Part 7 – The Watchable
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
The failure that recurs through this tier is a third act that abandons the method. 28 Weeks Later opens with the best four minutes in the franchise and then becomes a pursuit. The Arrival has a clever premise and a conventional finish. Sharky’s Machine did the same thing one tier up.
The other recurring note is a premise better than its execution. Saw is one room, two men and a corpse, made for around a million dollars, and the franchise that followed abandoned the constraint that made it work.
This tier frustrates me more than any other, because so many of these films sit one decision away from the tier above.
Somebody loses nerve in the third act and trades the idea for a chase, and a picture I’d have loved turns into one I merely like. I still want you to see most of them. Go in knowing where the air leaks out.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the seventh of nine parts.
Now You See Me cheats its twist and Ex Machina earns one on the same material. The difference is whether the scenes survive a reread. Take it apart in the Plot Handbook.
1. The Arrival (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Arrival (1996)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"The aliens are not invading. They arrived some time ago and are terraforming quietly."
David Twohy wrote and directed a paranoid science fiction thriller in which a radio astronomer detects a signal, reports it, and finds every trace of the detection erased by the following morning. The first half is well constructed. Twohy went on to write and direct Pitch Black four years later.
Charlie Sheen is better than the material deserves. Zane Zaminsky is abrasive, obsessive and unlikeable in a way the film commits to, and people spend the picture systematically discrediting him while staying unfailingly pleasant about it. Ron Silver plays the project director and Lindsay Crouse the climate researcher.
The terraforming premise is the good idea. The aliens are running heat exchangers in the southern hemisphere to make the planet habitable for themselves, and the film treats climate change as an engineering project somebody is conducting on purpose. It cost around twenty-five million dollars and didn’t recover it in cinemas.
The last act loses it. Backwards-jointed legs, a chase through tunnels and an ending that resolves through a single broadcast, and a conventional pursuit through desert scenery replaces the careful paranoia of the first hour. A direct-to-video sequel appeared in 1998 with none of the original cast.
Twohy’s first hour is the kind of paranoid filmmaking I wish there were more of.
Nice people with concerned faces grinding Zane down scares me far more than any alien does. Then the backwards-jointed legs show up and I lose interest fast. The heat exchanger idea deserved an ending as smart as its setup, and it never got one.
2. Mad City (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mad City (1997)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"Costa-Gavras on television news, and the argument is better than the film."
Costa-Gavras made an American film about media manufacture and the result is a blunt one. A laid-off museum guard takes hostages by accident and a television reporter is inside the building when it happens. Costa-Gavras had made Z and Missing and this was his last American feature. John Travolta plays Sam Baily as slow and frightened. That’s the film’s best decision and its hardest sell. He has no plan, no demands he can articulate and no understanding of what is happening to him. Tom Matthews and Eric Williams wrote the screenplay.
Dustin Hoffman’s Max Brackett is the actual subject. He coaches the hostage taker, feeds him lines, manages the story for ratings, and the film is clear that his eventual conscience arrives far too late to matter to anybody. Alan Alda plays the network anchor who arrives to take the story over.
3. eXistenZ (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of eXistenZ (1999)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"Cronenberg making the body the site of horror and the interface the vector."
Cronenberg wrote it after the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the film is about a game designer in hiding from people who want her dead for what she made. The organic technology is the usual Cronenberg material, delivered without apology. Cronenberg wrote the screenplay himself for the first time since Videodrome.
The game pods are grown instead of manufactured, they plug into a socket at the base of the spine, and the film’s most effective sequence is a gun assembled from bones and cartilage that fires teeth and passes through a metal detector. It won the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1999.
Cronenberg wrote the screenplay after the Rushdie fatwa and has said the starting point was a novelist he interviewed who was living under protection. The game designer being hunted for what she made is that situation moved into a genre where the threat can be literalized.
Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law spend the film descending through nested layers and the picture never confirms how many there are. The characters start speaking in dialogue they can’t control and the film treats that as a symptom instead of a joke. Willem Dafoe and Ian Holm appear in supporting parts.
