Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen in a scene from "Primetime." Photo courtesy of A24.
A soggy fall has arrived in South Florida, giving us an all too brief reprieve from the summer's sweltering temperatures. At the multiplex, things are decidedly less sizzling, with an outlook that can best be called adequate.
But amid the just okay releases (and a handful of good ones) making their way to local screens, one pattern appears to emerge: standout performances in movies that are only occasionally worthy of them.
This week, let's focus on two reasonably watchable conversation starters elevated by performances that command and reward our attention. One of these motion pictures turns the clock back to the mid-2000s and a particular reality series that had a seismic effect on the U.S. television landscape. The other sees a renowned horror filmmaker take a crack at adapting a popular video game that's no stranger to the big screen treatment.
In this calm before the awards-season storm, let's take a look at what this transitional period has to offer moviegoers. Two words: lurid thrills.
“Primetime”: He recites his lines in front of his dressing room mirror like a seasoned thespian about to put his imprint on a Shakespeare play. That is, until you hear the lines he's memorized: smutty, crude, lewd to an almost creative degree.
This isn't a scene in a play that's being rehearsed. Because this performer's stage is the living room of a Long Beach, California home equipped with a plethora of hidden cameras and microphones. His stage partner is no actor, but a divorced man in his 30s who thinks he's about to hook up with an underage girl. And the dialogue? Well, it's a printout of an unhinged and libidinous online chat where one person is who he claims he is, and the other is pretending to be the object of his desire.
In a few swift brush strokes, the opening sequence of this feverish, fitfully absorbing portrait of controversial TV personality Chris Hansen and the rise of “To Catch a Predator” sets the tone for the sleazy cocktail of fame and infamy that follows. As Hansen (Robert Pattinson) confronts the cyber-horndog, played by the ubiquitous Tony Revolori, whose online moniker is Married And Looking For Fun31313, director Lance Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh attempt to establish a balance between naturalism and caricature.
Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and Tony Revolori as MarriedAndLookingForFun31313 in a scene from "Primetime." Photo courtesy of A24.
The color palette is garish and Day-Glo loud, the closeups are intense, and it all clicks into place.
And that's before “Primetime's” MVP even takes center stage. That would not be Pattinson, but Skyler Gisondo, who lights up the screen as Dan Plumb, an aspiring actor who's about to go on the ride of his life when he's cast to pose as the bait poised to keep unsuspecting pedos off the street. Gisondo (Netflix's “Santa Clarita Diet,” James Gunn's “Superman”) uses his boyish features for maximum effect, his freckled face a canvas that comes to life whenever he raises his voice a few octaves to approximate the aw-shucks purity of a boy in his early teens. The results are uncanny, and frequently hilarious.
It's a good thing Gisondo's screen time, as he becomes a sort of audience surrogate, is ample, because “Primetime” is on comparatively shakier ground when zeroing in on Hansen's quest to dominate the airwaves. Pattinson attacks the role with considerable aplomb, but this is a high-wire act he's not always able to sustain. As Hansen's inner demons are given visual representation, the star of Matt Reeves' “The Batman,” the “Twilight” saga and a bunch of cool indies that won over the film bros in your life alternates between scenes that capture his subject's essence and others where he is distractingly mannered. The fact that you catch Pattinson A-C-T-I-N-G works for this broad portrayal of Hansen until it doesn't.
That's because Oppenheim and Singh begin to lose their otherwise solid grip on the material with about a half hour left to go. They give the versatile Pattinson the freedom to portray Hansen as a morally iffy shell of a man who wields righteousness like a baseball bat, yet doesn't exactly practice what he preaches in his offscreen hours. The film is more compelling with simply dealing with the cutthroat nature of network programming that when it's peeking into Hansen's home life. (Anna Faris plays his dissatisfied, long-suffering wife Mary Joan.)
Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb in a scene from "Primetime." Photo courtesy of A24.
And yet, “Primetime” isn't the shallow exercise of style over substance its detractors would have you believe. Oppenheim and Singh were not aiming to make a profound message movie, and there is nothing wrong with that. What they convey pretty effectively is how the way Hansen compartmentalizes his professional and personal lives created a void that's sucked the life force out of whatever conviction he once had. (Sadly, I don't think Pattinson will be able to fulfill my unrealistic request of inviting the real Hansen as his awards-show plus-one, a la Sarah Paulson/Marcia Clark at the 2016 Primetime Emmys.)
