DESTROYER

★★★

It’s another grim and glowering Los Angeleno cop movie, about a hard-bitten, haggard, drunken, deadbeat parent detective with a dark past, still haunted by the death of their former partner, lured into a downward spiral of bloody, violent vengeance, where they hope to achieve karmic justice — and find some sense of closure — by the barrel of a gun. Only, with Destroyer, there’s this wrinkle: the cop in question is a woman. And so is the filmmaker tackling such all-American, anti-hero, pro-gun, movie-makin’ machismo.

Karyn Kusama’s star has waxed and waned across her career, from beloved micro-budget debut (Girlfight) through failed blockbuster (Æon Flux), feminist horror-comedy (Jennifer’s Body), and trauma-manifest-as-horror psychological-thriller (The Invitation). Throughout, she’s made a career of interrogating things — genre, violence, power— usually thought of, in the Hollywood machine, as being archetypally ‘male’. Destroyer is the latest expression of this, a picture that shows even a tired tale can be made to feel alive by a simple act of gender inversion. No matter how many times you’ve seen a story just like this, you’ve never seen it quite like this.

The trope is spoken aloud: Bradley Whitford playing a squirrely lawyer who sizes up our cop thusly: “I think you’re playing out some vendetta, colouring outside the lines a little”. But Kusama stares the cliché directly in the eye, and steers into it, hard; her direction mirrored by a throwing-herself-into-it leading turn from Nicole Kidman. Her down-and-out, rough-and-tumble cop wears her hard-living self-destructiveness in every line on her face, the bags under her eyes, her ill-fitting jeans, her give-a-shit saunter. This, too, is the kind of performance — literally beaten down — that we’ve seen many times from male anti-heroes, but never from a screen siren like our Nic.

Kidman and Whitford headline a loaded cast, which also includes Scoot McNairy, Sebastian Stan, Tatiana Maslany, and Toby Kebbell. The script — by Kusama’s familiar writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi — runs parallel narratives, eventually turning present and past, and beginning and end, together into a neat (if not quite flat) circle. The narrative ‘now’ follows Kidman on the trail of old fellows, her casework, really, a series of shakedowns. But there’s also a simultaneous chronicling of an undercover operation from 17 years ago; the one where things went wrong, both her partner and her idealism dying, the cop who came out the other side but a shell of her former self.

TRIPLE FRONTIER

★★1/2

It’s the kind of thing you’re used to seeing in the multiplex: big stars with big guns, a big budget action movie with big budget songs. Instead, here, a heavy hitter cast (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal), an acclaimed director (JC Chandor), and a host of expensive soundtrack placements (Metallica! Fleetwood Mac! Credence! Dylan!) are wheeled out for a Netflix movie.

It’s yet another example that the streaming behemoth is becoming a major player in the Hollywood system, with the clout to get a project this big to (albeit small) screens. It’s also a strong sign that streaming-services could become the home for certain kinds of cinema — like the middle-aged macho action movie — no longer being made by Hollywood.

Triple Frontier takes its name from the border region where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet. Assumedly, that was initially the setting for the screenplay, by Kathryn Bigelow’s scribe Mark Boal. But, somewhere along the line, the location was changed to an unnamed place, likely Colombia, and only the title stuck. In this vague South American location — AKA: it’s shot in Hawaii — Isaac has been working as a military contractor combating local cartels, and romancing Adria Arjona whilst he’s at it. She’s the insider who’s given him a hot tip: a stash house in the jungle where an evil kingpin and a pile of cash await.

All Isaac needs is a crew, so, here comes the first act movement where we get the gang together for one last job. Back in nowheresville, America, Affleck has packed on the pounds, failing at both being a dad and selling distressed real estate (which he seems to do early on weekday mornings, before school); and he drinks beer whilst driving his pickup truck, which seems like a bad idea. Hunnam gives speeches to soldiers about returning to civilian life. Hedlund, his brother, fights in low-rent MMA meets at local veteran’s halls, bouts seemingly staged on weekday afternoons. Pascal, as the fifth member of the crew, doesn’t get much story. But he’s a pilot! And they’re all former soldiers. Or, as Hunnam prefers to put it: “warriors”.