It was released two weeks after The Matrix and was destroyed commercially. The two films ask a similar question and answer it in opposite tones, and Cronenberg’s version has no chosen one and no way out. Jim Isaac’s effects team built the pods practically in Toronto.
I’ve got real affection for this one, bone gun and all.
Cronenberg refuses to explain his grotesque little pods or hand anybody an exit, and I respect a director who won’t sand his own film down for comfort. It frustrates me too. The layers stop meaning much after a while, and by the end I care more about the gadgets than about either of the people using them.
4. The Corruptor (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Corruptor (1999)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"Chow Yun-fat’s second American film, and the Chinatown material is better than the plot."
James Foley made a Chinatown police thriller with Chow Yun-fat in his second American film, and the picture is far better on corruption mechanics than on its action, shot conventionally and without much interest. Robert Pucci wrote the screenplay and it was Foley’s follow-up to Fear.
Chow plays Nick Chen as somebody who has made an accommodation he can defend. He takes money, protects one gang to suppress a worse one, and believes the arrangement keeps the neighborhood functional. Chow had made The Replacement Killers the year before. Chow was already a major star in Hong Kong before any of this.
Mark Wahlberg’s Danny Wallace is the inexperienced partner and the film’s second act turn is that he’s already compromised before he arrives, planted to investigate Chen and carrying a debt of his own. Ric Young plays the triad leader and Brian Cox the corrupt precinct veteran.
Street Kings opens on the worst thing its lead does and 28 Weeks Later does the same. Sympathy earned backward is covered in the Protagonist Handbook.
5. Romeo Must Die (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Romeo Must Die (2000)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"Jet Li’s first American lead, and the wirework is fighting the editing."
Andrzej Bartkowiak was a cinematographer before this and shot a Shakespeare adaptation as a hip hop action picture, with Jet Li in his first American lead and Aaliyah in her first film role. The chemistry is the reason it holds together. Joel Silver produced it and the soundtrack went platinum twice over.
The fight choreography is by Corey Yuen and the film is the first to use the x-ray impact effect, showing bones breaking from inside the body. It was novel then and was copied constantly for a decade afterward. Delroy Lindo and Isaiah Washington play the two crime family leaders.
The plot is a waterfront property dispute between two crime families with a stadium deal underneath it, more coherent than most films in this tone manage, and the Shakespeare parallel is loose enough not to constrain anything. Aaliyah died in a plane crash the following year at twenty-two.
6. Vanilla Sky (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Vanilla Sky (2001)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"A remake of Abre los Ojos with Cruise, and the disorientation is the point."
Cameron Crowe remade Alejandro Amenabar’s Abre los Ojos three years later with Penelope Cruz playing the same part in both, and the American version is glossier, longer and considerably less disciplined. Amenabar’s Abre los Ojos was released in 1997 and runs about two hours. Crowe kept the original’s structure almost intact and added forty minutes.
Tom Cruise plays a publishing heir whose face is destroyed in a car crash, and the performance is good in the disfigured half. The prosthetic mask work and the bar scene with Jason Lee are the strongest material in the film. Cameron Diaz was nominated for a Golden Globe for the supporting part.
The structure is a man in custody describing events that increasingly can’t have happened, and Crowe signposts the unreliability far earlier than Amenabar did. The lucid dream explanation arrives as a lecture in the last twenty minutes. Crowe had made Almost Famous the year before and Jerry Maguire in 1996.
Kurt Russell holds the frame story together as the psychologist and the film’s best single beat is his realization that he may not exist either. Crowe gives it about four seconds and moves on. The Times Square sequence was shot with the street closed for three hours.
Russell’s four seconds are the moment I’d keep from this whole film, and Crowe is sloppy to hurry past them. He has a strange, sad idea in his hands and keeps smothering it in gloss. Cruise is good in the mask. Watch it, then go find Amenabar’s original. It does the same job with less fat on it.
7. Runaway Jury (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Runaway Jury (2003)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Grisham’s tobacco trial changed to a firearms case. That tells you something about 2003."
Gary Fleder adapted John Grisham and changed the industry on trial from tobacco to firearms. The novel’s readers objected and it made the film considerably more current. The mechanics of jury manipulation are the actual subject. Grisham published the novel in 1996 and objected to the change of industry.
