What Movie Will Margot Robbie Make Next?

On the heels of Cinema Romantico quite possibly predicting Tom Cruise breaking into a submerged submarine in the next “Mission: Impossible” movie, this blog’s esteemed powers of prescience are at it again. Longtime and extremely frustrated followers might recall that last spring, to mark the release of “Air,” detailing the birth of the Air Jordan Nike sneaker, we proposed some other products that Hollywood could exploit for entire movies. Bartles & Jaymes Wine Coolers, the Rubik’s Cube, even Monopoly, the boardgame that I think was supposed to be teaching me the basics of finance but that I mostly treated the same as the classroom, a conduit to daydreaming, in this case, imagining the extravagant beauty of places like Marvin Gardens and St. Charles Place, and hey, before I slip into another St. Charles Place daydream right now and forget, did you hear, fresh off her “Barbie” triumph, Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment will produce a Monopoly movie. [Searches blog for bugging device.]

Margot Robbie after drinking too much Surge.

What a Monopoly movie might look like, whether it’s a tense game of a family stuck at home during a blizzard that comes to life, a murder mystery on the Reading Railroad, or something that causes Marco Rubio to take out an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about Marxists, is difficult to determine and undoubtedly dependent on who winds up directing. No, the question of what a Margot Robbie Monopoly movie might look like interests me less than wondering what movie based on which product this blog pitched will Robbie and LuckyChap take on next? 

United Airlines probably needs to put its focus elsewhere these days, and a movie based on the Dominique Wilkins sneaker is probably less likely at this point than one about Caitlin Clark’s forthcoming footwear. No, I think Robbie’s most likely post-“Monopoly” move is a movie about Surge, the ostensible Mountain Dew Killer that was advertised as the soda of the extreme sports crowd, meaning her performance could combine Glenn Howerton in “Blackberry” with Dan Cortese, which could maybe paint economics as nothing more than a version of extreme sports, or vice-versa. I’m picturing an ending where her character is reduced to eating at the Shakey’s Pizza buffet, wistfully noting they still have Surge on tap. 

Road House

A commercial and critical failure upon its theatrical release in 1989, Rowdy Herrington’s “Road House” found a cult audience through cable TV and home video. And though I understand director Doug Liman’s frustration at his “Road House” remake not receiving a run in theaters, I also sort of understand the impulse of its distributor Amazon to send it straight to streaming, the cable TV and home video of our time, as if seeking to maximize its cult potential right up front. If watching at home worked for “Road House” (1989), why wouldn’t it work for “Road House” (2024)? We’ll see how that goes. As of this writing, the audience score for “Road House” (2024) on Rotten Tomatoes is lower than the critics score, though, c’mon, what do those snot-nosed, horn-rimmed glasses and black turtleneck wearing ‘audience’ members know anyway? True, this remake isn’t at the level of the original, or maybe, merely not in the same zone as the original, which in its violent flamboyance became something like the camp version of a movie for guys who like movies. Liman’s model is more akin to a traditional jokey-kinda action movie, and on those terms, it proves generally successful, not least because of the secret weapon that’s staring you right in the face and getting shirtless, what, two, three minutes in – Jake Gyllenhaal.

Like Patrick Swayze before him, Gyllenhaal plays a dude named Dalton, though unlike his predecessor, he’s not a bouncer by trade. He’s a UFC fighter with a UFC-centric secret that has made him so feared people pay not to fight him in the ring. This prompts Frankie (Jessica Williams), who runs a roadhouse called the Road House in the Florida Keys, to hire him to help tame her unruly place. The Road House, though, despite its beachside betting is never as evocative a place as the original’s Double Deuce. No one is likely to teach David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin’s script for Herrington’s movie in a screenwriting class, but it’s all relative, and I found myself yearning for a similar block by block structure in Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry’s screenwriting update. The place never stands out, the characters surrounding Dalton never emerge, not so much as fully rounded people as entertaining presences. Dalton’s bar-taming is achieved in nothing less, really, than the space of a montage, demonstrating how this Road House exists mostly as a venue for a rotating cast of musical guests and a stage for Dalton to fight. (The script also does an exceptionally bad job with the crocodile set-up and payoff, which comes way too early and is, oddly, too muted when it does, like it knows this can’t be the real payoff.)

