Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich*, Ralph Fiennes

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Feel weird missing out this long on new Coen Brothers, but it has, indeed been one of the weirdest, most exhausting decades one might have been able to imagine. Some things are bound to slip through the cracks.

Did I Like It: It’s a strangely slight movie. Likable, sure. Funny in the strange ways one comes to expect from the Coen Brothers, sure. But a prestige film clocking in at less than two hours smacks of studio interference, as if something had been gutted from the core of the film to ensure that it could run a maximum amount of times on opening weekend.

But that just may be the movie projecting on to me. Maybe no movie ever needs to be beyond two hours in its runtime. It’s a scary thought to entertain.

It’s probably wrong. Where would Zach Snyder be with thinking like that?

The real thing I’m struck by as I watch this is a fundamental paradox at play. Fundamental rule of movies: Regardless of when a movie takes place—the time of Jesus, the here and now, in the far flung future—you’ll be able to tell when the movie was made. As the odyssey of Eddie Mannix (Brolin) unfurls, there’s never a moment where I don’t think that the film was made sometime in the last ten years. And yet, each and every time we see something of the movies Capitol Pictures is making in 1951, they are absolutely believeable as movies of the era, yet are populated with the likes of Clooney, Channing Tatum, and Scarlett Johansson.

How do they pull of a trick like that, and also not pull of a trick like that.

*An actor whose name I find it increasignly difficult to spell. You just through as much of the letter “h” as you can, and just hope everything works out.

Weapons (2025)

Director: Zach Cregger

Cast: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Brand new.

Did I Like It: There are long stretches where this film really reaches—and actually grabs—something special. Most of that happens in the film’s middle. That’s kind of a surprise all by itself, as most movies, and especially horror films get water-logged and flabby in their second act. Overlapping the stories of the various main characters keeps the attention far higher than average, and fully develops those characters. All have their flaws, but most of them* are innocent at their core. I’ll be stuck with the memory of their motivations and behavior all careening towards each other.

If that solid plot and character work had been coupled with an array of some of the more basic horror movie cliche you’re likely to find in a major release this year. Strange looking villain who’s strange looking for the sake of strange looking? Check. Jump scares a-go-go? Check. The camera pans across a character looking at something, landing on an open hallways and WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT? Check. Dream sequences within dream sequences that are just a vehicle for the aforementioned jump scares**? You better believe, check.

The film could have truly been great in a year filled with great horror movies, but I’m left with the frustration of a average-to-good film that couldn’t quite get out of its own way.

*Everyone but Paul (Ehrenreich), the opportunistically tee-totaling cop.

**When they aren’t offering one of the more over-the-top images I’ve seen in a film in a long time. One that doesn’t even feel thematically right, even if it does go a long way to offering a sweatier than it needs to be reason for the title being what it is.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

Director: Elizabeth Banks

Cast: Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Ray Liotta

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: Christopher Miller and Phil Lord are associated with this, and they have a nearly unassailable track record of making bad ideas for films insanely watchable. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) might have struggled, but that was rather pointedly not their fault. Here, they have an absolutely killer—perhaps too on the nose—pitch for a movie, so one wonders how they might fair.

However, I fear your mileage with this movie will be tied almost exclusively to the crowd with which you see the film. I saw it with a small crowd that was so primed for howling with every joke and explosion of ultra-violence, with any other movie they might have been astonishingly irritating.

But this kind of movie is so delightfully shameless in its execution, that the shamelessness of the audience only seemed like part and parcel with the whole experience. I even found myself crying out a few times, usually when something horrible happened to Margo Martindale, which, to be fair, was often enough. If the movie hadn’t had a wide release and more than few big stars, it might have been the stuff of midnight screenings for years to come.

Or maybe not. As it stands, I’m wondering if with me writing this review nearly a week after I saw the film and after it was released, the movie may have already collectively disappeared from our collective awareness. I’m certainly struggling to find at least 300 words to write on the subject. I can’t imagine I’m alone when I say that I appreciate funny, ultra-violent, mid-budget movies which don’t feel the need to break two hours in runtime.

So I don’t actually think I’m actually complaining about the film as I write that last part. The title of the film will likely linger in my memory for some time, but memories of the film itself might very well disappear entirely with another week’s distance.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Director: Ron Howard, but to get into that story any further might begin the review prematurely.

Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover

Have I Seen it Before: Saw it in the theater. I had long since decided to be excited about it, despite the kerfuffle behind the scenes. It seems like a simpler time, just over six months ago.

Did I Like It: It was fine.

A Han Solo-based prequel seems like an astoundingly bad idea on paper. Do we really need to see how Han (Ehrenreich) and Chewie (Joonas Suotamo, having fully replaced the aging Peter Mayhew since The Last Jedi (2017)) met? Do we need to see the long-fabled gambling match where Lando Calrissian (Glover) loses his prized Millennium Falcon? Do we really need to see the conclusion of a story where, inevitably, Han will learn the virtue of shooting first? Is there need for more elaboration on just what the Kessel Run is? Did we not learn anything from the rationale for the prequel trilogy?

Given it’s pointedly bad idea bona fides, the logical conclusion was to reach out to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. With The Lego Movie (2014), 21 Jump Street (2012), and hell, 22 Jump Street (2014), they have an unbroken track record of turning wildly stupid pitches into insanely watchable movies. There was reason enough to get excited.

And then Lucasfilm fired them. Apparently they were making the film too watchable, and that didn’t quite fit in with the earnings projections already made to Disney shareholders. They hired Ron Howard. He’s a great director in his own right. He brought Michael Keaton into the movies with Night Shift (1982), and is therefore worthy of our respect. Here, unfortunately, he is a hired gun, and it shows.

As the boy who would be Solo, Ehrenreich never quite feels up to the task, turning in the kind of work that can’t help but bring to mind the trajectory of Brandon Routh, forced to do a tepid impression of Christopher Reeve in Superman Returns (2006). Ehrenreich is charming enough, and we can only hope that there is some nice TV show he can call home in a few years. As Calrissian, Glover equates himself far better, still offering a performance with only flourishes of an impression of Billy Dee Williams, more akin to the work of Chris Pine as Captain Kirk in the recent Star Trek movies.

The film ends up a wildly over-budgeted adaptation of a tie-in novel that might have been written in the mid-90s*. There is even a bewildering cameo jammed into the third act by none other than the crown prince of prequels, Darth Maul (Ray Park), that by all accounts has nothing to do with the actual film at hand, and came off a list of possible reveals that could happen at the end. Even so, the movie is largely fine, and a better way to spend a little over two hours than digging ditches, but it isn’t the film it could have been, and that’s a shame.

Maybe, a la what happened with Richard Donner’s cut of Superman II, we might one day see the best version of this movie. A guy can hope, right?

* The Star Wars line did produce a young Solo trilogy in the 90s, written by the late A.C. Crispin. They trade in a lot of the same story beats as this movie, but remain firmly entrenched in the now defunct Legends canon.