Suburbicon *1/2

Director: George Clooney

Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac
Screenplay: Joel & Ethan Coan and George Clooney &Grant Heslov
Rated R (Violence, Language, Sexual Situations
Running Time: 104 Minutes
Release Date: 10/27/2017

Suburbicon is the type of film that makes you ask questions after you exit the theater. The problem is that the questions you are asking are not the ones the producers and director intended. The big one, the one I couldn’t stop asking myself even hours after sitting through it, is ‘What happened?’ Not ‘What happened in the film, although there is plenty of confusion there, too, but what happened behind the scenes to make it turn out like this. There is plenty of talent both in front of the cameras and behind them with every key player on both sides having at least one Academy Award to their name, yet this film comes across as sloppy and poorly executed. ‘What happened?’

Suburbicon is a typical suburban in the mid-fifties, serene, quiet, and white. Problems begin when an African-American family moves in. Immediately the citizens are in an uproar over this. Things escalate quickly and turn violent. There is no real development behind the characters involved. Even the African-American family is nothing more than mere stereotypes with no one in the family given much to do beyond represent a problem with suburban white people in that era. A scene late in the film when the mother is denied the ability to shop at the local grocery store could have been powerful had we been given a real character for her. But this movie doesn’t care enough to develop her or anyone else in her family. This movie is also not really about this. The real story is about Matt Damon, a suburbanite who’s wife, Julianne Moore, is killed by two men during a break-in. To help his young son cope, Damon’s sister-in-law, also played by Julianne Moore, moves in. Like the B-story, things escalate, turning violent as only a film written by the Coen Brothers could.

The twist, if you could really call it that, reveals itself early on and from that point on the film loses much of its momentum. The only thing keeping it from a complete train wreck is the terrific performance by the two leads. Damon and Moore are in fine form here but they are given no real meat to bite into and it makes what they are doing feel like swimming upstream. It’s frustrating seeing these two struggling to make the most of so little material. Oscar Issac shows up about midway through the film for a couple of scenes and steals the movie away. It’s really two bad he’s not in it more as he elevates the film whenever he is on screen.

This is the type of film that could have soared under the direction of the Coen Brothers. It has all the elements of some of their classics, like eccentric background characters and absurd situations. George Clooney doesn’t seem to understand how to make this material work, though. At times it seems like it’s attempting to do comedy, then it seems to forget this and go into bad thriller mode. Then there is the B story which just seems to play in the background as noise before suddenly ending unsatisfactorily. It is a muddled mess that could have been so much more than what it ended up being. With a lesser pedigree this could have been forgiven. With the talent around it it ends up being a head scratcher. Again I ask: ‘What happened?’ 

Geostorm (2017) *1/2

U.S. Release Date: 2017-10-20

Running Length: 120 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Violence, Action Peril, Language)

Genre: Disaster

Director: Dean Devlin

Cast: Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Andy Garcia, Ed Harris

Geostorm is problematic right out the gate. It expects the audience to be so fundamentally stupid that they will take everything spoon fed to them on screen without questioning even the most obvious scientific inaccuracies. While I have no inherent issues with a film asking us to go with the narrative rather than hard science, (Hello Star Wars) it still has to be rooted in reality enough to keep me in the film. There has to be just enough ‘fact’ to get me past the ‘fiction.’ Sadly, or perhaps inevitably, Geostorm doesn’t do that and because of that it comes across as insulting to my intelligence. I’m no scientist and have never set foot in outer space and I could easily smell the bologna that reeked throughout the entire two hours.

The premise is simple. Global Warming and climate issues have taken their toll on the world, so much so that the world has united, or at least 17 countries have, (the film isn’t quite clear on this) to fund and built a net around the entire earth to control the weather. After three years of climate tranquility the system is set to fall under control of the world’s nations rather than solely the United States. All of a sudden there is a malfunction in one of the satellites in the net that causes a small area of the middle east to freeze, killing everyone in the area. Then another malfunction causes fire and destruction in Hong Kong. Things quickly ramp up to a deadly countdown to a geostorm, a worldwide weather event with the potential to reshape the earth. Is it really a malfunction or the work of a saboteur? Two guesses and the first doesn’t count.

To deal with the malfunction, estranged brothers Jake (Gerald Butler) and Max Lawson (Jim Sturgess) are recruited by the White House to get things back in order. Jake was the original engineer responsible for the creation of the net, dubbed Dutch Boy, and Max is the current head of the program who fired Jake when opinions got hot over the way to run it. Naturally things ramp up and explosions abound.

As mentioned above, to call this film stupid is an understatement. Director Dean Devlin, known primarily as partners with Roland Emmerich who spews out films in this genre every few years, had this film filmed and ready for release back in May, but test screenings were so poor that it was pulled from the summer line up for hefty reshoots by Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, writer Laeta Kalogridis and Director Danny Cannon. The result begs question as to just how bad it was before the retooling. Besides all the behind the scenes problems there is another problem that should have delayed the release of this film at least into February. That problem is current events. With the recent hurricane and tornado damage in Texas, the Caribbean and Puerto Rico the world is a little battle worn and tired of images of natural disaster devastation. This is sure to effect the box office clout. That coupled with the sheer cliché of the subject matter and visuals is unlikely to lure people into theaters. It doesn’t help that the visuals are often cartoonish and poorly done, but then again by the time people realize that they have already paid for their tickets.

The film tries clumsily to inject political hot points into it’s narrative. There are many instances of this but the worst one comes when an American character is saved by an Hispanic character who afterwards points to the Mexican flag on their uniform and says ‘by a Mexican’ as if it’s making a bold political statement about the current state of Mexico/America relations in the Trump era. This is just bad. It’s also in poor taste. For a film of this ilk it stands out like a sore thumb. This film is not smart enough to make these types of statements well.

In the end this film is boorish, borderline offensive, and just plain dumb. The scenes of destruction could have been copied and pasted from another natural disaster film of a few years ago, 2012. At this point, seeing skyscrapers collapse in old and tired. Seeing satellites explode in space and people run from fireballs and falling debris is cliché and unexciting. The political intrigue is anything but and even the most undiscerning viewer will have no problems guessing who is behind it all. The film would be disappointing if not for how low the expectation was in the first place.