The original “Road House” might have been released in the 80s, but it evoked a western of Hollywood past in so much as Dalton tamed a whole town as much as he cleaned up the club, freeing it from the grasp of grizzled kingpin Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). The new “Road House,” then, evokes not so much a western as, well, an 80s movie in so much as its villain is a spoiled brat, Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), who wants to build a resort in the Road House’s place which sounds like the plot of an 80s movie. But because Ben is not the kind of guy that can mano-a-mano with Dalton, the script engineers an excuse to bring in a second heavy played by real-life UFC star Conor McGregor. He is playing a character named Knox but really, he is just playing Conor McGregor playing Conor McGregor. His whole performance feels like he took Liman’s notes, threw them out the window, and did whatever he wanted, way too much, in fact, and virtually to the point of distraction, yet paradoxically, simultaneously fitting right in. Dalton might romance a local doctor and make friends with the father and daughter proprietor of a bookshop, but his real reason for being here isn’t so much to save the town as meet Conor McGregor, er, Knox in the ring, so to speak, to become Ultimate Fighting Champion, a showdown with a gleeful undercard on a speedboat that’s like the end of “Patriot Games” on a multi-colored upper, to quote Hunter S. Thompson.

Despite so many monster trucks and polar bears, the original “Road House” was ultimately defined by Patrick Swayze, and not just in the image of his chiseled abs and exultant mullet but in the air of his Zen countenance and his omnipresent smile, the one that seemed to know every character better than they knew themselves. Gyllenhaal has a small smile too, though a countenance that’s less Zen than charismatically blasé. When one of the myriad baddies calls him rage-filled, Gyllenhaal’s response is quietly astonishing, like he’s living an LOL text, so bemused by the insult that he’s actively trying to wrap his head around it. Given that we meet him by way of a suicide attempt, and considering the bloody carnage to come, this Dalton feels a little like Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire,” but in Gyllenhaal’s air, Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire” manifested as a Parrothead, as if telling us to just let go and be carried away by the blood-splattered, limb-snapping breeze. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Split (1968)

1968’s “The Split” is a heist movie in which the heist comes to feel perfunctory. It might be elaborate, pulling down a half-mil from the LA Coliseum while an LA Rams game is in progress, but it goes off without a hitch, and is conveyed in such a way by director Gordon Flemyng to accentuate that cool-eyed execution as opposed to ratcheting up suspense. No, the heist is more about happens after, when the money goes missing and the participants suspect the ringleader McClain (Jim Brown) is seeking to keep it all for himself, though even these games of cat and mouse, as well as the climactic shootout, don’t really rise to much. Neither do the interpersonal relationships, as the intriguing nature of McClain’s relationship with his older white partner (Julie Harris) goes unexplored, and his desire to start over with his ex-wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) comes across like screenwriter motivation than anything real. And yet “The Split” still leaves mark, and not just because Donald Sutherland in an early role leaves one. The “Parker” novel on which it was based, “The Seventh,” was by all accounts, dark and tough, and though the overall tone of the movie never mirrors it, there are these incredible jolts, not exactly of grim reality but reflections of it, rendering a movie that is not quite more than the sum of its parts, per se, but rememberable for the parts that stand out, nevertheless.

Though the specific narrative ingredients of “The Split” do not necessarily concern race, released in the racially tumultuous year of 1968, it is notable just how much Flemying still finds ways to effectively inject race into the proceedings. Indeed, “In the Heat of the Night” had made waves a year earlier for Sidney Poitier’s black detective slapping Rod Steiger’s white southern sheriff and in “The Split,” McClain slaps one of his white colleagues, too, though it is at once much less sobering and much more intense even if it is conveyed in a manner approaching slapstick: in other words, anyone can come get it now. It is surpassed by an earlier moment when McClain seeks to test potential members of his crew by secretly turning the screws on them, like he does by showing up at Bert’s (Ernest Borgnine) place of work and punching him without a word, just to see how he will react. Never mind that Ernest Borgnine could never credibly contend in a fight with Jim Brown and just revel at the raw impact of this moment, Jim Brown, costumed not unlike a Black Panther, socking a white dude straight in the face with nary a warning.

