If you want to witness an exercise in hopelessness, take a gander at “Crisis,” an early frontrunner for 2021’s Feel-Bad Movie of the Year. A strong cast (Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear, Gary Oldman) examines the opioid issue from multiple angles – junkies, overdosers, recoverers, dealers, law enforcement, researchers and Big Pharma. It’s not pretty. There’s suspense, however, as you see various storylines careening toward each other and you’re trying to guess which ones are going to make it to the intersection, which ones are (literally) going to die trying, and if it’s possible for anybody to get away clean.
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I imagine someone took a Western short story, adapted it for the 1970s as a one-act play called “Shootout at the IRA Corral,” and mailed it to Martin Scorsese with a note saying, “Betcha can’t make a movie like Tarantino!” That’s how I imagine Scorsese ended up executive producing “Free Fire,” which made the 2016 international festival circuit and then bombed at the 2017 U.S. box office. I don’t care. It’s funny. It’s got Irish guys, a cute girl, a bunch of Buscemi-like weasels running around and a dude that looks like he just stepped off the set of “Argo.”
I watched “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (2015) with my mom, who is old enough to remember the 1960s TV show. Her assessment? “I liked it, but I don’t think young people would like it, because it’s too quiet.” What she means is that while it’s an action movie, it’s not a video game or a comic book. It’s an actual spy movie with an actual spy plot, human-scale action sequences, and a stylish level of subtlety and pacing that might come across as “quiet” to an 83-year-old woman. Or “boring” to a 16-year-old boy; thus its box-office struggles not surprising.
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