Friday reviews: 1 September 2023

The Equalizer 3, Haunted Mansion, Past Lives and Scrapper are all in cinemas now

Not nor­mally a fran­chise kind of guy, in The Equalizer 3 Denzel Washington returns to the char­ac­ter of Robert McCall, who he first por­trayed nearly ten years ago (and then again in 2018). He also reunites with styl­ish jour­ney­man dir­ect­or Antoine Fuqua, a col­lab­or­a­tion that won Washington an Oscar for Training Day in 2002.

McCall is ex-CIA, a killing machine with a hyper-alert sense of justice but maybe his best days are behind him. In a moment of weak­ness, after a suc­cess­ful mis­sion equal­ising things in a Sicilian vine­yard, he’s injured and can only make it as far as the pic­tur­esque sea­side town of Altamonte1 where the loc­al doc­tor decides his bul­let wounds are the kind a good man gets and brings him back to health.

During his recu­per­a­tion, McCall falls for the pretty little town and its salt-of-the-earth inhab­it­ants but is alarmed to dis­cov­er that it is under the thumb of the bru­tal loc­al Camorra (or ‘Mafia’ as the doc­tor insists on explain­ing to us).

So, we have a clas­sic Western scen­ario where the age­ing gun­slinger who just wants a quiet life, is forced out retire­ment to deal with the bad guys one last time.

If you are expect­ing wall-to-wall action, this film will dis­ap­point. It spends a good deal of time on McCall’s recov­ery and the slow build up to the inev­it­able final one-sided con­front­a­tion. I pre­ferred it this way. It gives us plenty of Washington’s cha­risma and makes it really clear what he now has to lose.

Unlike, say Eastwood in Unforgiven, Washington’s McCall is not tor­men­ted by all the killing, in fact the film makes clear that the bad guys in this film are very bad indeed, leav­ing no room for any mor­al quandar­ies. He’s just tired of the phys­ic­al exer­tion required and would prefer to be left in peace with his new friends.

The action, when it comes, is very bloody and extremely vis­cer­al. A graph­ic Equalizer, if you will.

Like Washington in The Equalizer 3, LaKeith Stanfield does such good work in Haunted Mansion that he looks like he belongs in a dif­fer­ent, bet­ter, film.

He plays Ben, an astro­phys­i­cist who has developed a cam­era that is able to see dark mat­ter but who has fallen into depres­sion and alco­hol abuse fol­low­ing the death of his wife.

He is approached by mys­ter­i­ous priest Owen Wilson to use that tech­no­logy to cap­ture spec­tral images that will help him rid an old house of the ghosts that are mak­ing life miser­able for new own­ers Rosario Dawson and her son Chase Dillon (from The Underground Railroad).

Inspired by the Disneyland Haunted Mansion ride (opened in 1969), like all Disney intel­lec­tu­al prop­erty it has to meet cor­por­ate object­ives above all else. Thus, fans of the ride (and the spinoffs in Florida, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong) will get to see favour­ite spooky moments recre­ated in ser­vice of a story about the ghost of a seri­al killer (Jared Leto) look­ing for one more soul to take his tally to 1,000.

While all of this is going on around him, Stanfield con­tin­ues to per­form in a prop­er film all by him­self, giv­ing it some emo­tion­al weight not sup­por­ted by the script or by his fel­low performers.

Directed by the cre­at­or of Dear White People, Justin Simien, it looks as if at one point there might have been an oppor­tun­ity to be a little more than just Disney nos­tal­gia but whatever edges there might once have been are long since smoothed over.

Wilson, in par­tic­u­lar, gives a per­form­ance so small that some­body must have had to invent a spe­cial cam­era to cap­ture any of it.

Straight back from the New Zealand International Film Festival, Past Lives is a strong con­tender for the most romantic film of the year, although I wasn’t dev­ast­ated by it the way many audi­ences have been.

Na Young and Jung Hae Sung are 12-year-old best friends in Seoul, South Korea. Na Young’s par­ents are migrat­ing to Canada and the two young people are dev­ast­ated by the loss of their friend­ship though power­less to do any­thing about it.

12 years later, Na Young is now Nora (Greta Lee) and for­ging a career as a play­wright in New York. Hae Sung (Teo Loo) is an engin­eer­ing stu­dent, emo­tion­ally unanchored, reach­ing out across the new social media chan­nels to recon­nect with his old friend.

Reconnect they do, but these long Skype calls are unsat­is­fact­ory and a dis­trac­tion for both of them from what they think is their main pri­or­ity – their careers – so they take a break.

During that break, Nora meets anoth­er writer Arthur, played by John Magaro, and they start a rela­tion­ship and marry (for her Green Card).

Another 12 years pass, and Hae Sung comes to New York for a visit.

Will their bond – across time and space – prove to be stronger than the day-to-day real­it­ies of life in one’s mid-thirties? Or will the choices already made be impossible to over­come? (Like Denzel in The Equalizer, will they real­ise that ‘this is where I am meant to be’?)

Directed with del­ic­acy by Celine Song, there is a lot to think about in Past Lives, not least the ques­tions of iden­tity that come up when someone moves coun­tries and cul­tures. I emig­rated to New Zealand when I was 18 and chose to try and rein­vent myself at that moment because I knew it might be my only chance. If you move when you are young­er – like Nora – those choices can be far less con­scious but just as real.

Finally, we travel to Brexit Britain where little Georgie (Lola Campbell) is scrap­ing an inde­pend­ent liv­ing fol­low­ing the death of her moth­er. Faking a care­giver to keep the social wel­fare people off her trail, and steal­ing and selling bikes to pay the rent, on the sur­face this is an idyll­ic sum­mer of free­dom but des­pite the self-confidence she is barely coping.

Over the garden fence comes Jason (Harris Dickinson) who says he’s her dad. Will Georgie sub­mit to a strange new par­ent and is Jason even equipped for a role he’s been avoid­ing his entire adult life.

In the 80s a film like this would have had grit and rage against the sys­tem­ic injustices of Thatcher’s Britain but there doesn’t appear to be enough energy in the coun­try any more for that kind of res­ist­ance. Now we have whimsy and a child’s ima­gin­a­tion, and the fail­ures of the sys­tem are played for comedy.

Scrapper eases its way slowly into the world of grief for this lonely little girl and it’s the per­form­ances from the two leads that hold the thing togeth­er. Talking spiders? Not so much.