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    ‘Poolman’ Review: In the Sun Too Long

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    Chris Pine’s shaggy debut feature has a charismatic cast that rambles along with him on a Los Angeles detective adventure.In “Poolman,” Chris Pine’s debut feature, he plays Darren, a distractible pool cleaner who becomes an amateur detective when he learns of a municipal conspiracy in Los Angeles. The sure-why-not plot, modeled on the California water grab in “Chinatown,” is less interesting than the charismatic cast that rambles along with Pine on his excellent adventure.Pine’s yarn was savaged when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but the sour response is a bit like getting mad at a golden retriever for rolling around in the grass. A shaggy civic gadfly, Darren grandstands at City Council meetings and becomes so self-absorbed that he forgets what his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) does for a living. His Jungian psychiatrist, Diane (Annette Bening), and her story-spouting filmmaker hubby, Jack (Danny DeVito), look after him like foster parents, while apparently overseeing some kind of movie about his life.Darren is clued into the unnecessarily confusing water scheme by June (DeWanda Wise, glamorous and gorgeously costumed), who’s an assistant to his nemesis on the City Council (Stephen Tobolowsky). But the amateur sleuthing through Los Angeles landmarks — smartly shot on film by Matthew Jensen (“Wonder Woman”) — plays second fiddle to what’s really a collection of warm character sketches and mild eccentricities punctuated by meditative visions.Pine wisely avoids winks to the audience. But he whiffs at making the mystery especially gripping, leaving one instead to savor the moments, like a note-perfect Bening calmly talking Pine’s befuddled pool man through his latest setback.PoolmanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Actors Seeking Stability Turn to Directing at the Toronto Festival

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      Movies directed by actors were prominent at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Could the reasons they’re striking also underlie the career move?By my count, there are 10 movies by actor-turned-directors at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Ten. The majority, including Chris Pine’s “Poolman” and Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour,” are debuts.I don’t know how many actors choose to be filmmakers at any given moment; “what I really want to do is direct” is a cliché for a reason. But that still seems like a lot. And it is particularly noteworthy right now in Hollywood, when the strikes by the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and the Writers Guild of America have revealed how much disparity there can be in pay and in the ownership of one’s work. Not to mention the willingness of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to make a deal with the Directors Guild of America but not the other creatives.“Actors directing films isn’t unusual,” said Cameron Bailey, the chief executive of the Toronto festival, “but we saw a larger number this year and invited several, before we got news of the strike.” Besides the Kendrick and Pine movies, actors making directorial debuts included Patricia Arquette (“Gonzo Girl”), Kristin Scott Thomas (“North Star”), Kasia Smutniak (“Walls”) and Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk (“Hell of a Summer”).Directing confers control, which confers power, which confers stability, right? At the very least, if you’re directing, you’re not left hanging around.“Everyone is hanging around,” Stacey Sher, one of the “Poolman” producers, told me. “You’re hanging around to get financing. You’re hanging around to get distribution. You’re hanging around to hope that you get a date that connects. You’re hanging around to hope that you get lucky and your campaign clicks and that you’re in the zeitgeist. You’re hanging around hoping that the press likes your movie.” Sher has been producing films for more than 30 years, among them actor-director feature debuts like “Reality Bites” (Ben Stiller) and “Garden State” (Zach Braff).In “Poolman,” for which he also served as a producer and co-screenwriter, Pine plays a Lebowski-style free spirit who ministers a decrepit apartment-complex pool by day and disrupts local council meetings by night. As a director, Pine, who has been acting for two decades, suddenly found himself answering questions about everything around the clock. Sher recalled him telling her, “‘I understand how easy I had it before, just being able to go back and study my lines and prepare and stay in character.’”Though Pine had planned to publicize “Poolman” at Toronto, his support of the strike precluded his attendance because SAG-AFTRA forbids promotions during the labor action. On opening night, Sher presented the film solo, stating: “It is a different premiere and Q. and A. then we had hoped for, but there was never a second where Chris was going to do anything but stand with SAG and the W.G.A.”Pine was returning the favor. He “knew what he wanted and what he wanted was to build a team that could support him in achieving what his goals were cinematically,” Sher said. Patty Jenkins, who had directed the actor in the “Wonder Woman” franchise, was a “Poolman” producer from the start (Ian Gotler was also a producer). Jenkins acted as “directing doula,” available for technical checks and gut checks, Sher said. Pine also worked with the “Wonder Woman” films’ cinematographer, Matthew Jensen. Directing granted him the power to surround himself with people — the kind who are currently striking — who could make his new job easier.