MORE LIKE "INSHITTYOUS: CRAPTER 2", AMIRIGHT? HIGH FIVE!

When James Wan, the co-creator of the dismal Saw, came out with his ghost story Insidious, I was stunned at how good-to-great it was for the bulk of its running time. And earlier this summer, when The Conjuring bowed, I was outright gobsmacked that this director, of all directors, had just like that become one of the best working American horror filmmakers.

Well, I am relieved to say that we can all start breathing again, because his latest, Insidious: Chapter 2, is fucking awful. It's precisely the movie that Insidious itself should have been, and unaccountably - but happily! - was not: filled with baldly-telegraphed scare scenes, flat characters with no discernible emotions or motivations except for those which exist entirely to prod the plot along, lousy acting, worse dialogue, and boring, atmosphere-free cinematography. It is the exact movie that Wan and frequent collaborator/fellow Saw creator Leigh Whannell, writing the screenplay and playing the movie's single most annoying character (a function he also served in Insidious), ought to have made as their first ghost story on the heels of the truly awful killer ventriloquist dummy picture Dead Silence from 2007, and it's really only the existence of Dead Silence that makes Chapter 2 appear at all acceptable; hard as it is to believe from these results, it could be worse.

The film takes off right where Insidious left off, and proceeds forward with only a meager nod in the direction of catching up newbies: Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) has just been possessed by the spirit of a psychotic old woman who has been haunting him since he was a little boy (their first meeting dramatised in a prologue that is the single bright patch in the whole feature), and was able to take over his body while he was in "The Further", the gloomy afterworld were dead spirits dwell and psychically-sensitive humans can visit during out-of-body experiences. Josh was in the Further to save his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) from an entirely different evil spirit - a demon that looked like somebody's terrible attempt at a homemade Darth Maul costume, who doesn't make so much as a cameo in this picture - and Dalton is fine now, except for the fact that he and his mother Renai (Rose Byrne) can't quite put their finger on what's the matter with Daddy. Which is, all things considered, not something that should be very difficult for these people to imagine, and the fact that it takes the characters something like two-thirds of the movie to start wondering about possibilities that should have been on their minds from, literally, the first beat of the plot, is the most frustrating element of Chapter 2, though it's hard to say that it's the worst.

The attempt to figure out why terrifying things are still happening to the Lamberts, living with Josh's mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) now, involves the ghost of medium Elise Rainer (Lin Shaye), the living version of her old colleague Carl (Steve Coulter, the only signficant member of the cast who wasn't in the first movie), and the bumbling paranormal investigators Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), who provide quite a lot more in the way of comedy this time around, virtually none of which is funny; indeed, in a film that is shockingly full of intentional jokes (compared to, I think, zero jokes in The Conjuring), the only one that landed for me at all was a reaction shot where a half-asleep Dalton bolts awake with a perfectly-formed "oh, shit" expression. Specs and Tucker, meanwhile, flail around like a pair of illiterate clowns, deflating the minute scraps of tension that the film is ever able to generate, in between marathon-length bouts of exploring with fanboyish intensity the mechanics of how the Further works.

The big problem with Chapter 2 is its inheritance: Insidious started out really well, but as it started to reveal its convoluted mythological system, the film plummeted from being a perfectly effective, spooky exercise in yelling "boo!" to losing itself up its own asshole. By the time Chapter 2 comes along, the bed has already been shat in, and the only options would be to wholly discard a huge chunk of the first movie's plot (at which point, it could just have a different title, different character names, and be unrelated, and called The Conjuring), or it could double-down and work on making the material in the third act of Insidious as functional as possible. Obviously, Whannell and Wan went the second direction, as they'd basically have to, and to be fair, Chapter 2 does its best to expand the idea of the Further in the most coherent, systematic way possible. That still doesn't make it a worthwhile place to set a movie, and the more involved in describing this ghostly place the movie gets, the less energy it has left over to set up good scare scenes, which is after all the reason we tend to want to see movies like this; sort of like how The Matrix Reloaded decided that reel-long scenes discussing the architecture of virtual spaces mattered more than slow-motion fight scenes with guns.

