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    ‘Land of Bad’ Review: Tech Ops in the Jungle

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    Fighters on the ground, assisted by drone pilots, including Russell Crowe, half a world away — in Las Vegas.From a U.S. military installation in the Sulu Sea — where, a title card tells the viewer, “We are in a war … we just don’t know it” — soldiers board a chopper to execute a “sterilized op” (contemporary lingo for “secret mission”). The soldiers are played by a couple of Hemsworth brothers; a onetime Face of Reebok, Ricky Whittle; and a pumped-up Milo Ventimiglia. Their backup is a couple of drone pilots half a world away, providing lethal firepower from the comfort of Las Vegas.“Land of Bad,” directed by William Eubank from a script he wrote with David Frigerio, is commendable in the abstract for depicting the realities of 21st-century warfare both narratively and thematically: Its settings include a jungle and gnarly underground jails. “At the end of the day,” Whittle’s character says, in the jungle, “when tech fails, it all comes down to one very simple thing — man killing man.” He then welcomes a rookie soldier to “the land of bad.” What the squad subsequently encounters feels like several strains of global terrorism reconfigured into a jingoistic theme park.The former action star Russell Crowe plays Reaper, a drone guy at the other end of the soldiers’ communications devices. He’s not only fighting to keep this squad alive after the mission goes upside down, but to convince indifferent upper brass to pay attention.Moments presumably conceived to create suspense, like Reaper’s stop at a grocery store late in the picture, merely contribute to its longueurs. When Reaper, trying to keep a seemingly stranded soldier’s spirits up, recounts his career trajectory (“The Air Force found my responses to authority were not normal”), he doesn’t sound so much like Tom Cruise’s Maverick in an alternate universe as he does Robert Hayes boring a fellow passenger to death in “Airplane!”Land of BadRated R for language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ Review: A Head-Spinning Genre Mash-Up

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      The buddy-priest action-comedy-horror hybrid we didn’t know we wanted has finally landed.It’s hard to pick the most surreal part of Julius Avery’s new horror film. It could be that the main character is based on the very real Rev. Gabriele Amorth, who used to be the Vatican’s chief exorcist (in a head-spinning twist, William Friedkin, the director of “The Exorcist,” once made a documentary about him). Or maybe it’s that Father Amorth is portrayed as an espresso-drinking, scooter-riding maverick by Russell Crowe in one of his most engaging performances in years. He is dispatched by the Pope (the cult Italian actor Franco Nero) to an isolated Spanish abbey where a young boy, Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), has started producing ungodly growls, changing colors and shapes, and making inappropriate moves on his mother (Alex Essoe, a Mike Flanagan horror regular).Amorth has his work cut out for him, but luckily he is paired with the inexperienced but game Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), which adds a dollop of buddy-priest action comedy to an already genre-full plate. The two men have excellent, er, chemistry with the ancestral evil figure who has taken over Henry and is magnificently voiced by Ralph Ineson. Avery (“Samaritan”) drives the film at a pace as caffeinated as Amorth himself, and manages to incorporate legitimate scares into a plot halfway between Indiana Jones and a Dan Brown potboiler, with camp touches worthy of Ken Russell.“The Pope’s Exorcist” ends with a shameless suggestion that there is room for a sequel or even an entire series. It is not an unwelcome prospect.The Pope’s ExorcistRated R for demon-induced expletives and glimpses of naked ladies. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’ Review: Vietnam on the Rocks

