Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

This Labour day weekend might be your last chance for some thrills before school and work start up again. So this week I’m looking at three new American movies with lots of action. There’s a a gold-smuggling adventure in Oregon; a military showdown at a trailer park in New Mexico; and an FBI agent teamed with a mafia hitman in Mississippi.

The Weight

Dir: Padraic McKinley

It’s the Great Depression in Oregon. Murphy (Ethan Hawke) is the kind of guy who can take a car apart and put it back together again. He’s a single dad who puts his little daughter Penny front and centre. But when he can’t make the rent, and the two end up homeless, Murphy gets jumped by three hoods in a dark alley and ends up in jail… with no one left to take care for poor little Penny. Please don’t leave me, Daddy! But there’s nothing he can do. He’s dragged off to a hard labour camp, with no sign of release. He shares a shack with three other convicts: Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) a naive,  Scandinavian farmer with a wife and kids; Singh (Avi Nash), a south Asian socialist,  and Rankin (Austin Amelio) a card shark wannabe. Work is hard and relentless; splitting rocks on a mountain pass. But when Clancy the warden (Russell Crowe) offers a day off for any worker who can move an enormous boulder, Murphy steps up to bat. Using clever engineering, he sends the boulder rolling down the hill and all the guys get a day off.

But Murphy doesn’t want to rest; he wants to save his daughter. So Clancy makes another offer: you find me three strong men you trust and if the four of you complete a dangerous job, you’ll all be free men again. They’re dropped off at a goldmine, and told the job is to secretly carry heavy gold bricks over mountains, across rivers and through forests, all accompanied by armed guards, before the day private gold ownership becomes illegal in the USA. But they face unexpected obstacles and meet dangerous men along the way. Can Murphy and his buddies make it to the end of the trail alive? And will he ever see his daughter again?

The Weight is an exciting and fun adventure/thriller, a sort of a non-western western. (There’s even a possibly indigenous woman who joins their trek.) It’s exciting, scary and thrilling. Yes, the parts with Murphy’s daughter are needlessly smarmy and sentimental, but most of the film spins a good yarn. Hawke is great as Murphy, always ready with a new MacGyver hack to get them out of any predicament, and the rest of the characters all have their own backstories. And the Pacific Northwest scenery is truly stunning. 

The Weight is a good old-fashioned, watchable movie.

Onslaught

Co-Wri/Dir: Adam Wingard (The Guest)

Celeste (Adria Arjona) is a former army sniper who lives in Windy Oasis, a godforsaken trailer park in the New Mexico desert. She collects rent from her neighbours, like Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), an elderly vet, and Kovacks (Eric Wareheim) a grungy cop. Celeste is a veteran herself and suffers from PTSD — her trigger finger freezes up at all the wrong times. She and her ex-husband share custody of their adorable daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy). And like all her crazy neighbours she has a good gun collection. But what she doesn’t realize is, something sinister is happening at a nearby abandoned military base. That’s where Herr Doktor Kammler (Dan Stevens) is experimenting on dead GIs to create super soldiers. (Kammler is a fourth-generation legacy of Operation Paperclip which smuggled nazi scientists in the 40s so America could defeat the Soviets in the Cold War.

He still lives a nazi lifestyle, replete with kinky S&M fetishes. But something goes wrong and the three super soldiers — resurrected corpses with superhuman strength — revolt. Nicknamed The Butcher, The Cockroach and the Crybaby, these cyborgs launch a tsunami of blood and destruction wiping out the entire military base. They are programmed to kill! kill! kill!  and they carry lethal weapons, like chainsaws, cleavers and machine guns, to help them in their mission, until everyone they encounter is brutally murdered. And they’re heading toward the dusty trailer park. Only one mysterious government agent, known as Cyrus (Drew Starkey) seems to know about what’s going on… and he’s in no rush to stop it. But can Celeste, her precocious daughter, and a few of her neighbours defeat these three military behemoths?

Onslaught is an absurdly violent action thriller set in a rusty trailer park. It’s a soldier vs soldier battle. The music, titles and cinematography look straight out of a 1980s John Carpenter movie, while Celeste gradually morphs into a new Rambo, complete with bandana headband.  But don’t worry; the kooky characters and over-the-top violence render it less scary than it might have been.

If you’re a fan of non-stop, violent military kitsch, you’ll probably like Onslaught.

I did.

By Any Means

Dir: Elegance Bratton (The Inspection, Move Ya Body)

It’s 1966 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito) is a prominent civil rights leader and the head of a NAACP campaign to help black voters by countering the poll tax. But when he is murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, who burn a cross on his front lawn, the FBI sends in agents to catch his killers. But despite their efforts, they hit a brick wall. So, as a last resort, they put together an unusual pair of investigators: Special FBI Agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II: Candyman, Ambulance) and Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg: Flight Risk, Instant Family, Pain & Gain, Contraband, The Fighter, 2 Guns) a hitman for the Mob in Brooklyn. Up to now, Strider has had a routine job and never left his desk. As one of the only Black FBI agents, he plays it strictly by the book. He’s from Hattiesburg originally and knows everyone there (though he met his glamorous wife in Chicago). Then there’s his partner, Scarpa, a family guy who is quick to kill anyone in his way, and is an old pro at torturing people till they squeal. He’s good at what he does, and never leaves a trace. But can a strait-laced, Black detective and a professional hitman learn to work together? And can they catch the Klan bastards who murdered Dahmer?

By Any Means is a quasi-historical detective thriller about an odd couple. I think it’s emulating the success of Green Book with a black guy and an Italian guy in the Deep South in the 1960s. I like the tension between Abdul-Mateen and Wahlberg, and the fast moving plot. That makes for a not-bad action thriller, full of comical villains (the Klansman are all scruffy hillbillies).

But what rubs me the wrong is the absurd portrayal of the FBI and the Mafia as supporters of the civil rights movement. In this fantasy, Strider loves Martin Luther King while Scarpa prefers Malcolm X. And the two of them, with J Edgar Hoover’s blessing, are sent out to stop the white supremacists and save the Black activists. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Under Hoover, the Feds initiated COINTELPRO, a program specifically designed to surveil, infiltrate, harass and ultimately bring down pacifist groups like the NAACP and King’s SCLC; never mind Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam and eventually The Black Panther Party. (Ironically, Abdul-Mateen II played Bobby Seale, a Black Panther targeted by the FBI, in The Trial of the Chicago 7.) While the FBI did investigate the KKK, their main targets were Civil Rights and Black equality.

Feel free to enjoy this movie’s chase scenes and Mark Wahlberg’s prosthetic nose, but its revisionist history should never be taken at face value.

The Weight is opening in two weeks, and Onslaught and By Any Means both open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website  culturalmining.com