“Poolman” was a low-budget film in which almost half of the 22 days was spent shooting in a motel where beds were removed to make way for makeshift offices and dressing rooms, adding to the camaraderie. “I think if you just want the job for control, you’re not going to do a very good job,” Sher said of directing. “The best filmmakers I’ve ever worked with are the most collaborative.”Chris Pine starred in as well as directed “Poolman,” featuring Annette Bening, left, and Danny DeVito.Darren Michaels/ABC Studios“Woman of the Hour” was an exercise in combining the right people in what Miri Yoon — one of several producers on the project along with Kendrick — likened to a kind of “math” problem. Kendrick, who was initially attached only to star, “really drove us over the line,” said Yoon, who recently worked on another major actor-director feature, “Don’t Worry Darling” from Olivia Wilde. It was the way Kendrick interpreted the Black List script by Ian McDonald — a quasi-biopic about the 1970s serial killer Rodney Alcala told through the eyes of women who crossed his path, including a “Dating Game” contestant (Kendrick) — that convinced everyone she should helm.“We’re like, well, what are we doing?” Yoon said. “Why do we even bother going through this whole dog-and-pony show trying to figure out who else can do this movie? Let’s just go.” From that moment, it went fast — about six weeks after Kendrick was tapped to direct, the crew was in prep for a 24-day shoot — and it went hard, with a Vancouver winter standing in for a Los Angeles summer. Despite all of this, the first-time filmmaker was very deliberate, Yoon said: “There’s nothing arbitrary about Anna Kendrick.”I suggested that Kendrick’s preparation might be due to the fact that she’s a woman in the director’s chair, with all the prejudices that entails. Yoon gestured that I had hit it on the nose. While almost half the actor-director films at Toronto are by women, everyone knows by now the challenges female filmmakers face behind the camera. As actress Eva Longoria recently told Variety upon the release of “Flamin’ Hot,” her feature directing debut, “I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap.”No doubt aware of this calculus, Kendrick herself announced she was “heartbroken” at not being able to attend the Toronto festival for the premiere because of SAG-AFTRA rules. While some independent films have secured interim agreements if they agree to union demands, this year’s festival has seen few American filmmakers and actors doing promotion. Despite that, “Woman of the Hour” still landed the first major sale of the festival in a reported $11 million deal with Netflix.Considering that the stability of Hollywood itself is in question, it is hard to determine whether directing confers more security than having to hang around waiting for an acting job. Neither of the producers I spoke to were able to give a definitive answer, with Yoon saying the industry was still finding its footing in “a landscape that is going through a seismic change.”Bailey, the Toronto festival chief, surmised that the lack of work around the Covid lockdowns led to an abundance of actors directing, an attempt to claim agency over their careers. “I suspect some of these actors used the opportunity of the pandemic disruption to get more personal projects made.” Indeed both Pine and Kendrick have said separately that the pandemic led them to change the way they thought about their work.Yoon did, however, agree that while producing seems to be more about business ownership, directing seems to be more about artistic ownership. She elaborated, “The film’s end result is the sum of many, many, many parts, and the fact that you get to participate in all of those parts, which, as an actor, you don’t necessarily do.”Still, Sher said she thought the reason anyone, including an actor, directs is incredibly personal. “I remember a filmmaker friend of mine said every filmmaker directs for a different value,” Sher explained. “For some people, it’s reality; for some people, it’s about precision, some people performance, some people it’s technical, some aesthetic pleasure. And the more people that are doing it, the more people also realize that it’s an option that they may never have thought that they had.” More

