These deals-in-the-making stories always carry a grain of salt since nothing in Hollywood is ever so sure just about until the cameras roll, but the trade scoop that The Killing ‘s Joel Kinnaman may be your next RoboCop is just too tantalizing. Joel Kinnaman who , you may ask, and rightly so? The Swedish-American actor’s been in a handful of stateside film projects here and there (including the recent Safe House and, briefly, Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ) but the closer I look at his work, the more enticing this casting move becomes. According to a Tweet by Variety’s Jeff Sneider (also confirmed by Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter ), Kinnaman has been offered the lead in Jose Padilha’s reboot of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi pic. “Dealmaking is expected to begin imminently,” writes THR’s Boris Kit, whatever that really means. In any case, it’s the first solid movement on a RoboCop lead since those Michael Fassbender fantasy rumors were waved away by the secretive Padilha. Kinnaman’s not an obvious choice to headline a high profile franchise reboot, but he’s been dancing on the cusp of breakout status for a few years. The 32-year-old Kinnaman got his start in Swedish film, most notably taking the lead in Daniel Espinosa’s crime adaptation Easy Money (AKA Snabba Cash ), based on Jens Lapidus’s novel; the film is being released in the U.S. on July 27 and will be remade in English with Zac Efron , while a Kinnaman-starring sequel, Snabba Cash II , is set for release in Sweden in 2012. According to the Swedish website Ostran.se , Kinnaman was once up for the leads in both Thor and Mad Max 4 (the roles went to Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hardy, respectively), so Hollywood filmmakers have already been looking at him to carry a major studio release. But while he’s obviously pretty easy on the eyes, it’s his screen presence — whether speaking English and Swedish — that’s impressed me the most. Take a look at Kinnaman below and weigh in: Is there cause to be excited if this is indeed your new RoboCop? Snabba Cash trailer: In a scene from Swedish franchise entry Johan Falk: National Target (opposite Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol ‘s Samuli Edelmann): Behind the scenes on AMC’s The Killing (via Slashfilm ): In the trailer for Snabba Cash II (via Playlist ):
The filmmaker clarifies: “We’re still in discussions about whether it should be a prequel or sequel. It’s an interesting conversation. I’m meeting with writers and I’ve also gone back to [ Blade Runner co-writer] Hampton Fancher and he still speaks the speak. He’s right there. I spoke with him this week. But we don’t even have a script yet. I’m not sure that that’s going to be a story point, so I don’t know. But if it were, nothing would please me more. Honestly.” [ EW ]
Based on a true story out of World War II-era Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), In Darkness seeks to distinguish itself from the painfully distended genre of Holocaust movies with relentless “you are there” realism. It’s not quite Smell-o-vision, but the idea seems to be to try and make the experience of the 12 Polish Jews who hid in a sewer for 14 months as uncomfortable for the audience as it was for them. It seems significant that even a movie like The Reader paused in the midst of its “I was deflowered by a war criminal” melodrama to acknowledge that there is nothing to be learned from the Holocaust. Because its stories of annihilation and survival have taken on the ritual interplay of genre, often they have as much to tell us about current narrative appetites as they do about history. In Darkness , currently nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, is foremost a Holocaust movie that asks to be measured against all the others; its primarily lessons are directed toward the genre itself. Not all of the victims, for instance, are noble or even particularly nice. Director Agnieszka Holland ( Europa, Europa ) seems so enamored with her own resolution on this account that little more is offered in the way of characterization. But making the victims “human” does not necessarily make them complicated, or well drawn; in fact it leaves them vulnerable to cliché. So here we have the upper-class couple (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup) and their two small children, the resourceful hero (Benno Furmann), the rogue (Marcin Bosak), the pretty sister (Agnieszka Groshowska), the wanton redhead (Julia Kijowska), and a few others who never really emerge from the sewer’s shadows. Crammed together into a miserable crevice of the Lvov underground after a pogrom destroys the city’s Jewish ghetto, they all behave badly some point. There are fights over food, space, noise — and though bitter religious recrimination occasionally erupts, it feels more like a requirement of the genre than a reflection of deteroriating inner lives. In Darkness is based on the story told in a 1991 book called In the Sewers of Lvov , by Robert Marshall (adapted here by David F. Shannon). Its central figure is also one we have come to recognize on film: the benevolent gentile. Leopold Socha was a Catholic Pole and prolific thief when the war broke out; he also worked in the sewer system, and offered to help hide the group of Jews in exchange for payment. Robert Wieckiewicz, an enigmatic performer with a tough potato face, plays Socha as a Polish Tony Soprano by way of Graham Greene, with all the charisma, martyr issues and ambivalence about his own better nature that suggests. In Darkness is most successful when it follows Socha through a city where life goes on despite the nightmares unfolding in plain view and underfoot. The opening scenes use an effective contrast to set up the question: What kind of times are these? Socha and his sidekick (Krzysztof Skonieczny) shake down a couple of teenagers in what appears to be a middle-class family home; during their getaway they cross paths with a group of naked women racing through a forest, pursued to their death by nattily uniformed gunmen. From there Holland continues to effectively exploit the tension between Lvov’s ominous sense