Meanwhile, most of the heavy-lifting for the scares is done by Wan's reliable old standby, the Terrifying Old Lady, making this the fourth movie in which the director has relied on the natural human fear of women with wrinkled faces, and it's also the one where these weird trend finally suggests that one of the two filmmakers has some deep-seated psychological problem that they've been working out all this time, and while I will do Insidious: Chapter 2 the dubious honor of not spoiling it, suffice it to say that film steals from Psycho in way that makes absolutely no fucking sense for a haunting movie. It's not the only horror movie Wan copies: there are particularly obvious lifts from The Shining, and even a few from The Conjuring itself, the clearest sign of many that Wan didn't have the energy to make two movies in basically the same genre so close together, and Chapter 2 is the one that found total creative rot setting in. Still, the Psycho riffs are particularly off-putting and out-of-place, turning a simple possession movie into a really dumb-ass mystery with gender representation problems.

Along with its misplaced narrative priorities, its bad comedy, and its lack of scares, Chapter 2 is just shoddy filmmaking: Joseph Bishara's score is nowhere near as insinuating as it was in the previous movie, and the framing isn't as full of suggestive empty space. It's more pedestrian in every way, and lacks any kind of creepy mood that could have at least made it a diversion of some sort. Worst of all, though least related to technique, the writing is unbelievably awful, culminating in a line that I would happily call the worst dialogue of 2013 thus far, if only I could read my damn notes and remember what the line was - it is given to Wilson to say as he threatens Byrne. Most of the worst dialogue, in fact, is given to this most unlucky actor, who has to bear a truly heroic weight of syntactically warped exposition and speeches that are meant to sound cryptic, but mostly have such obvious subtext that you can only assume that the filmmakers had contempt for the film and for its audience, assuming that we cannot possibly understand how to decipher moments such as Renai's confusion why the song she wrote for her husband is playing from nowhere, as though everything about the scene wasn't screaming neon letters that Josh's disembodied spirit is trying to communicate with her.

About two-thirds of the way through, Insidious went from terrific to bad; Chapter 2 doesn't have such a neat moment of collapsing in on itself, though it surely does start out bad and has become quite insufferable by the end. This is a wonky horror film, obsessed with world-building and retelling a serial killer hunt in the idiom of a ghost story, and the empty-headed characters and frivolous sense of humor make it impossible to take the anemic results seriously, even more impossible than the story already did. This is, I am confident, the most slapped-together, pointless, allover terrible horror film of 2013; and I will remind you that 2013 bore witness to Texas Chainsaw 3D. "Worst of the year" is a very competitive title.

1/10

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PERSONAL CANON: THE AIR IS CRISP, THE LEAVES ARE CHANGING COLORS, THE BODIES ARE DEAD

Alfred Hitchcock is probably the closest thing to a consensus pick for the greatest film director of all time, between critics, historians, general audience, and hardcore film buffs, but even he was a mortal, and could not do every thing he applied himself to. Notably, and predictably for a man promoted as "the Master of Suspense", he wasn't much of a hand at comedy, at least not at straight-up comedies. Comic relief he could do as well as anybody you've ever heard of, as anybody who's ever seen North by Northwest can attest. But his "pure" comedies are rare, generally underseen, and not generally regarded among his best films by those who've seen them. And while I'll agree that 1941's Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a problematic late screwball put over largely by Carole Lombard's strength of will, and 1976's Family Plot (which I do regard as being particularly under-appreciated) is certainly a perverse enough piss-take on Hitchcock's whole career, particularly as it was his very last movie, the man did direct one comedy that works on just about every level for a movie to work, and which I do think rates somewhere around the very peak of his career: The Trouble with Harry, released in 1955 during Hitchcock's greatest period of influence and popularity. Rear Window was just a year old, To Catch a Thief wasn't even two months old, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents had just begun its indescribably iconic run on TV. It was, in short, during the half-decade period in Hitch's career when he was most able to do absolutely anything he wanted, and what he wanted to do was this.