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      Zac Efron plays a man trying to deliver brewskis to his Vietnam War buddies in Peter Farrelly’s film.In the early winter of 1968, the 26-year-old civilian Chickie Donohue arrived in Vietnam with a duffel bag of brewskis and an errand that could be reasonably called idiotic, patronizing, suicidal — and, even, as this shaggily appealing comedy insists, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.” Donohue (Zac Efron) has been double dog dared by his drinking buddies back home in Inwood, then a working-class Irish neighborhood in Manhattan, to hand-deliver a beer to four of their buddies serving in the war. “A sudsy thank you card!” Donohue exclaims, delighted by his own moxie. His farcical mission is mostly true and just the sort of crowd-pleaser about lunkhead enlightenment that intoxicates the director Peter Farrelly in the wake of his Oscar for “Green Book.”Farrelly and his co-writers, Brian Currie and Pete Jones, see the national id reflected in Donohue’s patriotic, ill-reasoned rationale for his quest, which is clearly a few cans short of a, you know. To this layabout slacker, his blustering pals and their jingoistic barkeep, the Colonel (Bill Murray, near-invisible under a gruff flattop), a pull-tab of domestic ale supports the troops by reminding the fighters abroad that America reigns supreme. For a while, Farrelly feigns to agree; the film starts like a Super Bowl commercial and ends like a hangover.When Donohue sets sail for Saigon, public opinion supports the conflict, an innocence Efron embodies by hitchhiking toward the front with a schmucky grin affixed like a shield. (Grunts one soldier, “Every once in a while, you run into a guy who’s too dumb to get killed.”) But by the time Donohue returns home, the Tet offensive — which he witnesses — will have turned the majority of Americans against the war, including him. After all, if a dingbat like him is able to bluff his way past officers to get to the battlefield, things are not under control.The script is grounded in Donohue’s memoir of the same name (written with J.T. Molloy) and captures his bravado. (“I was a four-star general when it came to slinging BS,” he writes.) While the film makes his onscreen portrayal more oblivious, it backs his claim to have seen a United States tank blow a hole in the wall of its own embassy, only to later blame the blast on the Viet Cong.A local traffic cop (Kevin K. Tran) and hard-living photojournalist (Russell Crowe with a brusque, sleeves-rolled-up cynicism) are invented amalgamations of the many people who stepped in to save Donohue’s neck. (If pressed, the movie would rather label its protagonist a dangerous distraction over a hero.) To heighten the tension — as well as extend empathy toward the Vietnamese villagers — Farrelly also concocts a scene where Donohue is forced to hide in the jungle from his own countrymen.A few horrors are embellished from the book, particularly those that inspire the cinematographer Sean Porter to shoot in dramatic slow motion: a herd of napalmed elephants, a prisoner plummeting headfirst from a helicopter, a wounded soldier backlit by flames. Otherwise, the film’s style is, like its subject, stubbornly chipper (albeit with a marvelous psychedelic rock soundtrack that pulls from lesser-known acts like The Electric Prunes). Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.The Greatest Beer Run EverRated R for language and violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ Review: A God’s Comic Twilight

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      The director Taika Waititi injects antic silliness, once again, into this Marvel franchise starring Chris Hemsworth, who swings a mighty hammer and flexes mightier muscles.Every so often in “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the 92nd Marvel movie to hit theaters this year (OK, the third), the studio machinery hits pause, and the picture opens a portal to another dimension: Its star, Chris Hemsworth, embraces wholesale self-parody, a pair of giant screaming goats gallop along a rainbow highway and Russell Crowe flounces around in a flirty skirt and Shirley Temple curls. As the movie briefly slips into a parallel realm of play and pleasure, you can feel the director Taika Waititi having a good time — and it’s infectious.This is the fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years and the second that Waititi has directed, following “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017). That movie was all over the place, but it was funny (enough) and had a lightness that proved liberating for the series and Hemsworth. “Love and Thunder” is sillier than any of its predecessors, and thinner. A lot happens in overstuffed Marvel Studios fashion. But because the series has jettisoned many of its earlier components — its Shakespearean pretensions, meddlesome relatives and, crucially, Thor’s godly grandeur — the new movie more or less plays like a rescue mission with jokes, tears and smackdowns.It starts with a pasty, near-unrecognizable Christian Bale, who, having been relieved