing not to, in the hopes that its defying genre to blaze a new trail. But its not pulling from what makes genre effective. Scenes begin to generate classic horror movie tension only to punctuate them with a dull cop cliche. Take the aforementioned home invasion scene: Eric Bana's daughter is awoken by scratching on the ground. Her toy owl begins to roll across the floor on its own, occasionally stopping to stare at her and hoot. The door slams shut. This should be building to something other than a jerk in a hoodie standing in a hallway. They don't even bother to put a loud noise on the soundtrack to at least get a jolt from the audience. Because Law & Order wouldn't. But Law & Order isn't about fucking demons. When the end of a so-called horror film's second act is a knife fight in a stairwell between a muscled-up douchebag and a red-eyed monster man, that's the cue to vow never to watch an "Inspired by true events" horror movie again, get up, walk out and salvage what's left of your Sunday afternoon with something a little less moronic. It's what Eric Bana would want you to do.
