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Films: A Most Wanted Man, Lucy, and Force of Evil

A triple feature...almost. More like a double feature with an old film noir DVD cherry on top. A Most Wanted Man was what we can now expect from a LeCarre adaptation - stylish, cool, ponderous, well-acted, and poor movie storytelling. I can say this about LeCarre because he is one of my favorite authors, but the best screen adaptations of his work are long over. Richard Burton's A Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Alec Guiness' Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy are both his two best books and two best adaptations. The truth is, LeCarre's one big insight was that the West's tactics in the Cold War were no worse than the Soviets, but it was in defense of something better. His insight was so true and so ahead of its time, it is now widely accepted. He is not likely to make another such insight anymore than Mark Zuckerberg is likely to invent another Facebook. Book reviewers praise some of his newer work, A Most Wanted Man among them, but he has no bad guy to work against. Sure...his premise is now that we defeated communism, we must work to defeat capitalism. But come on...capitalism has endured the criticisms he lobs at it for longer than even LeCarre's been alive - that it is cold, it sacrifices the weak, and so forth. It just isn't very original. Still, there was a great Phillip Seymour Hoffman moment at the end that was perhaps a tad too subtle for the movies in this day and age where he jumps out of the car, slams the door, and yells "Fuuuuucccckkk" before flopping around the street like an injured sea lion.

Lucy. Yikes. I cannot believe the man who made Leon The Professional also made this film. Does Besson do drugs? This movie was seemingly conceived out of a bad drug trip after binge watching True Detective and Her. I know that probably didn't happen, but is it so unimaginable that Besson had this idea and Scar Jo lined up, took some weird drugs, binged watched and decided to do a last minute rewrite? Anyhow...a bad sign in your action movie...when your final sequence involves your protag sitting in a chair building up a computer flash drive in her mind (don't ask me)...while the bad guys attack the building.

Force of Evil. Simply put, back in those days the writing was better. It has a lame voice over, but there are snippets of little aside dialog in this film that tops anything I see on film or tv today. Funny that.