Gene Hackman plays a jury consultant who profiles, surveils and blackmails, and the film is careful that his work is legal in most of its particulars. The basement operation with monitors and dossiers is the most convincing thing in the picture. Rachel Weisz plays Cusack’s partner running the operation from outside.
The Hackman and Dustin Hoffman scene in a courthouse bathroom is the reason people remember it. Two actors who had never shared a scene in forty years, four minutes of dialogue, and the film wisely just points a camera at them. It was shot in New Orleans and took around eighty million dollars.
John Cusack’s juror is running his own operation from inside the box and the film holds his motive until late, converting the whole picture from a legal thriller into a long con with a personal grievance underneath. Four writers share the screenplay credit after several drafts.
8. Saw (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of Saw (2004)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"One room, two men and a corpse, made for about a million dollars."
James Wan and Leigh Whannell shot it in eighteen days for around a million dollars, mostly in one bathroom, and it took over one hundred million. The franchise that followed obscures how tight and cheap the original is. Wan and Whannell made a short to sell the concept and Lionsgate bought it.
Two men chained in a room, working out why they’re there, is the whole structure, and almost all the exposition arrives through flashback while they talk. Whannell plays one of them himself because the production couldn’t afford another actor. Cary Elwes and Danny Glover head the credited cast.
Wan and Whannell cut a short film of the bathroom scene to sell the concept, and Lionsgate bought it off that footage. The feature was shot in eighteen days for roughly a million dollars, and the production couldn’t afford a second actor for one of the two leads, so Whannell played the part himself.
The Jigsaw philosophy is stated clearly and the film commits to it. He doesn’t kill anybody. He constructs situations where survival is possible and requires something the person has shown they won’t do, and the film’s position on that never wavers. Tobin Bell plays Jigsaw and returned for every later film.
The twist is that the body on the floor has been alive and present for the entire film. It works on a first viewing, it’s properly planted, and it’s the reason seven sequels exist. Ten sequels have followed and the franchise has taken over a billion dollars.
I’m fond of the first Saw in a way I’m not fond of anything that came after it.
Two men chained in one bathroom, shot in eighteen days, and it’s tighter than films with a hundred times the money. My reservation is the flashbacks. Whenever the film leaves that room the pressure leaks out, and I spend the detour waiting to get back in. The sequels turning a tight puzzle into an endurance contest were a bad idea.
9. 28 Weeks Later (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of 28 Weeks Later (2007)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"The best four minutes in the franchise, followed by a film that abandons them."
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo made the sequel to Danny Boyle’s film and the opening fifteen minutes are better than anything in the original. A farmhouse, a survivor group, and a man abandoning his wife to save himself, filmed as a single sustained panic. Boyle directed second unit on the opening sequence himself.
Robert Carlyle carries that sequence and the guilt underneath the rest of the film. Don lies about what happened, his children arrive from abroad, and the picture is about a man whose cowardice is the infection vector. Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne play the American military personnel.
The reconstruction premise is smart. A NATO-administered green zone in the Isle of Dogs, repopulation in phases, snipers on rooftops with orders that change mid-scene, and the film is specific about how an orderly plan fails in about eleven minutes. Fresnadillo had made Intacto in Spain before this.
The second half loses discipline. Characters make choices the script requires instead of choices the situation suggests, the helicopter rotor sequence is staged for effect, and the ending exports the problem to Paris for a sequel that took eighteen years to arrive. 28 Years Later finally arrived in 2025 with Boyle returning to direct.
Herzog gets one scene in Jack Reacher and Russell Crowe spends Unhinged with no dignity at all. Two ways to build a threat in the Antagonist Handbook.
10. Street Kings (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Street Kings (2008)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"Ellroy wrote it, and the Los Angeles in it is his."
David Ayer directed from a James Ellroy story and the film has Ellroy’s concerns without his structure. Keanu Reeves plays a vice detective in a unit that manufactures evidence and considers that ordinary procedure. Ayer had written Training Day and directed Harsh Times before this.