This is a film set and shot in rural Vermont (as opposed to bustling, hectic, urban Vermont), where two locals, a recent transplant, and a visitor all cross paths with a dead body. For that, you see, is the trouble with Harry Worp (the immaculately still Philip Truex): nobody's quite certain what killed him, and they're damned if they know what to with him now. Old Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn), who was hunting illegally the morning of Harry's death, the first to find the corpse, is certain it was one of his errant bullets that felled the man, and he's anxious to hide the body before the law comes snooping. This turns out not to be the case at all, and then it's the turn of Harry's estranged wife, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine) to think she done the deed, smacking the abusive bastard on the head with a milk bottle when he tracked her and her son Arnie (Jerry Mathers) to ground. The very charming spinster Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) is equally sure that she must have done it, clonking him in the head with the heel of her shoe when he tried to attack her in his bottle-dazed state.

Even just putting that little bit down is arguably spoiling too much for a movie that stubbornly refuses to be watched and appreciated as widely as it should be, but The Trouble with Harry is far more about the tone with which its plot toddles along than the actual details of that plot. The sense I have, every time I've seen it, is that's a quintessentially Vermonter kind of story: it's about four people (the fourth is visiting painter Sam Marlowe, played by John Forsythe) being mightily inconvenienced by a corpse, but not actually finding themselves particularly upset by it. Or made even the littlest bit nervous. It's about likable, friendly, gently quirky people behaving in a briskly pragmatic way about death, without an ounce of gravity or "respect for the dead" involved: Harry is buried and dug up so many times over the course of slightly less than 24 hours that even Jennifer, recapping it all at the end, admits that she can't remember why it happened the third time. And this information plainly causes her no distress at all.

As a result of all this, it ends up being one of the most perverse films in Hitchcock's catalog, and what a terrifically perverse collection that is. Death is traditionally held to be sacrosanct in some way; nice people treat it with a kind of gravity and awe. Well, the people in The Trouble with Harry are unfailingly nice, and they are also quite unimpressed with Harry's corpse as anything but an object. An object that is, incidentally, framed by Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks with an unfailingly puckish sense of humor, such that simply seeing bits of Harry poking into frame results in some of the biggest laughs in the whole movie. Whatever Hitchcock's affinity with comedy, there should be no doubt that the filmmakers behind this image, for example, new exactly what they were doing:

Besides tweaking one of the biggest taboos out there, the film's other chief attempt to thoroughly discombobulate the audience lies in its tone. Basically, this is a weird comedy: structurally, it cannot be regarded as anything but a farce, with repetition and piled-on misunderstandings and a third act struggle to keep things held together in the face of a dubious authority figure. But the momentum is so laconic and slow that it's practically asleep (this is the part that especially feels Vermont-ish), and that is, itself, part of the joke - the film is hilarious, often, because of how coolly everybody is under-reacting, and the deliberate pace of the characters is exactly what makes them such amusing oddballs. It's a dry, subtle form of humor altogether, and Hitchcock was lucky to have performers able to meet him at exactly the right sweet spot: Gwenn is particularly great at playing in this relaxed mode, but MacLaine - making her uncommonly assured feature debut - is right up there with him, and she lands all of the very best line readings, talking about death and abuse with a kind of bored wisdom.

It's too low-key and restrained to ever result in huge, heaving laughs, and maybe that's part of why the film has never found an especially enthusiastic audience, but it's still one of the absolute funniest movies of the 1950s, not least because it is perhaps the most puckish; the best kind of comic film for the trickster Hitchcock to release onto the world. In the meantime, it's also a consummate piece of moviemaking: capturing the Vermont locations (and the locations recreated in a Vermont gym following bad weather) with eye-bleeding beauty, and especially the impossibly painterly feeling of a New England autumn. It is, in fact, one of the best movies about autumn I can name, despite the number of interior sets dressed up with spray-painted leaves.

