Best of 2016: Honorable Mentions

2016 was bad. Just ugly, toxic, divisive, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad.

Except for film. In that one category, 2016 was *awesome*! It was a year when filmmakers took risks, writers bucked convention, directors toyed with genre and even the stiffest franchise fare from the major studios flexed their creative muscles — for good or ill.

The annual Top 10 is coming soon. But as always, and in particular this year, there was an abundance of quality film that demands recognition.

Best Box Office Flop: The Nice Guys

It is a crime, an honest-to-God, should-be-prosecuted crime that The Nice Guys failed to find an audience. It’s a neo-noir action comedy, pairing Ryan Gosling and Russel Crowe as wise-cracking private detectives in late-70s Los Angeles, and is writer-director Shane Black’s follow-up to Iron Man 3. (Black, by the way, also wrote and directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which if you haven’t seen yet WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS PARAGRAPH AND NOT RECTIFYING YOUR WASTED LIFE?)

Black has a talent for structured chaos, in which everyman characters save the day through a combination of ingenuity and dumb luck as dominoes fall around them. His action scenes are like Rube Goldberg contraptions, which burst outward in unexpected ways without every sacrificing credibility. And his scripts, meanwhile, are filled to the brim with smart, winking dialogue that  sizzles with energy. It’s a delightful recipe that in Nice Guys puts a modern spin on the old gum-shoe tale with jazzy, retro setting.

Best Superhero: Doctor Strange

In a year of strong competition (Deadpool, Civil War) and weak competition (Batman v Superman) it’s Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sorcerer Supreme that turns in the most memorable comic-book tale of the year. As satisfying as the other entries are (or aren’t), they still amount to “Who Punches Hardest?” while Dr. Strange culminates around a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria and the manipulation of time and space. And while the Marvel movies are routinely lacking by way of compelling antagonists, Strange scores by revealing its big bad to be an amorphous mass while setting up more personal threats down the road. The line for DS-2 starts here.

Best Documentary: Tickled

Welcome to the wonderful of competitive endurance tickling, where teams of young, male athletes take turns tying each other down and tickling the stuffing out of each other. If that sounds like some weird kinky fetish, well…it kind of is.

What starts as a passing curiosity for journalist David Farrier quickly turns increasingly bizarre and sinister as Farrier falls further down the rabbit whole of internet tickling videos. There’s not much more to say without spoiling the films myriad twists, suffice to say that Tickled tells the kind of true story that gives meaning to the phrase “stranger than fiction.”

Best Indie (tie): The Witch, Love & Friendship

Two Sundance Festival breakouts share the distinction of 2016’s best indie. Both period pieces, albeit on opposite ends of the genre spectrum, one is a minimalist thriller about a frontier family battling a malicious entity and the other is a Regency-era comedy about a master of manipulation. They’re also among the eeriest and funniest, respectively, cinema produced this year. In either case the filmmakers show an impeccable attention to detail and atmosphere, giving the scenes a lived-in quality in which the actors can disappear, serving spine tingles and belly-laughs in spades.

Best Western: The Magnificent Seven

In today’s landscape of sequels, prequels, sidequels and all other -quels, its refreshing to see a movie with a healthy budget and recognizable actors commit to telling a single story rather than twisting itself into a narrative pretzel for future installments. And movies are meant to entertain, and sometimes an old fashioned shoot-em-up is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Such are the strengths of The Magnificent Seven, a saddles and spurs yarn about a motley crew of assorted scoundrels teaming up to take out a mustache-twirling villain, with no larger ambitions then to tell its tale of camaraderie and derring-do. It’s a pleasure watching the pieces come together, and it builds to a bombastic climax this is remarkably satisfying for its ability to avoid the pratfalls of lesser efforts while honoring expectations.

Best Head Trip: The Invitation

When Will arrives at his former home, to attend a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife, something is just a little…off. Thus begins one of the most effective thrillers in years, that takes “slow burn” to a new level, incrementally dialing up Will’s paranoia and building up to a climax that is both inevitable and shocking when it arrives. Director Karyn Kusama is almost too effective at making the audience sense the unease, aided by stellar work by Game of Throne’s Michiel Huisman and jack-of-all-trades John Carroll Lynch, and the final moments of the film’s kicker ending are expertly composed to haunting results.

Best Setup: 10 Cloverfield Lane

10 Cloverfield Lane, the second film in the barely-defined anthology universe of Cloverfield, has third act problems. Your mileage may vary on the ending, but whether you like or loath the climax, there is no denying that what comes before it is Grade-A mystery box storytelling. For two-thirds of the movie, the audience is kept at arms length about what is or is not going on in an underground bunker and the world above it. At the center is John Goodman, who makes poetry of his doomsday prepper who is either a reluctant savior or an unhinged predator, or both, or neither.

Things go a little sideways, to say the least, when the Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s heroine makes it outside. But even if you turned off the film at that point it would be time well spent.