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      A Beginner’s Guide to Dungeons & Dragons

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      The filmmakers behind “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” help explain the characters, monsters and spells that make up their new film.“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” a comedy-fantasy movie from the directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, is a loose adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, more commonly known among fans as D&D. A social game of chance, strategy and a kind of improvisational storytelling, D&D is hugely complex and deeply immersive, demanding of its players an almost scholarly commitment to learning its history, its rules and its mythology — all of it chronicled in a series of exhaustive, encyclopedic official rule books that are the foundation of the game.With so much advanced knowledge and folklore out there, it might seem daunting to approach this “Dungeons & Dragons” film (now in theaters) as a newcomer to D&D. But the movie has in fact been made with novices in mind.“The intention was for nothing in the film to have to be explained prior to seeing it,” said Daley, who co-wrote the screenplay with Goldstein and Michael Gilio, in a recent video interview. “We knew that was of the utmost importance, so that we’re not alienating an audience that doesn’t know D&D.” Although the film contains more than enough Easter eggs and references to satisfy die-hard fans, “none of that is a requirement,” said Goldstein. “You don’t have to know how to fly an F-18 to enjoy ‘Top Gun.’”To help answer any lingering D&D questions you might still have going into “Honor Among Thieves,” Daley and Goldstein explained some of the movie’s more arcane nods and allusions.Who are the good guys and the bad guys?Broadly speaking, the film features two competing factions: the Harpers and the Red Wizards of Thay. (For much of the running time, our heroes are caught in the battle between them.) The Harpers are “a benevolent faction of essentially spies, who work in conjunction with good-aligned characters and places to help root out evil entities,” Daley said. One of their primary adversaries is Szass Tam, the leader of the Red Wizards, who rules as a dictator of the nation of Thay.Daisy Head, left, as Sofina in the film.Paramount PicturesWhat’s a class, and what classes are our heroes?One of the first steps in a game of “Dungeons & Dragons” is the choosing of a character class: It defines your identity based upon set skills and abilities, and limits what you can and can’t do in the game. Standard classes include monks, fighters, wizards and warlocks.The characters in the film were written with these classes in mind. Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard. Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) is a barbarian. We also see sorcerers (Justice Smith’s Simon), paladins (Regé-Jean Page’s Xenk) and a rare tiefling druid (Sophia Lillis’s Doric). Goldstein said that they wanted there to be “a clear distinction between each of the classes that was immediately recognizable to people who were aware of the game,” but they didn’t want the characters actually describing their types out loud. “Nobody ever says, ‘I’m a barbarian, what do you want from me?’ or anything like that.”Who’s aligned with what?One of D&D’s most enduring contributions is the idea of alignment — a moral category determined along the axes of good versus evil and law versus chaos. (If you have ever heard of someone being described as lawful good or chaotic evil, that’s where it comes from.)It’s easy enough to determine the alignment of each of the characters in “Honor Among Thieves,” as D&D fans will no doubt be glad to do. But Daley said that the alignments were less expressly conceived for the film than “coincidentally obvious” based on the way all fictional characters tend to be written.What are all these monsters?“Honor Among Thieves” is rife with curious creatures — all of them taken from the original game. Some are considered beasts, which are animals that could exist in the real world, and others are monstrosities, which Goldstein described as more “fantastical.”There are Mimic Chests (huge carnivorous mouths disguised as treasure chests) and the fan-favorite Gelatinous Cubes (more or less what it sounds like: huge cubes of goo that trap people inside).“There are also deeper cuts, like the Intellect Devourer, a brain-shaped creature with legs that takes control of your mind and kills you,” Goldstein said.A Gelatinous Cube traps one character in the film.Paramount PicturesAnd that … owl … bear … thing?… is an Owlbear, actually. It’s a big owl-bear hybrid that the druid, Doric, transforms into a couple of times in the film. Large and powerful, it’s one of the film’s more striking creatures.“The traditional Owlbear design often is more of a grizzly bear, but we thought it would look more beautiful if it looked like a snowy owl,” Goldstein said.Where does the movie take place?