The best part of all is that even with its frivolous tone and comedy, it's still tangibly a Hitchcock film, with the director demonstrating how thriller principals can be applied to humor, and for the same reasons: the longer a payoff that we're fully expecting is deferred, the bigger the release when it shows up (there's a magnificent scene where we're on pins and needles waiting for Harry's body to fall out, and then just at the last minute, it doesn't fall out, because it turns out not to have been there - fucking glorious filmmaking). It's an unusual application of technique, but it works flawlessly, and the whole movie is both absurd and tense for its entire running time, despite none of the characters ever noting that it's either of those thing.

On top of everything else, the film was the first teaming between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann, and the bouncy score, with all of its half-formed marches in unusual keys, is one of the very best things that man ever wrote, for Hitch or anybody else. So, you know, it's delightful, offbeat, beautiful, and it's historically important. Pretty fantastic all around, and a movie that continues to surprise and entrance me no matter how often I see it.

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ALFONSO CUARÓN: SÓLO CON TU PAREJA (1991)

It is a greatly satisfying thing that the first shot of Sólo con tu pareja, the first feature directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is a tracking shot towards an exquisitely-lit man and a woman having sex. That's as close a one-image summary of the director's subsequent career as you're likely to run into, particularly when that director has worked in so many genres aimed at such wildly divergent audiences as Cuarón.

Would that I could go right from there to assuredly declaring that the film thus represents a fully-formed birth for the director, and that everything which makes the best of his later films so damn great is to be readily found in Sólo con tu pareja; but no, this is very much the work of a young filmmaker of obvious talent in need of just a smidgen more discipline, training, and experience. This mostly shows up in his management of the film's comedy - for this is an outright farce, and it's probably telling that nothing he directed ever again more than intermittently cracks a smile - which is scattershot: for every scene that ends up flawlessly balancing on a tightrope for the whole run of absurd moments and huge character reactions, there's another one that drags out and feels flaccidly redundant, or one that just feels like a pointless aside designed to desperately lunge for just one joke, to hell with character or story logic. It's also a bit deflating to note how little Cuarón is able to extract from virtually his entire female cast, given the prominence of women in his later work (and especially in Y tu mamá también, the film most directly descended from this one), in what is effective a male-driven satire of male sexuality and male privilege. But since I mostly liked the film, and occasionally loved it, I would prefer to at least initially accentuate the positive.

The male who chiefly occupies our attention is Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the first of many characters in the film with doubled or nearly-doubled names, the first indication that Sólo con tu pareja is eager to align itself with the wacky, borderline-cartoon tradition of humor exemplified by American screwball comedies, though present in the cinema of other countries as well; I am told, for example, that Mexico itself had a robust genre of wacky satires a generation prior to this film's 1991 premiere, though I myself have no firsthand knowledge of them, and that's as good a cue as any to admit that the viewer who comes to Sólo con tu pareja without a fairly strong knowledge of Mexican culture in the early 1990s and Mexican film history up to that point - subjects on which I am almost wholly ignorant - is not in a position to give the movie its full due.

Anyway, back to Tomás. He's a lothario of the worst sort, plowing through women at a fevered clip, and treating them, literally, as cum dumpsters; he has an intense aversion to condoms, and to acknowledging the existence of a sexual partner that might not, for whatever reason, want to have unprotected sex with him (the film's title, in fact, translates as "Only with your partner", the slogan of a contemporaneous campaign to encourage safe sex in Mexico, one of the exact sort of important cultural references that make the film richer, and that I would absolutely never have picked up on). This probably results in a lot of broken hearts, but Tomás certainly doesn't know a goddamn thing about that, never paying any attention to his conquests ever after.