Where “Primetime” stumbles is when indulging in some ill-conceived magic realism, as Oppenheim strives to create psychedelic imagery that recalls the films Oliver Stone made in the 1990s, “Natural Born Killers” in particular. If Oppenheim's name rings a bell, that's because before the director, who, like Gisondo, hails from South Florida, went the fiction storytelling route, he crafted nifty nonfiction work like the documentary feature “Some Kind of Heaven,” his playful profile of The Villages in Central Florida. His touch is considerably lighter and less brusque than Stone's, which is why he's able to elicit such delicate, nuanced performances from Gisondo and a nearly unrecognizable Alex Winter as a Texas public official being pursued by the “To Catch a Predator” team as a potential ratings bonanza.
It's only when “Primetime” indulges in the kind of stylistic overkill that became emblematic of Stone that it goes off the rails. Up until that point, it nails the skeevy appeal of this brand of instant-justice reality TV and the troubled master of ceremonies at its center. There's no need to change the channel.
“Resident Evil”: It's essentially a bunch of setpieces meant to evoke the visceral immediacy of the survival horror video game that inspired it, strung together with bubblegum, spit and bucketfuls of viscera. And that's okay.
Austin Abrams as Bryan Hodukavich in a scene from "Resident Evil." Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Sony's latest attempt to turn Capcom's 30-year-old gaming franchise into genre-driven popcorn fare works more than it doesn't, and this is coming from a non-gamer with zero familiarity with the source material. What's nearly miraculous here is that this tightly wound creature feature is the third solo directing effort of Zach Cregger, who has amassed a following that goes well beyond gorehounds but whose past work has made this critic feel like he's breaking out in hives.
So, what's different this time? “Resident Evil,” which tells the story of a medical courier who finds himself in the middle of a gruesome viral outbreak, is peppered with the gallows humor and snide sense of irony that helped set Cregger's previous two films, “Barbarian” and the Oscar-winning “Weapons,” apart from other “hard-R” horror films of its ilk. And like his previous two films, it dangles a tantalizing premise like a carrot, then begins to sputter less than halfway through.
But Cregger comes to “Resident Evil” as a hired gun, and in that capacity, the filmmaker chooses to eschew the nonlinear structure of his previous features. The simplicity is becoming, because it prevents the director from indulging in his trademark toxicity, a viciousness that spreads through his work like those fungi in the HBO series “The Last of Us,” another video game adaptation.
But the sturdiest selling point this version of “Resident Evil” has to offer is its star. As a junkie besieged by spectacularly bad luck, Austin Abrams was one of “Weapons'” few bright spots. Here, as mobile errand boy Bryan Hodukavich, he eats up the role of a delivery driver who can't resist a dicey trek on a treacherous snowy roads to bring a mystery package to a hospital in the fictional, Denver-flavored Raccoon City in the dead of night.
Andrea Miltnerova as Pedestrian and Austin Abrams as Bryan Hodukavich in a scene from "Resident Evil." Photo by Dusan Martincek. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
The after-hours setting makes the series of gnarly complications, stumbles and narrow escapes that ensue all the more immersive, and as the faulty avatar making one bad decision after another, Abrams shows he's able to carry a movie on his everyman shoulders. He makes viewers ask themselves what they would do if they were facing Bryan's growing dilemma. (Nine times out of ten, it's the opposite of what he does.)
Abrams also shepherds viewers past some stabs at humor that don't always land, and his bewilderment at the increasingly grotesque, Lovecraftian imagery (limbs! tentacles!) makes him an engaging object of the camera's gaze, coming across as the disarmingly nebbishy ne'er-do-well next door.
Cregger attempts to insert domestic malaise into Bryan's character arc in the form of a rough patch the character is experiencing with his girlfriend Michelle, who remains a disembodied voice on the phone, played by Sara Paxton, Cregger's partner in showbiz and in life. But despite the filmmaker's attempt to give the relationship some depth, the couple's rift never stops feeling abstract, despite the magnitude of what's at stake.
Fortunately, these short detours don't stop “Resident Evil” in its tracks. As Bryan inches closer to his destination, the film hurtles forward like a runaway train, and Cregger is wise enough to tap out around the 90-minute mark.
It plays like a feature-length visit to one of those haunted houses at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights. A couple of judiciously timed jump scares, some freaky close encounters of the gross kind, some neat visual callouts to movies like “Die Hard” and “An American Werewolf in London,” and a splatterific resolution where no one's safety is guaranteed. Disposable? Yup. Cregger's picking up a paycheck here, but his first tolerable movie is, I suspect, junk food of the rewatchable kind.
Austin Abrams as Bryan Hodukavich in a scene from "Resident Evil." Photo by Dusan Martincek. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
“Primetime” and “Resident Evil” are now showing across South Florida in wide release, with IMAX engagements still available for “Resident Evil” at AMC Aventura, AMC Sunset Place, and AMC Pembroke Lakes.