“Honor Among Thieves” isn’t set in a generic fantasy land. In fact, its globe-trotting adventures are situated in clearly delineated spaces based on pre-existing “Dungeons” maps and settings. “While writing the movie, we consulted the map,” Goldstein said. “We treated it like it was a movie about a real place with a real history.”The film largely takes place within an area called the Sword Coast, of the Forgotten Realms, along the western side of the continent of Faerun. We see such cities as Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate, glimpse the Arctic tundra of the northern Icewind Dale, and much more. The filmmakers took pains to make the geography game-accurate, being mindful of relative positions, travel times and how different areas relate. “If they go from Triboar to the Evermoors by horseback, we know that it’s a certain distance and that it would be possible,” Goldstein said.The film uses various locations from the game, like the ice prison Revel’s End.Paramount PicturesSo all of these places were already in the game?Not exactly. As the film opens, Edgin and Holga are serving a life sentence in the remote ice prison of Revel’s End, having been busted during a botched heist. Daley and Goldstein always knew they wanted to begin the movie this way — but when they reached out to the game’s manufacturer, Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), to ask if such a prison existed in the wintry region of Icewind Dale, they were informed that none did.Fortunately, Wizards worked their magic: A new “Dungeons” book released in the fall of 2020, “Rime of the Frostmaiden,” added Revel’s End and its parole board, the Absolution Council, to the official D&D canon. “That was one of the most gratifying parts of this whole process: seeing our names in a D&D book,” Daley said. “More so even than seeing our names on the poster for the movie.”What’s all that weird writing?As in “Star Wars,” “Honor Among Thieves” contains no written English. Instead, any of the script you see throughout the film is written in Thorass, a well-known in-game “Dungeons” language with its own established alphabet. Much as Trekkies can speak Klingon, many D&D obsessives will know the text by sight — and will no doubt be taking notes on what it means. “It was all very deliberate,” Goldstein said. “Anything you see in the film has meaning and can be translated.” More

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      Will Anyone Give ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ a Chance?

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      Olivia Wilde’s new film is trying to fight free of its pre-release reputation.Years ago, when I was a film critic, I was asked out for coffee by a guy who’d just been hired at the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t remember the purpose of the meeting. I just recall the sense — as he ventilated about the site’s “Tomatometer” rating, which would soon crush all my elitist insights into hard data — that I’d been summoned to witness the digging of my own grave.This was actually fine with me. I was already demoralized by the whole enterprise. I’d always seen the role of the critic as a conduit, someone who has an aesthetic experience and then reports on what it was like; I never cared to tell others what to see or avoid, imposing a hegemony of tastes and interests that I didn’t believe in. At work, though, I was feeling the pressure to serve readers with ratings and recommendations — and, increasingly, sites like Rotten Tomatoes seemed to push a binary of “good” and “bad,” all based on consensus. It was depressing, all this holding up of fingers to the wind. Consensus is a snowball with a hard, mineral center, barreling down a slope, and few people want to be on the wrong side.Sometimes consensus accretes around the story of a movie, even before people see the film itself. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a screening of “Don’t Worry Darling,” which I’d been looking forward to since first getting a glimpse of its poster. I had been vaguely aware of some noise emanating from the film’s press rollout, I suppose, but it wasn’t until the now-infamous spit video that I realized just how much flak the movie was catching. The video showed Harry Styles, one of the film’s stars, approaching his audience seat at the Venice Film Festival, suavely buttoning his jacket, leaning down and then — according to nothing but gleeful online supposition — purportedly hocking a loogie on another of the film’s stars, Chris Pine, who stops clapping and, with his eyes, traces a trajectory from Styles’ lips to his own lap. No actual spit is discernible in the video, and no motive was ascribed. But none were needed. Those few frames of video were scrutinized, analyzed, slowed, zoomed, dissected and compared to the Zapruder film so often that the joke begged for mercy.People were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark.To me, though, the Cold War artifact it recalled was Kremlinology — the practice of