You can't build a narrative out of that, and the situations that force Tomás life into a new direction are two: first, he starts to fall for his next-door neighbor, flight attendant Clarisa (Claudia Ramírez), despite her handsome pilot boyfriend Carlos (Ricardo Dalmacci). The second is that he arranges a "date" - that is, a quick fuck without so much as dinner beforehand - with Silvia Silva (Dobrina Liubomirova), the openly antagonistic nurse who works for his doctor, Mateo Mateos (Luis de Icaza), who's also his across-the-hall neighbor. And this date happens at the same time that his boss, Gloria Gold (Isabel Benet), stops by to demand that he deliver the ad copy she's been patiently waiting on for days. And also to deliver his penis into her vagina. Thus it is that Tomás has Silvia in his apartment, and Gloria in the Mateos' apartment (he's watering their plants while they're at a convention), and to sneak between the two, he has to cross on the ledge outside, wearing nothing but a towel, stopping every time he passes Clarisa's window to admiringly gaze at her screwing Carlos. It is the classic old "man with two women at the same restaurant" sketch, only it's about casual sex and the dangers of leaving women carnally unsatisfied. Because Silvia, who receives far less attention and finds out bout Tomás's game, decided to get him back: when she mails him the results of a complete blood test, she falsely informs him that he has AIDS.

Lord knows that's dangerous ground for the movie to wander into, and accusing Sólo con tu pareja of gross tasteleness is absolutely fair game. But I think the movie mostly avoids the trap it sets for itself, first by delaying this plot development as long as possible (it's over halfway through the 94-minute film that Tomás gets the news), filling up the time with every drop of character development that can be squeezed out of its protagonist, and throwing in a subplot with a pair of Japanese businessmen that Tomás has to entertain for a night, for no obvious reason other than to jack up the comic stakes. Second, it's actually a fairly sharp way to criticise a society in which fuck-crazy men like Tomás are free to run wild, and the collage of STDs that result, and the way that his fake diagnosis punctures the self-aggrandizement that defines his life is used strictly as character material. AIDS itself is never the joke; only Tomás is.

Regardless, the result is astonishingly subversive, even two decades on. At its best, Sólo con tu pareja has a take-no-prisoners approach to depicting its characters and society, the mark of punk kids rather than sophisticated satirists, perhaps, but the film's attitude and its busy comedy mesh well, for the most part.

It's funny stuff, all in all, though it often feels like it could be funnier: the handful of top-shelf physical comedy scenes (the back-and-forth on the ledge including a running gag with a cat; an inspired slapstick bit involving a microwave oven used as a suicide device), and the way that Cuarón and Luis Patlán edit the film so that cutaway jokes and reaction shots shoot by the viewer with almost metronomic precision, call attention to the various places where things fall flat, almost always because the timing is off and gags go on far longer than their expiration. It also hurts that Giménez Cacho and de Icaza are mostly alone in giving a generally loose, fun performance; Liubomirova has some tart line readings, but that's about it. Often as not, even the good performances drift a little to far on the side of being shrill.

And while I greatly admire Cuarón's visuals, which pair him up with his totally essential collaborator, the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, there are points where the images threaten to drown the movie. Some of the sweeping, probing camera movements for which the Cuarón/Lubezki partnership would become justly beloved are perfectly-suited to giving the comedy a big boost of energy and flow (particularly in the "two apartments" setpiece, which really is the highlight of the film in every way), Lubezki's lighting can err on the side of being too pretty: as the Pedro Almodóvar films of the same period prove, creative farce thrives on poppy colors and brightness, not the graceful shading that Lubezki brings to the table, which is glamorous as all hell, but just not fun.

Still, the movie's got spunk, and the way that it mines jokes from a cruel place without ever turning into a black comedy is impressive; screenwriter Carlos Cuarón, the director's brother and infrequent collaborator, had some problems structuring scenes, but the madcap plotting that yokes them all together gives the film a bounciness that keeps it from being as nasty as the satiric edge, and the concept, could easily fall into. All in all, the film is not chiefly interesting for any reason other than the career it kicked off, and I don't suppose it would deserve to be widely remembered on its own merits, but its frankness, its high spirit, and its excellent craftsmanship make it a perfectly worthy launching pad for bigger and better things.

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TIM AT TFE: KENNEDYESQUE

This week's essay: as part of Film Experience's celebration of Robert Redford this month, I discuss my favorite among his performances, as Bill McKay, title character in The Candidate.

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MAN WITH A MOVING CAMERA

It is, at this point, quite clear that 2013's predominate Movie Which Cinephiles Are So Damn Excited For is Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, and I surely don't want to prove the exception. Frankly, anything shot by Emmanuel Lubezki comes in at a tremendous advantage for me to start with, to say nothing of it being the first film for the director in seven unendurably long years since the great Children of Men.

