Schweighofer, Matthias

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    ‘Brick’ Review: No Way Out?

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    In the overly constructed thriller from Germany, tenants are trapped in apartment building by a mysterious bulwark.“Brick” is built almost entirely of hints and twists. Even so, it feels spoiler-free to share that Liv, an architect who is trapped in an apartment building in Hamburg, Germany, concludes that the material composing the barricades is neither carbon fiber nor liquid granite.Liv (Ruby O. Fee) attempts to escape the apartment building with her video game-designing spouse, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer). Tim is haunted by flashbacks of a family tragedy, one that provides the movie its iffy metaphorical mortar and moral. Hint: Like the building, Tim’s emotions are also entombed.The pair may be at an impasse, but skills-wise, they are well-suited for the task at hand. The couple are joined by Marvin (an amusing Frederick Lau) and Ana (Salber Lee Williams), who are drug-imbibing lovebirds, as well as the cagey veteran Oswalt (Axel Werner) and his bright granddaughter, Lea (Sira-Anna Faal). They also meet an outlier set on not escaping: Yuri (Murathan Muslu).But what, exactly, is the mysterious bulwark that transforms from a mosaic of smooth black bricks to undulating metal and back again? Does it have anything to do with the inky plume billowing near the harbor? Or is it, as Marvin frets, some sort of diabolical game ginned up by their short-term “super-host”? Or maybe it’s a high-tech fortress keeping them safe from a Deep State catastrophe, as Yuri fervidly claims. The writer and director Philip Koch teases these ideas up to the final image.Make sure to watch this thriller in its original German. Dubbed into English, it goes from mildly diverting to landing like a ton of, well ….BrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Army of Thieves’ Review: A Little Help From Some Old Friends

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      This “Army of the Dead” prequel leans in, deliberately, to every last heist movie cliché.The heist at the center of “Army of the Dead,” the action-horror zombie flick Zack Snyder directed for Netflix earlier this year, wasn’t much of a heist at all — a cursory, surface-level safecracking scene that felt like a brief digression from all the violent zombie mayhem happening around it. “Army of Thieves,” a prequel starring and directed by the “Army of the Dead” ensemble player Matthias Schweighöfer, takes place in the very early days of the zombie apocalypse, and with the undead safely confined to the United States, the Europe-set “Thieves” is free to focus entirely on heisting. In fact, this is a heist movie about heist movies: While it stops short of outright parody, it’s meta in the extreme.Heist movies tend of course to be similar and predictable, and “Army of Thieves” leans in, very self-consciously, to the style of the genre. You’ve got all the usual stuff — the assembly of the team of experts with highly specialized skills, the double-cross that’s really a triple-cross, the plan that looks like it’s failed only to turn out that the failure was part of the plan. A recent episode of “Rick and Morty” wittily summarized heist movies as “60% putting a crew together and 40% revealing that the robbery already happened,” and that strikes the heart of the problem: A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.Army of ThievesNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Army of the Dead’ Review: Thieving Las Vegas

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      Zack Snyder’s zombies-in-Vegas extravaganza is an exhausting pivot from brilliant to boring, accomplished to shambolic.Leave it to Zack Snyder to wonder if “Ocean’s Eleven” could have been improved by the addition of zombies. Netflix, at least, entertained this possibility, and the result is “Army of the Dead,” a prolix heist-horror hybrid whose undeceased are a sight more fun than its living.That’s just as well, as this supersized bloodletting feels as interminable as a Las Vegas summer. Yet the movie’s prologue — an inspired collision of comedy, camp, carnage and back story — is downright masterly, laying out the origin of the infection that has turned showgirls, Elvis impersonators and a tiger named Valentine into crazed flesh-munchers. In other words, Vegas is still bleeding visitors dry, only now the exsanguination is literal.Outside the hastily walled-off city, a handful of displaced survivors (led by Dave Bautista with all the expressiveness of a flak jacket) is planning to brave the infected to rob a vault containing $200 million. Aside from Matthias Schweighöfer as a jumpy safecracker and Tig Notaro as a hard-boiled helicopter pilot, the would-be thieves — whose tiresome motivations only cripple the story’s momentum — are singularly unmemorable. All we need to know is that they have just hours to grab the loot before a nuclear bomb will obliterate the city. On July 4, naturally.With its sticky pacing and divinely unsubtle soundtrack (though The Cranberries’ “Zombie” is always excusable), “Army of the Dead” is an ungainly, yet weirdly mesmeric lump of splatter-pop filmmaking. Its grim images of quarantined refugees and rotting hordes summon a bleakness at odds with its most fun creation: An elite zombie power couple with functioning brains. Snyder should probably have given them final cut.Army of the DeadRated R for slain humans and slaughtered dialogue. Running time: 2 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More