scrying every available scrap of information to discern the hidden motivations and power struggles of distant, unknowable figures. The events that drew such close attention to “Don’t Worry Darling” were not huge ones, in the scheme of things: They included a supposed feud between the director, Olivia Wilde, and the lead actress, Florence Pugh, possibly involving a pay gap between leads; the actor Shia LaBeouf’s being replaced, under disputed circumstances, with Styles; LaBeouf’s leaking messages from Wilde about Pugh; Wilde’s being served with custody papers from her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, while onstage at CinemaCon; and, above all, Wilde’s becoming romantically involved with Styles, 10 years her junior. Where the theoretical animosity between Styles and Pine was supposed to fit in was unclear. But by then people were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark — as long as it kept building the story of a woman who fostered a work environment so fraught that one star would spit on another, in public and on camera, for no apparent reason.More on ‘Don’t Worry Darling’In this much gossiped-about feminist gothic, Florence Pugh plays a seemingly happy housewife whose world starts to crack apart.Review: “If Pugh’s performance never gets beneath the shiny, satirical surface, it’s because there’s no place for it or her to go,” our critic writes of the film.Publicity Crisis: It was one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. But a series of missteps on the promotional trail, hinting at supposed feuds and behind-the-scenes drama, have raised questions about the film’s viability and about Olivia Wilde, its director.Bad Reputation: Amid all the rumors and negative press, a vocal portion of the public seems to have grown oddly invested in witnessing Wilde’s comeuppance. Will that affect the movie’s ratings?“Don’t Worry Darling” is just the most recent example of a film maudit, or “cursed film.” That was the term coined for Jean Cocteau’s Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, describing works that had been wrongfully neglected, or deemed too outrageous to merit serious attention — “movies rendered marginal by disrepute,” as J. Hoberman would later write in The Village Voice. Films made by women are not the only ones stuck in this defensive position, but they seem disproportionately prone to it, often with criticism centering on the director herself. (Elaine May’s experience on “Ishtar” was such that Hoberman classed her as a cineaste maudit; she wouldn’t direct again for decades.) Hints of a production’s chaos or excess are less likely to be taken as signs of unruly genius, and more often framed as messiness or lack of authority. The more that talk swirled around “Don’t Worry Darling,” the more its quality — and then, specifically, Wilde’s competence — were called into question.Out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.Cinema has a century’s worth of lore about films troubled by budget overages, clashing personalities and on-set affairs: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s wanting to kill each other while making “Fitzcarraldo,” mental breakdowns on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” Peter Bogdanovich’s leaving his actual genius of a wife after an affair with a young Cybill Shepherd on “The Last Picture Show.” These productions were plagued by bad press and rumors, but they never faced the wrath of stan Twitter. These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews. Then out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.But of course the idea that this consensus opinion emerges from some pure, objective place is disingenuous. Press always colors reviews — and now some vocal portion of the public seems oddly invested in Wilde’s comeuppance, a fact we may see reflected in ratings. (Given statements Wilde has made about some of the film’s real-world inspirations, it’s not hard to imagine the online response including the kind of organized backlash that has greeted other disfavored films.) And while critics’ responses won’t be actively malicious, they won’t be magically free of their own biases, either. “More or less the definition of the history of cinema,” Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker in 2012, “is: the stuff that most of the best-known critics didn’t like, or damned with faint praise — it isn’t that they didn’t care for it, but that they didn’t care about it.” Male film critics outnumber female ones 2 to 1, and tend to award “slightly higher average quantitative ratings to films with male protagonists,” according to studies conducted by Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.It’s odd that this could be the fate of “Don’t Worry Darling,” a film about men trapping women in a regressive, suffocating place where dissent means repudiation and exile — a film whose big plot developments must be hard for Wilde to resist talking about, given how much the narrative surrounding the film echoes their point. But it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the story, so I’ll just share an anecdote. My 14-year-old daughter came with me to the screening, unencumbered by external baggage. When the credits began to roll, she announced, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Seeing Wilde’s name among the cast, she asked which character the director had played. When I told her, she was impressed. She said: “I want to be her. I want to do what she does.” It made me happy to hear this. And then I started to worry.Source photographs: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images; Screen grab from Warner Bros.