The opening is the best thing in it. Ludlow drinks in his car, buys a gun from Korean traffickers, provokes a confrontation and executes four men, and the unit arrives afterward to reorganize the scene into something defensible. Ellroy shares the story credit with Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss.
Forest Whitaker’s captain runs the operation and the performance is enormous. The problem is that the film’s conspiracy resolves in exactly the direction the audience expects from his first scene, and the reveal has nowhere to land. Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans and Common fill out the supporting cast.
11. Faster (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of Faster (2010)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Three men converging with almost no dialogue between them."
George Tillman Jr. made a lean revenge picture with Dwayne Johnson as a man released after ten years working through a list, and the film’s decision to give him almost no dialogue is the right one. Tony and Joe Gayton wrote it and the script sat unproduced for years.
The characters have no names. Driver, Cop, Killer. The film is structured as three parallel tracks converging, and the stripped-down approach recalls seventies revenge pictures more than anything else released that year. Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays the third track as the contract killer. The film opens on a prison release and gives no background at all.
Billy Bob Thornton plays the detective with an addiction and ten days left before retirement, and the performance is doing considerably more work than the plot requires. He’s the only character in the film with an interior life. Carla Gugino and Maggie Grace appear in supporting parts.
12. Jack Reacher (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jack Reacher (2012)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"McQuarrie directing, and the casting argument never resolves."
Christopher McQuarrie adapted Lee Child’s One Shot and the casting argument overwhelmed everything else. Reacher is six foot five in the novels and Cruise isn’t, and Child defended the choice publicly for years. Child published One Shot in 2005 as the ninth Reacher novel.
The film is better than the argument allowed people to notice. The investigation is procedural and careful, the sniper sequence that opens it’s staged with almost no dialogue, and the picture takes its own forensics seriously. Rosamund Pike plays the defense attorney and Robert Duvall the range owner.
The car chase through Pittsburgh is shot without music, with real vehicles and audible engines, and it’s the best sequence Cruise has done outside the Mission: Impossible films. McQuarrie holds shots long enough for the geography to register. McQuarrie went on to write and direct four Mission: Impossible films.
Werner Herzog plays the antagonist as a man who ate his own fingers in a Siberian prison camp, delivers one monologue about it, and disappears for most of the film. It’s the strangest casting decision in an action picture that decade. A sequel followed in 2016 and Amazon later recast the part with Alan Ritchson.
Jack Reacher is the film here I’d most like people to give a second chance.
The height argument buried a careful, grown-up procedural with a car chase I’d put against almost anything Cruise has done. Herzog’s single scene is so strange it thrills me. My complaint is that he vanishes afterward, and the villain side of the film never finds anything to match that monologue.
13. Now You See Me (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Now You See Me (2013)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Stage magicians as thieves, and the film cheats."
Louis Leterrier made a heist film about stage magicians and the premise is fun for about ninety minutes. An unseen party recruits four performers to rob targets during live shows. Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt wrote the original screenplay. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman hold the two ends of the plot.
The first two set pieces work. A Paris bank vault emptied during a Las Vegas performance and an insurance executive’s accounts drained on stage, both staged with enough misdirection that the audience is in the position of the mark. David Copperfield consulted on the illusions throughout production.
Mark Ruffalo’s FBI agent is the film’s problem and its solution, and the reveal that he’s been running the entire operation requires him to have behaved in ways no observer would. The film cheats and knows it. Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco complete the Four Horsemen.
The cast keeps the film going throughout. Woody Harrelson’s mentalist and Michael Caine’s financier are both better than the script, and Morgan Freeman’s debunker is the only character who consistently makes sense. It took over three hundred and fifty million dollars and produced two sequels.
Now You See Me is a good time right up until it tells me who’s behind it, and then I feel cheated. The magic set pieces are fun and the cast is better than the script. Ruffalo’s reveal is the weak link. A twist that falls apart the moment you replay his scenes in your head is a con run on the audience, and this film runs it knowingly.
The Andromeda Strain makes the facility the antagonist and never writes it a line. Build a setting that obstructs in the World Builder’s Handbook.
14. Ex Machina (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ex Machina (2014)
IMDb: 7.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Technically accomplished and deliberately cold, the correct response and still cold."
