The Giver - Film Review

The Giver is a very odd movie. It features a couple of very appealing young actors in Australia’s Brenton Thwaites as Jonas and Odeya Rush as Fiona; the film’s leads. It has the presence of Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep in key supporting roles. It even has a small role for singer Taylor Swift designed, no doubt, to appeal to the young adults who buy her music. The film is directed by Phillip Noyce, another Australian with a wealth of film-making experience dating back to the 1970s, who has directed some great action thriller movies. It’s based on the controversial but very successful book of the same name, written by author Lois Lowry. Yet, The Giver lacks focus and feels too much like a series of scenes tied together by quick-cuts of home movies that serve to fill the space in places where it should be creating its own dramatic moments but, instead, relies on stock footage to convey the emotion it wants it characters and its audience to feel.

The challenge of adapting The Giver into a movie is highlighted in the visualisation of the drab, emotionless, colourless, homogenous society in which the bulk of the story takes place. As with many young adult science fiction stories, this one is set in a dystopian future where some kind of “climate event” has forced the creation of a large-scale secured community, where individuality is not allowed, the inhabitants are drugged and the government of “elders” rule by way of pseudo-martial law. The setting is a variation on the 1976 Logan’s Run movie and it would not be surprising if the owners of the Logan’s Run copyright took legal action if ever they see The Giver, the similarities are so pronounced. One of the opening scenes comes so close to plagiarising the opening Carousel sequence from Logan’s Run that it’s concerning that somebody else’s intellectual property could be so easily infringed without consequence.

The tedium of the film is reflected in the tedium of the various cultural ceremonies that are depicted, including one where the “children” – Jonas, Fiona and their friend Asher played by Cameron Monaghan – become “adults” when they are allocated their responsibility within the community. Fiona is nominated as a care-giver for the young, while Asher, in a way too on-the-nose set-up of “he’s the bad guy”, is selected to become a drone pilot. (It’s a pretty ham-fisted piece of analogy that criticises America’s use of the type of technology in the real world.) Jonas, however, misses out and is left standing on his own after his other 149 classmates have all received their job allocations. Meryl Streep, sleep-walking her way through the role of Chief Elder, announces that Jonas will become the Receiver; the most important role in the community. Watching on is Jeff Bridges as the current Receiver, who will instruct Jonas and transfer the knowledge of the outside world and past history to him.

It’s all very cliché and by-the-numbers film making. Moments where obvious tension should exist, there’s none. Scenes where the viewer should care whether or not Jonas will succeed in becoming the next Receiver fall flat and fizzle to nothing. Perhaps the bland setting of the film itself somehow infected the production with an inertia that made it difficult for any of them to energise their performances to a point that makes the film’s 100 minute running time of any real interest to the viewer. Jeff Bridges gives yet another gruff performance that has become his stock and trade in recent years and, in this role, has a serious case of the ‘Marlon Brando Mumbles’. To make matters worse, screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert Weide introduce a sub-plot for Bridge’s character that is so poorly executed that it only serves to confuse the already-struggling narrative drive of the film. The manner in which the film has been edited together leaves a very definite suspicion that important story material was left out; much of which was exposition to help the audience understand how Thwaites and Bridges’ characters are able to communicate the way they do and to provide a more detailed account of the meaning behind the film’s ending.

The Giver also commits the movie-making crime of not providing the audience with a clear-cut resolution to the story it’s trying to tell. Admittedly, this is a carry-over from Lois Lowry’s novel and if Christopher Nolan had made The Giver perhaps the ambiguity of the ending may have been more meaningful because of what had preceded it. Phillip Noyce is no Christopher Nolan and The Giver is not Inception. Those familiar with Lowry’s other books already know the fate of Jonas, but the way in which the film presents its ending feels like a cheat because it leaves the impression that The Giver’s producers are trying to create a franchise for future adventures. The problem with this approach is that it takes the audience who have paid good money to see a self-contained movie with a self-contained story for granted. More and more movie makers are trying to achieve “franchise” success with their movies but it creates schizophrenic story-telling because the plot gets hi-jacked by story points that are not related to the film’s narrative. The Giver is an example of this, although not quite on the same scale as The Amazing Spiderman 2.

The Giver is an underwhelming addition to the growing sub-genre of young adult dystopian science fiction and, unfortunately, has been released at a time when more superior versions of this type of film have either just been released or will soon be released -The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One. 