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl” and a contributing writer for the magazine. She frequently writes for the magazine’s Screenland column. More

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      ‘Doula’ Review: Rules of Contraction

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      An expectant mother and a male birthing counselor learn to get along in this dry, refreshingly candid comedy.Everything about Sascha (Will Greenberg), the titular character of the gestation comedy “Doula,” is comforting: his gentle voice, his soft belly, his cuddly cardigan. He’s like a plush toy reimagined as a birthing partner, and he’s exactly what Deb (Troian Bellisario), the unprepared mother-to-be, needs.Convincing her of this is the most entertaining section of a screenplay (by Arron Shiver) that initially skips and darts before taking a deep dive into the birth canal. The rom-com beats are deceptive: “Doula” (directed by Cheryl Nichols) has much more on its mind than romance. And a good thing, too, as the independent, outspoken Deb seems entirely mismatched with her controlling boyfriend, Silvio (Shiver). So when Silvio unilaterally hires Sascha, the son of Deb’s recently deceased midwife, as a replacement, Deb is not easily won over.“I’d like to show you some yoni stretches,” Sascha offers Deb, who would prefer to be masturbating. This explicitness about sex and desire during pregnancy, as well as other pleasures like alcohol and weed, is refreshing, as is the movie’s refusal to proselytize for home birth. Silvio might have purchased a birthing tub — again, without consulting Deb — but “Doula” takes sides only with the mother, its repeated insistence on a woman’s right to make her own choices landing with unexpected timeliness.Though finding mild humor in Silvio’s insecurities and the magnificently hairy forearms of Deb’s gynecologist (Chris Pine), “Doula” thrives mainly on Bellisario (always the most interesting of the “Pretty Little Liars”) and Greenberg’s tart-sweet connection. The running time is too long, and the finale’s screaming too prolonged; but, unlike childbirth, this good-natured movie delivers a dry, funny and utterly painless experience.DoulaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘All the Old Knives’ Review: Shooting Daggers Across the Table

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      In this thriller, Thandiwe Newton and Chris Pine work to out-smolder and outwit each other as old C.I.A. colleagues and former lovers catching up over dinner.Espionage thrillers usually traffic in globe-trotting mayhem, so in “All the Old Knives,” it’s refreshing to find one whose main ingredients are two stars out-smoldering each other over dinner.Chris Pine plays Henry, a C.I.A. operative. Thandiwe Newton plays Celia, a colleague who left the agency after their team in Vienna failed to resolve a flight hijacking that ended in mass fatalities. The present action is set eight years later. The head of their division (Laurence Fishburne) has learned that a mole may have fed information to the perpetrators. If it was Celia, Henry, her former lover, is ideally situated to catch her in a lie.So the two old flames meet in a water-view restaurant in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., to gab about how fresh the fish is, how good the bacon on Henry’s appetizer smells and whether Celia leaked secrets to international terrorists. Flashbacks show us who was where and when. And apart from a show-offy (apparent) single take that swans around the Vienna office introducing personnel, the director, Janus Metz, working from a screenplay by Olen Steinhauer (who also wrote the novel), mostly keeps things fast and easy, making everything look like a magazine spread.One downside of the small scale is that it only allows for a handful of suspects; the incriminating call Celia may have placed could just as easily have come from her boss (Jonathan Pryce, delivering infinitely subtle variations on how to act nervous in every scene). While “All the Old Knives” keeps cleverly resetting the table it’s laid out, it can’t fundamentally alter the meal.All the Old KnivesRated R. Sex, with a dash of Viennese sophistication. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘The Contractor’ Review: The Pine Identity