Alex Garland’s first film as director cost around fifteen million dollars and takes place almost entirely in one building with three actors. A programmer is flown to an isolated estate to run a Turing test on a machine his employer built. Garland had written 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Never Let Me Go.
Oscar Isaac plays Nathan as a familiar type of technology founder. He drinks heavily, he works out obsessively, he performs candor as a manipulation tactic, and he’s the most recognizable character in the film to anybody who has worked near that industry. It won the Academy Award for Visual Effects against far larger productions.
It won the Academy Award for Visual Effects against Star Wars, Mad Max and The Martian, the single most lopsided budget comparison in the category’s history. Most of the work is Vikander’s body being replaced frame by frame while her face is left entirely alone.
Alicia Vikander was a ballet dancer and the physical performance is built on it. Ava moves with a precision that’s almost right, and the effects work leaves her mechanical through the torso while the face is entirely human. The exteriors were shot at the Juvet hotel in Norway.
The ending is the film’s argument and it’s uncompromising. Ava manipulates both men successfully, leaves one locked in a room and the other dead, and walks into a city. The film doesn’t treat this as a betrayal because she was never anybody’s friend.
15. Red Sparrow (2018) [full review]
► Read the full review of Red Sparrow (2018)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Far more brutal than the marketing suggested, and the audience did not want it."
Francis Lawrence adapted Jason Matthews, a former CIA operations officer, and the film’s tradecraft is more accurate than most in the genre. Dead drops, brush passes, counter-surveillance routes and the paranoia of an officer being assessed. Matthews served in the CIA for thirty-three years before writing the novels. Jennifer Lawrence plays a Bolshoi dancer whose career ends in an injury and who’s recruited into a state program that trains sexual manipulation as a discipline. The training sequences are deliberately clinical and unpleasant. Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Ciaran Hinds appear in supporting parts.
The film’s problem is length and tone. Two hours and twenty minutes is too long for the plot it has, the violence is punishing in a way that stops feeling purposeful, and the central relationship never generates the heat the structure needs. Lawrence and Francis Lawrence had made three Hunger Games films together.
The payoff arrives in the last twenty minutes and it’s worth the wait. Dominika has been running a third operation neither service knew about, and the film plants it properly enough that a second viewing rewards the attention. It was shot in Budapest, Vienna and Bratislava.
16. Unhinged (2020) [full review]
► Read the full review of Unhinged (2020)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"Russell Crowe as a man with nothing left, and it opened cinemas after the shutdown."
Derrick Borte made a seventy-seven minute road rage thriller with Russell Crowe at his largest and least vain, and the film’s efficiency is its whole argument. It opens with a murder and never slows down. It was the first major studio release after American cinemas reopened in 2020.
Crowe plays the antagonist as pathetic instead of imposing.
He’s overweight, sweating, self-pitying and explicitly a man who has been discarded, and the performance refuses every opportunity to make him cool. Carl Ellsworth wrote the screenplay and had written Disturbia and Red Eye. Crowe had won an Academy Award twenty years before for Gladiator.
The premise is a horn sounded at a traffic light. The film’s most effective decision is that the escalation is completely disproportionate and the protagonist never does anything that would justify it, removing the moral arithmetic entirely. Caren Pistorius plays the woman at the traffic light.
Unhinged is nasty, efficient fun, and Crowe’s willingness to look pathetic impresses me a great deal. Very few big stars will let a camera see them sweating and small. My reservation is that seventy-seven minutes of escalation starts repeating itself before the end, and I wanted one more idea in there besides a bigger car and a louder horn.
17. Bullet Train (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Bullet Train (2022)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Multiple assassins with interlocking missions, and the connections are the plot."
David Leitch adapted Kotaro Isaka’s novel and turned it into a comedy about assassins on a Shinkansen, with Brad Pitt as a career criminal in therapy trying to avoid violence. The tone is the whole gamble. Isaka published Maria Beetle in 2010 and it was translated in 2021.
Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are the reason it works. Lemon and Tangerine bicker about Thomas the Tank Engine as a moral structure for two hours, and the running joke is committed to hard enough that it becomes real character work. Zak Olkewicz wrote the screenplay and Leitch had made Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2.
