Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been balancing work, personal creative writing, Blue Prince runs, and further episodes of Dimension 20, as I munch through its second, fantasy New York-set season. After watching so much Critical Role, I’m feeling a little foolish about only now checking in on the work of a dungeon master whose style and priorities are so much closer to my own. Basically everything I have issues with regarding Matt Mercer’s style is resolved by Brennan Lee Mulligan, who shares my preference for more direct, narrative-driven sagas where player agency is exercised through the moment-to-moment action, rather than through choosing their approach to an entire continent’s worth of potential conflicts. It’s a far more cinematic, propulsive approach that allows for significantly more coherent character arcs, and has me taking all sorts of mental notes regarding player direction and NPC construction. I’ll likely have more to say on that later, but for now, let’s quit with the dilly-dallying and get to the week in films!
First up this week was The Last Breath, a recent creature feature centered on a group of college friends reuniting for a Caribbean vacation. In a fit of genre-necessitated recklessness, the group decide to go scuba diving within a submerged WWII vessel, one which is buried so deeply in the sand that it is essentially both underwater and underground. Unfortunately, a family of sharks turn out to have also booked the battleship for a picnic date, leading to a bloody spectacle within its subaquatic/terranean halls.
Nothing is likely to surprise you in this feature, though I did appreciate the uniquely claustrophobic concept of its twice-buried aquatic tomb. This device is also employed to justify the lack of biological growth within the battleship, leading the group to discover a series of air bubbles they can rely on within its halls. As a result, The Last Breath proceeds much like a recent Resident Evil game, with characters briefly braving corridors haunted by sharks as they hop between safe rooms, all of which lends a touch of dramatic progression and mechanical coherency to the escape process.
The cast is roughly as accomplished as you’d expect from a film where, when googling it, I had to first clarify I was not referring to the Creed song, and then clarify I also didn’t mean the recent Woody Harrelson feature. That’s basically expected for these concept-driven genre exercises, but somewhat more damning is the fact that the film doesn’t really have the goods; beyond the anxiety presented by its fundamental concept, there are no standout setpieces, no fresh nightmares beyond the general speed with which a shark can be here and gone, taking your leg up to the thigh in the process. 47 Meters Down isn’t a great film, but it has precisely one image I’ll never forget; The Last Breath never finds its image, and flounders as a result.
As we are apparently deep in our Neeson era at the moment, we followed that up with Run All Night, another dad thriller from the reliable actor-director team of Liam Neeson and Jaume Collet-Serra, who’ve also collaborated on Unknown, Non-Stop, and The Commuter. Neeson here plays a former mob hitman, who is dragged back into action when he is forced to kill the son of his old boss (Ed Harris). This instigates a violent chase around New York City and beyond, as Neeson settles old debts while attempting to ensure his own son can live freely.
Run All Night is a step up from these two’s usual collaborations in terms of scale and narrative ambition, and makes excellent use of its temporal conceit (the film takes place over roughly one full day) to illustrate the variable faces of New York City. Neeson has made a pocket industry out of playing old men haunted by regrets, and here is matched ably by Ed Harris, whose palpable sorrow at being forced to hunt his old friend gives the film a nice patina of fatalistic melancholy. On the other hand, rapper-actor Common is wasted on a largely superfluous role, and both plot and performances waver whenever we stray too far from the core Harris-Neeson conflict. A perfectly watchable yet entirely inessential thriller.
Our next viewing was AFRAID, a recent Chris Weitz horror film starring John Cho and Katherine Waterston as a couple grappling with three unruly kids, whose lives are turned upside down when the artificial intelligence AIA is introduced to their home. While initially welcomed as a research assistant by Waterston and confidant to her children, problems soon emerge as AIA exhibits violent and controlling tendencies, ultimately forcing a battle between old-fashioned family bonds and the wave of the future.
Given its comfortably unchallenged PG-13 rating, there was never much chance that AFRAID was going to be genuinely scary. Still, there are fragments of good horror ideas here that are never quite fully realized – AIA constructing fake intruders that haunt their external cameras, deepfaking dead family members to manipulate their feelings, or inserting half-glimpsed figures of horror and mystery into their youngest son’s youtube videos. Additionally, Cho and Waterston’s performances are both excellent, the pair easily selling both their love and their dislocation as things steadily get worse.
Nonetheless, with basically no genuinely scary moments and generally indifferent filmmaking, AFRAID has trouble provoking much of an emotional reaction. Its greatest strength is the film it could have been, and intermittently gestures at being – like through the clever distribution of the modern internet’s horrors across our couple’s three children. The deepfaked cancelling and social isolation of their teen daughter, the violent radicalization of their adolescent son, the psychotic youtube slop consumed by their toddler – all three of these fears are urgent and inescapable, alongside the general surveillance state the film is proposing more broadly. But you need to do something with these ideas, not just raise them and set them aside, and AFRAID’s muddled final act betrays a lack of certainty regarding how any of these anxieties might be either fully realized or overcome. It was smart of them to strike while the iron was hot regarding the unnerving visual grotesquery of generative AI, but it might have been worth letting that iron cool a bit to brainstorm a proper third act.
Last up was Forty Guns, a ‘57 Samuel Fuller western starring Barry Sullivan as Griff Bonnell, a former gunslinger who now works for the Attorney General’s office. His journey to take in the mail-robbing Howard Swain eventually leads him to Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), who has carved out a slice of the west with the force of her titular forty gunslingers. The two collide with all the force and desperation of a dying age, a repentant gunslinger and defiant empire-builder thrown together by circumstance, yet set in conflict by the dying embers of wild western pride.
Sorry I got a little operatic there, but Forty Guns certainly deserves it. The film is lean yet sweeping, presenting a classic contrast of western grandeur in decline, and elevating its drama through Fuller’s restrained romanticism, his unquestioned understanding that what was allegedly beautiful about the gunslinging age was only ever a rose-tinted mirage. Stanwyck could not be more perfectly cast here; she commands the screen with her every appearance, making it unquestionable how she might have carved an empire in such a wild place, yet simultaneously selling her absorption with fellow lost soul Griff Bonnell. A thoroughly compelling watch.