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      Chris Pine and Ben Foster team up to play mercenaries in a solid thriller about losing your faith and finding yourself in a violent reckoning.Chris Pine often seems too pretty, too nice, decent and, well, intelligent for his movies. He’s comfortable sharing the screen with both men and women, and can persuasively shift registers, all while letting you see him thinking, not just emoting. His range elevates action movies like “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” a 2014 take on the Tom Clancy property. Even so, I forgot that I’d reviewed “Jack Ryan” until I looked it up recently. Like too many of Pine’s movies, it just didn’t stick.Multiple knowns and unknowns shape the careers of actors — the choices that they make and the good and baffling ones that are made for and despite them. For whatever reason, Pine has never taken off the way he should have. One obvious explanation is that unlike, say, Andrew Garfield or the Marvelites named Chris (Evans, Hemsworth, Pratt), Pine hasn’t slipped on a superhero suit. He did voice one of the title characters in the animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” but that was a collective rather than self-aggrandizing endeavor.And while Pine has done time in the superhero world (including as Wonder Woman’s squeeze), his biggest franchise turn as a headliner has been in the uneven “Star Trek” series, in which he plays Captain Kirk. (A fourth is apparently in the works.) Pine has made Kirk his own with a deft balance of personality and character homage that holds the center even when the movies collapse around him. He has also appeared in a raft of fine and middling smaller movies. What’s missing from his résumé is more work that’s sharp and distinctive enough to rise above the gray middle, the way that his 2016 western “Hell or High Water” did.Which brings me to Pine’s latest, “The Contractor,” a thriller that yearningly evokes the Bourne series while never approaching its level. (Pine even mentions that franchise in this movie’s production notes.) He plays James, an Army Special Forces officer recovering from a serious injury that he suffered out in the field, and that has nearly ruined one of his knees. It’s a character-defining detail (he’s vulnerable, physically and otherwise) that also works as a convenient plot device. But James’s struggles also extend to the home front: Like many American families, his is badly in debt and the bills keep coming.“The Contractor” has some serious things on its mind, notably James’s crisis of faith about service, nation and his military father’s legacy. The first hour or so sets up his situation steadily with introductions and explanations, along with a dramatic jolt that sets the narrative on its course: As he hobbles toward recovery, with bills spread out on the kitchen table, James is booted out of the Army without a pension for taking unsanctioned meds. He’s still a good guy, the story assures you, though it whiffs on assigning who’s to blame for his dire straits: him, his superior, the military or the bitter dregs of what’s still called the American dream?All these earnest sensitivities fade for a time once the story shifts gears, turning the movie into a tight, brutal thriller. Seeing no other option financially, with a small family to support — Gillian Jacobs does what she can with the rote wife role — James signs on with a private military firm. The energy picks up with the entrance of Ben Foster (Pine’s co-star in “Hell or High Water”), a former Army buddy who works for the outfit and now owns a big house and truck. The casting of Kiefer Sutherland as the company’s owner is a nice touch, mostly because you know that there’s a whole lot of serious trouble coming James’s way.Written by J.P. Davis and directed by Tarik Saleh, “The Contractor” finds its genre groove once James signs up with the company. As more pieces click into place, the filmmakers heat up the story and the atmosphere, creating a mounting sense of unease. James heads off to the owner’s ranch, where burly he-men help run a coffee company, presumably a nod at the veteran-owned Black Rifle Coffee Company (one of the Jan. 6 insurrections wore one of its logoed caps). At some point, amid all the wolfish smiles and bulging muscles, someone lobs an insult at Erik Prince, the founder of the private military firm Blackwater.The second half of the movie moves quickly, boom, boom, boom, and shows off Saleh’s ability to fluidly stage violent set pieces. James is sent to Berlin on an enigmatic assignment involving an mysterious scientist and, after some tension-ratcheting quiet, things rapidly go south. The great German actress Nina Hoss briefly shows up, adding a dash of glamour to the escalating mayhem. Pine and Foster sync up flawlessly, even when the dialogue fails them. This isn’t the reunion they deserve, but it’s nevertheless welcome. In silence and in action, they show you the unfathomable loss that the rest of movie never coherently expresses.The ContractorRated R for extreme gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More