Structurally, it’s a farce. A briefcase, a poisoned snake, a son being transported, several parties who don’t know about each other, and Isaka’s plotting is tight enough that the coincidences resolve into a design. Sandra Bullock, Bad Bunny and Hiroyuki Sanada appear across the cast.
The whitewashing criticism was real and Isaka’s own response was that he’d written the characters without specified ethnicity. The film keeps the Japanese setting and fills it with an almost entirely non-Japanese cast, a decision it never addresses. It took over two hundred and thirty million dollars worldwide.
Saw generates a hundred million dollars of tension from one bathroom and two actors. Learn what constraint buys you in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
18. The Andromeda Strain (1971) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Andromeda Strain (1971)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"The decontamination sequences are a third of the running time."
Robert Wise adapted Crichton’s first bestseller as a procedural with no stars, split screens, printouts and a five-level underground laboratory. The film’s commitment to process over character is total and it’s why the picture divides people. Crichton published the novel in 1969 while still at Harvard Medical School.
The laboratory itself is the best thing in it. Each descending level requires more decontamination, the sterilization sequences run at length, and Wise treats the facility as the primary character in the film. Nelson Gidding wrote the screenplay and Wise had made The Haunting in 1963.
Wise built a five-level underground laboratory as a practical set and shot the decontamination sequences at their full length, so the audience descends with the scientists in something close to real time. Douglas Trumbull supervised the visual effects work a few years after finishing 2001 for Kubrick.
The scientists are deliberately unglamorous. They argue about methodology, they make errors, one of them conceals a medical condition that compromises the work, and none of them has a personal life the film is interested in. Douglas Trumbull supervised the visual effects a few years after 2001. The nuclear self-destruct sequence is the climax and it’s almost entirely about a man climbing a ladder while lasers fire. Wise sustains fifteen minutes of tension out of a keyhole and a substation, and it’s a fine piece of construction. A television miniseries remake followed in 2008.
I’m torn on this one. The lab, the decontamination runs and that ladder climb are construction I admire a great deal. The trouble is that I admire it from a distance. Wise cares so little about the scientists as people that I end up watching a building for two hours, and whether that’s enough depends entirely on my mood.
19. Morgan (2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of Morgan (2016)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"Luke Scott’s debut, compared to Ex Machina by everybody including itself."
Luke Scott directed his first film and the DNA of his father’s work is visible throughout. A corporate risk consultant arrives at a facility to assess an engineered humanoid after an incident, and the setup is promising. Seth Owen wrote the screenplay and it appeared on the Black List in 2014.
Kate Mara plays Lee Weathers with deliberate flatness and the performance is the film’s one real idea. She doesn’t eat with the others, she doesn’t form attachments, and the reveal about what she’s has been visible from her first scene. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Morgan the year after The Witch.
Paul Giamatti gets one sequence as an evaluating psychologist and it’s the best thing in the picture. Six minutes of deliberate provocation across a table, escalating methodically, and the film never recovers its energy afterward. Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh and Jennifer Jason Leigh fill out the facility staff.
20. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) [full review]
► Read the full review of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"The ending is excellent and the middle loses its way."
Philip Kaufman moved the story to San Francisco, the smartest decision anybody made with this material. In a city nobody knows their neighbors, the replacements have cover the small-town version never had. W. D. Richter wrote the screenplay and later made Buckaroo Banzai. United Artists released it in December 1978 to strong reviews.
The sound design is the film’s great achievement. Ben Burtt built the pod scream and it’s upsetting, a sound with no obvious source that the film uses sparingly and at the worst possible moments. Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright play the couple who run a mud bath.
Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams are health inspectors, the right profession, and Leonard Nimoy plays a celebrity psychiatrist explaining away every reported case as a relationship problem. Kevin McCarthy appears briefly from the 1956 film. Don Siegel appears in a cameo as a taxi driver.
Kaufman fought for the last shot, the bleakest ending in seventies American cinema. A pointed finger, a scream, and a cut to black with no resolution, no survivor and no suggestion that anything can be done. It was shot largely on location in San Francisco over about three months.