of suspended reality and the denial human beings are capable of when not directly threatened themselves. Socha and his wife (Kinga Preis) speak about the massacres that take place in their streets like they have just read a report about a country halfway around the world. Though the tensions are not addressed in depth, the fact that German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian are spoken more or less interchangeably evokes the clashing ethnic currents that made Poland the Holocaust’s crucible, a better host than most of the region for genocide. Absolutely everyone is on the take, and the sudden perishability of human life has only heightened the instinct for self-preservation. That that instinct is more acutely felt in the character of Socha and his life above ground suggests the overriding misery emanating from the film’s depiction of life in the sewer. With a few exceptions — including cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska’s bravura depiction of a flash flood that threatens to drown the stowaways — Holland cannot make the group’s determination felt because she’s so intent on making us feel the mortification of their suffering. The squeaking and scampering of rats becomes a motif over two and a half hours — it ends almost every scene with one last dash of disgust — and the seemingly high incidence of sewer sex gets lingering attention as well. Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews’ plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it’s boring as shit. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Safe House is a twisted claw of a movie, a picture so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings. Let’s forget, for a moment, about the sub-sub-sub- Training Day plot, in which a wily old-coot operative played by Denzel Washington simultaneously annoys and educates spring-chicken CIA agent Ryan Reynolds. The plot mechanics don’t matter much. What does matter is the inexplicable horror of how lousy this film looks. Movies aren’t strictly a visual medium — they’re too complicated for that — but there’s something wrong when the only thing you can think of while watching a picture is, “Damn! My eyes!” Where to lay the blame? It’s hard to say, but let me unwrap these gauze bandages and I’ll try. The director of Safe House is Swedish-born director Daniel Espinosa, who made a 2010 crime caper called Easy Money . Are the horrors of Safe House completely his fault? Probably not. The script, by David Guggenheim, seems serviceable enough, if generic: Washington’s character, a fugitive smoothie named Tobin Frost, is brought in by the CIA for questioning and a little waterboarding. It’s all in a day’s work, right? Frost has info the organization desperately wants. Of course, other people want it, too: The joint where Frost has been locked up is suddenly overrun by Middle Eastern-looking baddies, who try to kill him. Poor Matt Weston, Reynolds’ character, has been entrusted to watch Frost and needs to spirit him away to safety, thus giving Frost many opportunities to chuckle derisively at the antics of this plucky little greenhorn. Meanwhile, somewhere at CIA headquarters, a bunch of people in suits — played by Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga, among others — call up info on Frost on big computer screens, loudly reciting Important Facts about this Very Dangerous Man. Through it all, Frost and Weston have to run around. A lot. They also have to shoot people. A lot. And they also get shot at. A lot. All of these things are standard in contemporary action thrillers — by themselves, they’re not enough to make or break a picture. Washington and Reynolds don’t seem to give particularly bad performances — in fact, they run around, shoot people and get shot at with actorly proficiency. The problem is, it’s just so hard to look at them. Like many features these days, Safe House was shot with a handheld camera. But while smart filmmakers have learned to chill out with the camera jiggling, the Safe House cameras are partying like it’s 2009: This isn’t just shaky-cam, it’s super -shaky-cam. The camera moves back and forth, up and down, just because it can. Craving a bunch of wholly unnecessary circular pans? Safe House has ’em! The tonal palette consists mostly of ochre yellows and greeny grays — cataract colors. And the editing is razor-sharp, meticulous and rapid-fire — so razor-sharp, meticulous and rapid-fire that you can’t really see anything. It’s like eating vegetables that have been sliced so thin they barely exist. Safe House is, I guess, pretty violent, from what you can actually see: There’s some ewky business in which flesh is stabbed with a shard of glass. Yet despite the presence of this sort of brutality, the picture has no pulse. It’s so crappy looking it anesthetizes you — the story it’s trying to tell dissolves away to vapor. So who’s holding the bag for this stinkbomb? The cinematographer, Oliver Wood, has shot plenty of other movies that look perfectly fine, including Surrogates and Fantastic Four , as well, as perhaps most tellingly, the Bourne movies. The editing is by Richard Pearson, who cut The Bourne Supremacy , as well as other cogent features like Quantum of Solace and United 93 . Moviegoers are divided, of course, on the way the Bourne movies have been shot and edited: For some, they’re too crazy, too disconnected, too frenetic. I think they generally work, coasting on their sheer peripatetic energy — but it’s possible their time has passed. It’s also possible that Safe House , while borrowing its style from the Bourne movies, is simply missing some key ingredient: What if every shot were held just one or two seconds longer? What if the camera jiggle was controlled even by just a few centimeters at the top, bottom and sides of the frame? What if the colors didn’t look as if they’d been run through the washer and dryer on the extra-hot setting, every day for three months straight? Then, maybe, it would be possible to look at Safe House directly without having to immediately remedy the experience with two Tylenol. Extra-strength. And throw in some Codeine, too. Please. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