Anyway, with Cuarón's filmography being so short, and the days until 4 October being so long, I could think of literally nothing better to do with my time than indulge in a retrospective of the director's six features (soon to be seven!) between now and then: starting tonight, Tuesdays and Fridays will be Cuarón time here at Antagony & Ecstasy. We kick things off with his 1991 debut, Sólo con tu pareja, which I'm especially excited to look at, as it's the only one of the director's films that I haven't yet seen.

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THERE COULD NEVER BE A FATHER WHO LOVED HIS DAUGHTER MORE THAN I LOVE YOU

The shockingly - one might fairly say unprecedentedly - successful Mexican import Instructions Not Included possesses a title and the skeleton of a plot (womanizer has an illegitimate child dropped on his doorstep, must take care of her) that makes it absolutely obvious what kind of film it is: a warm and cuddly two hours in which a shitty, self-absorbed bachelor learns to love other beings because of his darling infant daughter. Spoiler alert: it's not that movie. Also, the Spanish title, No se Aceptan Devoluciones, translates (saith Google) as "No Refunds", which is a whole hell of a lot better and more craftily suggestive of the plot.

To be sure, the film includes that movie, but it includes a great many movies, and by the 20 minute mark, it's already on the third one. Prior to that, we have experienced a wacky slapstick prologue in which robust Acapulco father Juan "Johnny" Bravo (Hugo Stiglitz) teaches his young son Valentín (who will be played, as a grown-up, by the film's director and co-writer Eugenio Derbez) how not to be scared, largely by plunging the child into a series of traumatising situations that serve the exact wrong purpose. For instead of having no fears, Valentín has all of the fears, which he visualises in the form of wolves ready to tear into him if he goes up that ladder/into that pool/by that spider/etc.

The biggest fear of all, he confides in truly weird cut across 25 years, is the fear of commitment. But the montage of random, family-friendly fucking that begins in this second face of the film, the "slapstick sex comedy" face, is brought to a close when one of Valentín's conquests, the American hippie Julie (Jessica Lindsey), arrives on his stoop with a baby girl that the dissolute chauvinist fathered, and leaves before he has a chance to react. He's so angry that he sneaks into the United States illegally just to dump the baby back at her feet, but something magical happens, and he realises that he's ready to be a father. Except that, now he has an American-born infant with him and no proof that he's related to her, any attempt to get back across the border would be suicide and a half.

At this point, the film skips ahead a few years, to find Valentín a hugely successful Hollywood stuntman, and his daughter Maggie (Loreto Peralta) a criminally darling 7-year-old with more fanciful ideas than you could possibly know what to do with. Valentín feeds these fantasies, spinning a ridiculous life story for the absent Julie involving spying and trips to the moon, and he spends a huge portion of his improbably high wages on buying every imaginable toy for Maggie. At just about the same time he gets a hugely discouraging diagnosis from the family doctor - which he deliberately hides from everybody besides his producer, Frank Ryan (Daniel Raymont) - Julie shows up, with her partner Reneé (Alessandra Rosaldo), looking to re-enter Maggie's life and, if possible, sue to get custody and bring the girl back to New York.

That's still two entire genre shifts from the end yet, one of which involves the single biggest tonal shift that I've seen in a 2013 movie, but let's go ahead and slow down to catch up with what the hell we just read. Instructions Not Included is assuredly not the bland, totally generic thing it looks like from the outside: the precise opposite of that, in fact. It's a florid, ADD-afflicted magpie of a film, including every plot point and emotional register it can, switching from smutty sex jokes to buoyant kiddie-flick slapstick to the treacly warm dramedy of a Very Special episode of an '80s family sitcom within the span of a shot, let alone a scene. It has intimations of political commentary (that it pointedly steps back from) and a weird fantasy idea of what the movie industry is like; it becomes a sober and serious custody battle drama that takes a sharp turn at the last possible instant into a shameless tearjerker. If it were American-made, I like to think of Lee Daniels getting his paws on it; it has the same register of anything goes creativity and disregard for traditional notions of emotional coherence that I respond to in his films.