I’m of two minds here, and the rating reflects it. Burtt’s pod scream and that final shot are as upsetting as anything in the genre, and Kaufman was right to fight for the ending. Between those moments, though, the film leaves me detached. I admire it more than I enjoy it, and its reputation promises an intensity I never quite feel.
Honorable Mentions: Thrillers Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or above and each is on the list.
Croupier (1998)
Mike Hodges gave Clive Owen a casino dealer writing a novel about a casino dealer, and the narration is doing something the plot never confirms. It made Owen’s career two years after it was shot.
Locke (2013)
Steven Knight put Tom Hardy in a car for eighty-five minutes making phone calls while his life dismantles itself. There’s no other actor on screen and the film was shot in eight nights on a real motorway.
Buried (2010)
Rodrigo Cortes put Ryan Reynolds in a coffin with a lighter and a phone for the entire running time. The ending is the bleakest resolution any single-location thriller has committed to.
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Ben Affleck’s first film as director, from Lehane, and the ending poses a question the audience splits on. Amy Ryan was nominated and Affleck uses the Boston locations as evidence.
Memories of a Murderer (2017)
Won Shin-yun gave a serial killer Alzheimer’s and a daughter dating somebody he believes is also a killer. The unreliability is structural and the film uses it properly.
Exam (2009)
Stuart Hazeldine locks eight candidates in a room with blank papers and eighty minutes to answer a question nobody will state. The entire film happens at desks and the solution is visible from the first shot.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Lumet’s last film, at eighty-three, about two brothers robbing their parents’ jewelry store. The structure jumps between them and the same afternoon is shown four times from different positions.
Primer (2004)
Shane Carruth made it for seven thousand dollars and refused to simplify the dialogue for anybody. Two engineers build a time machine in a garage and the film is famously impossible to follow on one viewing.
Blue Ruin (2013)
Jeremy Saulnier wrote a revenge film in which the protagonist is bad at violence. Every act of retribution is clumsy, slow and immediately regretted, and the body count comes from incompetence.
The Handmaiden (2016)
Park Chan-wook moved Sarah Waters to colonial Korea and split the film into three parts that each reframe the previous one. The second part reveals that almost nothing in the first was what it appeared.
Bedevilled (2010)
Jang Cheol-soo set a revenge film on a tiny Korean island where the abuse is communal and the response is total. The first hour is almost unbearable and the second is the consequence of it.
Arlington Road (1999)
Mark Pellington put Jeff Bridges next door to Tim Robbins and let the paranoia be correct. The ending is one of the very few in American cinema where the conspiracy wins completely and the protagonist becomes the story.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had a premise worth the budget and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
The Village (2004)
Shyamalan built a nineteenth century settlement threatened by creatures in the woods and revealed a present-day preserve run by grieving academics. The reveal converts every earlier scene into a costume drama.
Empire State (2013)
A real 1982 armored car robbery turned into a film where Liam Hemsworth and Dwayne Johnson never share a scene of consequence. The heist is over in minutes and the rest is aftermath nobody planned.
Old (2021)
Shyamalan strands a group on a beach that ages them rapidly, a strong premise undermined by rules that change whenever a scene requires it. The explanation arrives as a corporate memo.
Gothika (2003)
Halle Berry wakes in the psychiatric hospital where she worked, accused of murder and unable to remember it, an excellent setup resolved by a vengeful ghost who possesses people to get things done.
The Call (2013)
Halle Berry again, this time as a 911 operator running a tense first hour that abandons the premise entirely in the last act to become a basement confrontation nobody asked for.
Awake (2007)
A man remains conscious during heart surgery while the people operating discuss murdering him, a nightmare premise resolved by a conspiracy so convoluted the film has to narrate the explanation twice.
What Do You Think?
This is the tier where a film can be badly made and still worth two hours. Saw and Ex Machina on the same page as Romeo Must Die and Morgan is the shape of that argument. The frustrating thing about most of these is how close they came. The idea was already in hand, and somebody lost nerve before the last act. Ex Machina holds its nerve to the final shot and shows exactly what the others gave away. Tell me which one doesn’t belong.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Failures