The Equalizer - Film Review

The Equalizer is an entertaining film but serves to frustrate because, upon reflection, the viewer comes to realise that it could have been so much better if more consideration had been given to logical progression of its story. Denzel Washington turns in an every-man performance that allows him to display enough semblance of humanity to keep the film from becoming a preposterous exercise in the pursuit of gratuitous violence. What could have been a genuinely great film that expanded upon the central concept of its 1980s TV namesake teeters on the edge of becoming yet another entry in the rapidly expanding over-50s action revenge thriller sub-genre that has seen Liam Neeson reshape his career into an admired anti-hero.

Fortunately, Denzel Washington, as the mysterious Robert McCall, never allows himself to fall into the trap of muttering down the end of the phone to a disembodied antagonist, but he sure comes close as The Mechanic and Expendables 2 writer Richard Wenk’s script struggles to maintain a dramatic balance from which to make Washington’s character credible. The movie starts extremely well, as the First Act establishes a compelling scenario and range of secondary characters that enable McCall to become the avenging protagonist of the film’s title in its final stages. McCall is a man with a past, but the first half of the film doesn’t feel the need to embellish his story it simply allows the audience to partake in his routine and engage in conjecture as to the kind of man he is and may have been.

The Second Act fails to capitalise on the strong set-up as Chloe Grace-Moretz’s character of Teri, who is the reason why McCall takes up the mantle of The Equalizer, all but disappears from the story. Instead, Washington’s McCall engages in a cat-and-mouse game with Teddy, a Russian mob enforcer played with scenery-chomping glee by versatile Kiwi actor Marton Csokas. Teddy starts much like McCall; very understated, but he soon turns into a force of nature as he single-handedly starts taking apart the Boston criminal network in search of the man who has killed his goons.

Toward the end of the Second Act, McCall takes the opportunity to leave Boston and meet with former colleagues Brian and Susan Plummer, played respectively by Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo. This odd diversion serves as pure exposition and the audience discovers over the course of a few minutes McCall’s entire background. Despite the seriousness with which the scenes are played, there’s a sense of inevitable cliché about this digression which creates the circumstances through which the audience can throw their fourth-wall support behind Washington as he confronts corrupt elements of the Boston Police and the Russian mobsters who operate outside the law.

By the time the Third Act is done, the audience will be in one of two camps. There will be those who regard the film as an above-average action thriller that doesn’t shy away from violence but never quite reaches Tarantino-type gratuity and successfully positions Washington at a tilt for Neeson’s anti-hero title. The other group of viewers will walk away questioning how one man could be capable of what has just played out over the course of the last 130 minutes and will be entirely unconvinced of the premise or its outcome.

Fortunately, the production value of The Equalizer was enough for this reviewer to lean toward the former rather than the latter. Special mention must be made of Director of Photography Mauro Fiore, who employs his wonderful sense of composition and lighting to The Equalizer; elevating it above the standard action thriller “hero” point-of-view camera perspective. Fiore is currently one of cinema’s most sought after cameramen, with credits that range from James Cameron’s technologically-spectacular Avatar to the Peter Berg’s political thriller The Kingdom. In one of the most interesting and bizarre camera moves in recent mainstream cinema, Fiore and Fuqua design a scene that visually captures just how different Teddy’s Russian mobster is by comparison to the “American” environment in which he finds himself. The shot itself extends from the bottom half to the top half of his shirtless tattooed torso, but the contortion of his body makes him appear to be some sort of cross between an alien and a reptile fighting some unseen inner-demon that the audience will never quite fathom. It’s a unique shot that serves to highlight just how good and different The Equalizer could have been had this level of cinematic creativity been used throughout the entire production.

While Washington’s presence is a bonus and a blessing, Marton Csokas provides no shortage of support to help keep the film moving toward its inevitable showdown between McCall and Teddy. One scene at the mobster’s restaurant is especially riveting and was reminiscent of the great Diner meeting between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Michael Mann’s Heat. There’s no doubt that Anton Fuqua, the film’s Director, has the ability to direct good actors into the extended investigation of character’s personal lives and domestic matters that bears the comparison between him and Mann. Fuqua helped Washington realise an Academy Award in 2001’s Training Day; a film that has held up reasonably well since its release. Unfortunately, The Equalizer also suffers from some of Fuqua’s excesses that were so prominent in 2013’s artistic misstep Olympus Has Fallen. The Equalizer doesn’t have the “Director for hire” feel of that film, as it exhibits a higher level of craftsmanship, but a more considerate approach to the utilisation of the characters so well established in the first part of the film would have resulted in a much better movie; especially with such a great performer as Denzel Washington head-lining the project.