GORGE (C-minus) - I rolled my eyes so much that it was difficult to keep focused on how embarrassed I was for Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller as they were toting guns, doing battle with alien life forms and, of course, falling in love.
It's also hard to write a quick synopsis with a straight face. You see, they are expert sharp-shooters, with hundreds of kills between them and the requisite guilt that piles up on the soft shoulders of these earnest millennials who are good people deep down, because they care about their dad (her) or write poetry (him), and they're cute. Teller is American Levi, and Taylor-Joy is the Russian Drasa, and they are each on a secret mission to guard opposite sides of a grand abyss that, below a layer of fog, hides deformed superhuman creatures down at the proverbial gates of hell. The critters like to scamper up the sides of the gorge, but darn it if Levi and Drasa don't pick off every one of them (sometimes just in the nick of time!). The critters, conveniently, don't scamper up the sides and try to escape during times when it's convenient for the plot -- like when Levi and Drasa have a forbidden sexy date together or drop down into the pit to do a little battle with the devil's spawn.
You can't go five minutes in this two-plus-hour technicolor yawn of a movie without enduring an absolutely implausible tick in the plot. Sigourney Weaver plays a bad-ass intelligence commander who oversees the American side of the divide, and it's hilarious to watch Weaver's much younger stand-in run for her life when all hell breaks loose at the climax. Taylor-Joy, who can't weigh much more than 92 pounds here, effortlessly wields automatic weapons that are half her size while never missing her target. Teller struggles to prove once again that he's not a lightweight himself, by spitting his lines with a bitter world-weariness and later soaping up in the shower. Right off the start, Levi would know not to engage with the other side under threat of certain personal extinction, but doggone it, the heart wants what it wants, right?
Drasa and Levi can not only read each other's cue-card-size notes across the foggy gorge, but they can often hear incidental sounds from that distance. (The ears are as sharp as the eyes!) When all hell breaks loose, nothing goes wrong for our intrepid couple -- computers improbably spring to life; a long-dormant Jeep rumbles into action at the touch of two wires (and runs great!); the pair have an unerring sense of direction, even without GPS; explosions barely mess their hair let alone separate their bodies from their limbs; and little Drasa gets dragged at 40 mph, banging her head on a fallen tree trunk along the way, and she's none worse for the wear. And, as in every movie, the bad guys (things) conveniently like to attack one at a time, so that the hero can fend them off in succession. Some things haven't changed since I watched "Batman" on TV as a child.
There is a germ of a clever idea here. Whatever is going on down below is the unintended result of a post-WWII pact among the victors, a misguided act of hubris that told Robert Oppenheimer "Hold my beer." Levi and Drasa are on one-year assignments, cut off from the rest of the world, under strict orders not to engage with the other side. (But how could they not when a cute gal is acting all flirty and is packing a hipster collection of 45-rpm records.)
Pulp director Scott Derrickson and journeyman writer Zach Dean regurgitate plot points gleaned from binge-watching every action film and horror movie they could get their hands on. They create a somewhat interesting mucky underworld, and their budget allowed for unlimited explosions. They lucked out in getting two of the hotter young actors to agree to play some combination of Maverick, Indiana Jones, Wonder Woman and American Sniper. Taylor-Joy rocks a mild Russian accent that isn't too silly. Teller broods like a child doing an imitation of Robert Mitchum or Steve McQueen.
But the idea that these two relative soft targets could even think of racing through the bowels of hell to save humanity is just too absurd to take as seriously as we are doing right now. I've seen Roadrunner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote performs more believable stunts than Levi does here. They'll greenlight anything these days to provide content to Apple TV, especially when it is needed for Valentine's Day.
* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.
BONUS TRACK
The schizophrenic soundtrack includes a jolt of "Blitzkrieg Bop" from the Ramones, a Bach suite, and a part-rap version of Bob Dylan's "(All Along the) Watchtower." The most on-the-nose choice is "Spitting Off the Edge of the World" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Perfume Genius:
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