And finally, the 2016 Wood’s Stock Balls-To-The-Wall Award goes to:

Green Room

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier made a splash in the indie scene with his film Blue Ruin, a revenge tale that took a nuts-and-bolts approach to on-camera violence. In his follow-up, Green Room, Saulnier flexes those same muscles but with a greater degree of confidence as a storyteller.

The film, which features one of the final performances by the extremely talented and tragically gone-too-soon Anton Yelchin, revolves around a punk rock band fighting for survival after a gig at a skinhead bar goes south. It’s a story of colliding motivations, and told in a way that feels raw and human, within the realm of possibility and prone to the errors of casual mistakes.

Oh, and did I mention that Patrick Stewart plays a neo-Nazi?

Not for the faint of heart, the walls of Green Room are painted red with blood. But Saulnier’s style is not one of torture-porn exploitation. It focuses instead on the lengths people can and do go when backed into a corner, and it makes for a wild ride.

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Movie Review: 2 Guns

At the center of 2 Guns is an interesting premise: Two criminals bite off more than they can chew during a bank robbery and as bad men come knocking for the money they stole, the bandits each realize that their partner in crime is actually an undercover government agent.

Unfortunately, the film never rises to meet it’s own challenge. It’s an amusing but ultimately lukewarm caper, which cycles through familiar territory and fails to present the viewer with a compelling case for they are sitting in a darkened theater watching the events unfold on the screen besides the air conditioned respite from the summer heat.

Part heist flick, part shoot-em-up and part whodunit, 2 Guns stars Denzel Washington as undercover DEA agent Bobby Trench and Mark Wahlberg as undercover Naval Intelligence officer Michael Stigman.

The two men, independently investigating the dealings of Mexican drug kingpin Papi Greco (Battlestar Gallactica’s Edward James Olmos), are thrust together through circumstances that are never fully explained and are eventually led to the Tres Cruces bank where they believe Greco has stashed roughly $4 million in dirty dough.

But after hitting the bank and discovering far more green than they expected, the two boys realize they’ve been set up by their respective organizations and become locked in a multi-faceted scramble for the cash involving the aforementioned Mexican Cartel, corrupt government officials and their own distrust for one another.

The movie bets big on the interplay between its two stars, a gamble that for the most part pays off. Washington and Wahlberg engage in a series of bromantic tussles while firing off sarcastic jabs and ammunition with a sense of winking, plot-holes-be-damned nonchalance that keeps things lively throughout the welcome 90-minute running time. A few more minutes and the gags would have worn their welcome but director Baltasar Kormákur cuts the action off with aplomb and not a moment to spare after a climax that sees the various threads pulled together for a final Mexican Standoff, in Mexico.

It’s an inevitable conclusion as the viewer is promised a final act where the warring factions collide and while it’s not immediately apparent how things will wrap up, there is nothing particularly shocking or revelatory about its execution. The plot is neither predictable nor twisty – instead things just happen to characters you neither like nor dislike. In broader strokes, 2 Guns is not particularly good or woefully bad, it merely exists, which is more than can be said for a lot of recent Hollywood fare.

The supporting cast is a collection of not-quite-A-list actors thrust into one-dimensional roles that wear their motivations on their sleeves. X-Men’s James Marsden is Wahlberg’s obviously smarmy Navy superior and Ghost Protocol’s Paula Patton is the untrustworthy eye candy and romantic foil.

Of all the cast members, it’s Bill Paxton who is clearly having the most fun as a bolo tie-wearing government man who chews the scenery like a tender brisket and prefers Russian Roulette as his interrogation tactic of choice. His corrupt Earl reads like a cross between the backwoods vigilantism of Paxton’s Randall McCoy and the oily petulance of Aliens’ Private Hudson.

With Washington and Wahlberg, 2 Guns is an interesting pairing as each actor is coming off of a successful, modestly-budgeted winter thriller of their own with last year’s Safe House (Washington) and Contraband (Wahlberg). Safe House opened in February and netted $126 million while Contraband (which shares both star and director with 2 Guns) opened one month earlier to gross $66 million on a $25 million budget.

Only time will tell how the R-rated 2 Guns fairs at the box office this weekend, but one can’t help but wonder while watching if the “Where’s My Money?” actioner would have been better suited to the cinema doldrums of the winter season. As it is, opening in early August during a season that has laid waste to nearly every piece of Hollywood spectacle, the relatively understated 2 Guns feels out of place: for better or worse.

Should 2 Guns prove the next victim of 2013’s Summer of Flops we can all sit back and point yet again to the bombastic over-saturation of the marketplace, and should it succeed we’ll have to endure the titular-absurdity of an inevitable sequel 2 Guns 2: Shoot 2 Kill.

In the end, 2 Guns does not demand to be seen but the low-fi action and winking banter of its leads makes for an un-ambitiously entertaining trip to the cinema.

Grade: B-

*2 Guns opens nationwide on Friday, August 2.

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