I also suspect that it would be a better film in that case, given how weirdly Derbez mismanages the thing. I gather that he is a highly-regarded comic mind in Mexico, but Instructions Not Included isn't entirely a comedy; it has comic elements, but it has elements of everything else, too, and the jokes are more of a cute and warm register than actually being funny. Though I'll allow the possibility of a cultural or language gap between me and the film.

Anyway, the comic parts of the film, outside of the sex farce elements and the brief scenes of Valentín plying his trade as a stuntman (doubling for a powerfully unamusing parody of Johnny Depp), are mostly stuck in the "rubber-faced clown and darling moppet" mode that Roberto Benigni ruined for the rest of time with Life Is Beautiful. It actually works in this film, more than I'd have expected, thanks largely to Peralta, a distractingly good child actor (who, even more distractingly, looks like Kristen Bell's clone); not as much to Derbez, visibly ten years too old to be playing a developmentally arrested manchild specifically indicated to be in his mid-30s, though his clowning actually does add to the tenderness of the relationship, rather than just playing as cloying.

In fact, were it just for the candy-colored father-daughter relationship, I could see myself waving Instructions Not Included through, on the grounds that it's effectively sweet, and we need sweet things, just as much as we need anything else. Even the ginned-up conflict between Bitch Lesbian edition Julie and Valentín "works", though I should have preferred it working in some other movie than this one. The whole affair, though is so unevenly handled, slurrying emotions in a way that feels careless rather than cleverly unconventional, and the whole thing is about as visually drab as anything with this many bright colors and painfully quirky touches in the costumes and sets could manage to be. It's a slack movie that tries to coast on hamfisted emotional manipulation to make the viewer feel feelings, and ends up (particularly on the back of a crass, overwrought ending) playing as superficial and insincere at far too many key moments.

6/10

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BACK IN BLACK

I sincerely doubt that Riddick counts as "long-awaited" - in order to await something, you have to assume that there's a real possibility that it's probably going to exist, and I don't see how even the most devoted fan of the Riddick films could have imagined that during the back half of the '00s - so let us instead call it a "long-delayed" third film in the Chronicles of Riddick series (Trilogy? But if this film could come out after nine years, and be cheap enough that turning a profit is a mathematic near-certainty, is there any plausible reason to cut it off at just three?). And let us further say that this long-delayed third film is, to all intents and purposes, a remake of the first film, 2000's Pitch Black, differentiated from that film largely in that it has to devote a considerable part of the first act to walking back from the second film, 2004's The Chronicles of Riddick, in order to get the setting back to someplace reasonably contained and simple after the sprawling mythology and political wrangling that made that movie such a grand epic, if you are a member of its enthusiastic fanbase, or such an incoherent slurry of fantasy tropes, if you are normal.

This is a good thing, I mean to say, even though "this sequel feels, at times, like a beat-for-beat retread of its successor!" is virtually never meant to be a statement of praise. Certainly, Riddick isn't going to replace anybody's memories of Pitch Black, though the narrative emphases and character dynamics are different enough - violently so in the latter case - to make the new film its own thing, and not just a retrenchment to the safe and familiar. Part of me hoped that, given how the first two movies were examples two entirely different and essentially incompatible subgenres of science fiction, linked only in that they centered on the same character, that Riddick would go equally as far from both of them, but the results are probably better this way.

Some time after The Chronicles of Riddick - ten years after Pitch Black and so, presumably, five years after the first sequel, but that doesn't seem at all plausible based on what we see - Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel, for whom we can safely call this a passion project, the thing he wanted to do with all his Fast and Furious clout) has gone from being Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, the race/religion of death cultists, to weather-wracked survivalist trapped on a savage desert planet by the machinations of his treacherous second-in-command, Lord Vaako (Karl Urban, reprising the role in a flashback cameo). The film's first act is, in its way, the boldest part of the whole: virtually dialogue-free, postponing any narrative context as long as it possibly can, just following Riddick as he scrambles through a desert environment, evading the planet's remarkably savage bestiary of striped, doglike predators, and a giant scorpion-shaped beast living in a brackish pool that straddles the only path from the desolate mountains where Riddick finds himself and the relatively lush plains below. It's a perfectly involving one-man show let down only somewhat by shaky CGI and intrusive editing (but then, intrusive editing is a hallmark of the franchise), and it captures for the first time in any of these films the idea that nominally underpins all of them: that Riddick is basically an animal himself, savage and merciless and deeply, darkly cunning.