of his DC Dark Knight duties, has signed up with Marvel as a villain with the spoiler name of Gorr the God Butcher. Waititi quickly sketches in Gorr’s background, giving it a tragic cast. Believing himself betrayed by the god he once worshiped, Gorr is committed to destroying other deities. It’s potentially rich storytelling terrain, particularly given Thor’s stature and Marvel’s role as a contemporary mythmaker. But while Bale takes the role by the throat, as is his habit, investing the character with frictional intensity, Gorr proves disappointingly dull.For the most part, Gorr simply gives Thor another chance to play the hero, which Hemsworth does with a stellar deadpan and appreciable suppleness. He’s always been fun to watch in the role and not just because, as the slavering camerawork likes to remind you, he looks awfully fine with or without clothes. Hemsworth knows how to move, which is surprising given his muscled bulk, and is at ease with his beauty. He’s also learned how to deploy — and puncture — Thor’s inborn pomposity, although by the time the final credits rolled in “Ragnarok” that haughtiness had turned into shtick. Thor is still a god, but also he’s now a great big goof.To that end, Thor enters midfight on a battlefield washed in grayish red light, preening and posing and showboating alongside characters from Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.” With Guardians (Chris Pratt, the raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper, etc.) on backup, Thor vanquishes the enemy with his customary hyperbole — he strikes the ground, reaches for the heavens, flips his hair — and a new hammer the size of a backhoe shovel. He also destroys a temple that looks right out of an airport gift shop. This synergistic foreplay isn’t pretty, and neither is the rest of the movie, but it announces Waititi’s sensibilities, his irreverence and taste for kitsch.From the start, the “Thor” series has pushed and pulled at its title character, by turns enshrining and undercutting his supernatural identity, raising him up only to bring him crashing back down to Earth. The movies have, almost to a fault, emphasized Thor’s frailties: He has daddy issues, a sibling rivalry and romantic woes. Gods, they’re just like us! Thor’s love life humanized him for good and bad, though his romance with an astrophysicist — Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster — worked best as ballast for the he-man action. Jane wasn’t interesting, despite Portman’s febrile smiles, but, after sitting out the last movie, she’s back.Why the encore? Well, mostly because Waititi, who wrote the script with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, doesn’t seem to know what else he can do with Thor. By the end of “Ragnarok,” the character had been repeatedly cut down to size. He’d squabbled with his brother and wittiest foil (Tom Hiddleston as Loki). His long hair was chopped off and his kingdom annihilated, and gone too were the heavyweights who had helped fill the story’s holes with their magnetism and personality. Anthony Hopkins (Thor’s dad) exited, as did Cate Blanchett (sis). Thor fought, loved and lost, and then he packed on the pounds and went to hang with the Avengers.“Love and Thunder” revs up the “Thor” franchise again with the usual quips and beats, programmatically timed blowouts, brand-extending details, a kidnapping and a welcome if underused Tessa Thompson. Her Valkyrie, alas, receives less screen time than Jane, who’s given a crisis as well as special powers, a blond blowout and muscles that inflate and deflate like party balloons. Jane’s new talents don’t do much for the story and read as a dutiful nod to women’s empowerment (thanks). Portman does what she can, yet she’s so tightly wound that she never syncs up with the loosey-goosey rhythms the way Thompson and Hemsworth do.Waititi’s playfulness buoys “Love and Thunder,” but the insistence on Thor’s likability, his decency and dude-ness, has become a creative dead end. The movie has its attractions, notably Hemsworth, Thompson and Crowe, whose Zeus vamps through a sequence with a butt-naked Thor and fainting minions. It’s a delightful and cheerfully vulgar interlude, and critically, it reminds you of the sheer otherworldliness of these beings who — with their vanities, cruelties, deeds, mysteries and powers — turn reality into myth and stories into dreams. Like movie stars, gods aren’t like us, which of course is one reason we invented them.Thor: Love and ThunderRated PG-13 for superhero violence. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More