The premise is that, failing to adapt to society, struggling to make ends meet, and carrying injuries they suffered in service, these military men are banding together to get paid. In such, Boal’s script is both cynical and late-capitalist; ‘serving your country’ is bunk, fighting for money is the ticket. Triple Frontier is also, of course, another portrait of fraternity, of a band of brothers (sometimes literal) banding together, bonded by the things they suffer through. It’s also funny, though mostly unintentionally so; like so many middle-aged macho action-movies, part of the joy is the essentially silliness of the endeavour, and the plot holes so big you could pilot a Russian ex-military helicopter through them.

For all its questionable storytelling, it’s all shockingly well-made, and, in the case of Affleck, brilliantly acted. Triple Frontier’s strongest sequence is the raid on the kingpin’s compound, with Chandor — who has been, thus far, more concerned with moralist drama — showing an excellent sense of place and pacing. Where many contemporary action films cut up similar scenes (either deliberately or unintentionally) into a barrage of disorienting, incoherent edits, here Chandor maintains both suspense and a sense of geography; the whole thing living up to that generic heist sequence descriptor ‘gripping’.

Here, the score comes when the movie is still in its first hour, suggesting that’s there’s a whole unexpected second part to come. Eventually it does, in the form of a kind of Sierra Madre-esque B-side, where the film becomes both a poorly judged wilderness survival ode — how to spend a week crossing the Andes with gunshot wounds but no food, water, or shelter! — and a study of greed and brutality blossoming when a band of thieves is thrown into dire straits.

Of course, our Hollywood heavies come out the other side with their codes of masculinity intact. The bonds of bro-hood are, in action-movies of this ilk, unbeaten. Lots of South Americans get shot, but that’s all okay, as long as we learned something along the way.

“We’re a dying breed, boys,” Hunnam says, near the film’s end. It could be literal, but instead it’s figurative. The line pulls double-duty when considering Triple Frontier as a whole. With not a super-hero in sight, this is the kind of film that, even though it feels like a multiplex flick, may not be hitting theatres any more. Macho action heroes aren’t really dying, they’re just heading straight to streaming.

HOTEL MUMBAI

★★

This decade has found a run of films —most of them directed by Peter Berg, starring Mark Wahlberg— in which acts of real life tragedy/heroism are turned into popcorn entertainments, large scale event movies that’re some strange mix of action-thriller,disaster-flick, ‘inspirational’ true story, and icky muckraker. Hotel Mumbai is a local (well, local by way of international Australian/Indian/American co-production) riff on such a theme: a film about the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, set almost entirely in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

The set-up is familiar disaster-movie stuff: quirks of fate lead a host of name actors (Dev Patel, Nazanin Boniadi, Armie Hammer, Jason Isaacs, Tilda Cobham-Hervey) into being in the wrong place at the wrong time; the audience’s great desire, thereafter, to see these people coming out the other side alive. It’s loosely based on a memoir, by Victoria Midwinter Pitt, that puts this simple set-up into simpler words: Surviving Mumbai. As terrorists lay siege to the hotel — and the film resembles, more, a home invasion thriller, only writ luxury hotel large — every passing minute ratchets up the danger, and the drama. Debutante Australian director Anthony Maras stitches real life news coverage and video footage into the narrative, and the real people involved are shown in the closing credits; this all, hopefully, grand tribute to heroism in the face of unimaginable horrors.

But, in blurring the lines between real events and ‘based on a true story’, so, too, does Hotel Mumbai — like many films of this ilk— blur the lines between tragedy and entertainment, memoriam and money maker. In an age where original storytelling has been farmed out to television, cinema is built on known IP, familiar characters/titles a ‘safe bet’ for increasingly conservative film financiers. Movies about events that dominated news bulletins feel similar: recent round-the-clock coverage making for a weird kind of brand recognition. With Hotel Mumbai, the branding gets even weirder: by turning the flick into a grand shrine to the titular hotel, its unimaginable luxuries, its brave staff, and its grand reopening, the film essentially plays as bloody tribulation turned into opportunistic spon-con.