A long while later, Riddick has managed to thrive somewhat on this planet (having raised a pet alien dog, in a deeply useless waste of screen time), when a storm begins to roll in - the first he has seen since being stranded. And something he sees in it with his augmented vision freaks him out enough that he goes to a way station left on the planet for the use of bounty hunters, triggers an emergency beacon, and brings down two different teams of mercenaries to his location, one group a bit rundown, led by the unhinged Santana (Jordi Mollà), the other far more well-equipped and polished, led by a man whose name is delayed for long enough that it qualifies as a surprise, so we'll stick with the nickname Santana gives him, Too Late (Matt Nable). Riddick disappears for a stretch, as these men and their followers - eleven all told, though only Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), the sole female, Diaz (Dave Bautista), and absurdly innocent newbie Luna (Nolan Gerard Funk) end up having a specific enough purpose that it's worth naming them - bumble around attempting to figure out what's going on, as the shadowy, unseen Riddick effortlessly outwits all of them. Eventually, he makes himself known, and suggests that capturing him isn't nearly as important as getting off-planet before the huge storm barreling down hits the mercenaries' camp in about 24 hours. He doesn't explain why, but it's clear from his bearing that whatever is coming with that storm, it's deadly and hard to stop. Spoiler alert: beasties.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the biggest problem with Riddick - more than the simple fact that it's content to retread Pitch Black in so many ways - is that huge gap in the middle where Riddick himself is just a shadowy threat to the bounty hunters. It's meant to mimic the first third of the earlier movie, I suppose, but there are two key differences between Riddick and Pitch Black, in that regard, one of which is that Pitch Black was able to play coy about its characters - arguably, until the final five minutes of the movie, Riddick wasn't even the protagonist, and he could be an unseen danger in a way that too much domestication as a character over two movies leave it impossible for him to become now. Anyway, the opening act already told us that he was to be the main character, even aside from the other films in the series, and it's a sign of storytelling bad faith to dump him like that. The other difference is that, while Pitch Black had largely sympathetic (if ill-written and poorly-acted) characters in its ensemble, Riddick lacks a single figure worth rooting for outside of the title character, and the worst acting, across-the-board, in the franchise to date; the more time we spend with these people than with the smirking, cocksure Riddick, the less interesting the film becomes.

Happily, the film regains its footing in a pretty terrifically-executed, if generic, final sequence, in which the bounty hunters and Riddick are barricaded against an army of monster, and once again Twohy and cinematographer David Eggby (returning from Pitch Black, after sitting The Chronicles of Riddick out) get great mileage out of darkness and half-seen objects therein; it's less successful than the first movie only insofar as it feels less earned by a weaker script. But aesthetically, at least, the movie never really misses a trick: the parched daylight scenes on the planet work, the effects work better, relative to the budget, than in the last movie, and once again, Twohy manages the fine trick of implying without stating, building a world out of half-expressed details instead of stating everything for us in hectoring, expository detail. Like the notion that bounty hunters have some kind of overseeing agency that populates the galaxy with supply depots on planets where bounty might need to be hunt; it's contrived, sort of, but it's also rather imaginative and speaks to a deeper world than the one the film needed. Sure, Riddick is a rehashed gimmick that has been done better, but that's not to say that in this particular case, it's not being re-done with care and consideration, and that's enough to make it feel sturdier than a quick inventory of its merits would lead you to expect.

6/10

Reviews in this series
Pitch Black (Twohy, 2000)
The Chronicles of Riddick (Twohy, 2004)
Riddick (Twohy, 2013)

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