And even if “The Split” fails to render Ellie as true character, setting her up just to sacrifice her life, the manner in which her life is sacrificed still manages to make her matter. Confronted by her jittery white, underline, landlord (James Whitmore), who recognizes McClain as being wanted for the LA Coliseum heist, he first demands money to keep quiet, and then he demands something more. Eventually he stumbles upon a hidden cache of automatic weapons, taking a machine gun and pointing it right at Ellie, the scene ending the way you might assume, a metaphor for racial and sexual violence so wrenching, it virtually stops “The Split” right in its tracks.

Some Drivel On...June 17th, 1994

June 17th, 1994 began with a ticker tape parade for the Stanley Cup-winning New York Rangers hockey team in Manhattan and golf trailblazer Arnold Palmer teeing off for his final round in a U.S. Open at the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania and the day concluded with Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks being preempted on TV to instead show celebrity and ex-NFL star Orenthal James Simpson, wanted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, being chased down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco in what became tantamount to a twisted Hollywood version of a New Orleans Funeral. In other words, historic celebrations of athletes gave way to the infamous fall of one. In his astonishing 2010 documentary chronicling that bizarrely jam-packed day, director Brett Morgen eschewed narration and traditional talking heads to instead cultivate it almost exclusively from TV footage, creating the effect of a story told through channel-flipping fragments and sensations. After all, O.J. Simpson, as James Poniewozik essentially reckoned for The New York Times in the wake of the former’s death last week at 76, was as much media personality as man. The World Cup might have kicked off in America, too, on June 17th, 1994, but the hunt for a fugitive Simpson and the subsequent freeway chase managed to supersede the planet’s biggest event, at least for a day, with a vintage American-style spectacle.

For a comprehensive personal, political, social, and cultural examination of Simpson, “June 17th, 1994” is not it. That’s Ezra Edelman’s sensational five-part “O.J.: Made in America” (2016), and if you don’t have time to watch all eight hours then reading Ray Ratto’s evaluation of O.J. for Defector with Joel Anderson’s assessment at Slate as the necessary chaser will do. But that isn’t to say Morgen’s movie is uninterested in or unaware of these ideas. Far from it, he just manifests them in different ways. As an earlier sequence in which “June 17th, 1994” cuts from the elder Arnold Palmer hitting a tee shot at Oakmont to monochrome archival footage of the younger Palmer rocketing a golf ball down the fairway, Morgen tends to see history in eerie echoes and rhymes. During the freeway chase, a cut to archival footage of Simpson in an old Hertz commercial dashing through the airport echoes becomes a macabre joke, holding up these two sides of Simpson at once and then splitting them right down the middle with a figurative axe. Images of people cheering the Ford Bronco alongside the freeway and from overpasses reverberate with footage of the erstwhile football star being cheered on at L.A. Coliseum during a touchdown run in 1969 in USC’s Game of the Century versus UCLA, portending the Trial of the Century. Perhaps Morgen’s most cutting supplement is adding the recordings of an LAPD detective trying to talk down a possibly suicidal Simpson in the back of that Ford Bronco, underlining the grisly nature of the whole ostensible carnival, a man wanted for murder threatening to kill himself to the primetime entertainment of millions, reality and a distorted, disturbing funhouse reflection of reality blending until you can’t tell them apart.

By never zooming out, “June 17th, 1994” takes a Where Were You? moment and puts us right back in the middle of it, but with accumulated knowledge over time to put into perspective what it always was, a twilight drive through this country’s own splintered, media-addled psyche.

Dune: Part Two

“Dune” is set in the year 10191, which is 191 years after the year ten thousand, which is where the Zager and Evans song “In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” concludes, a long, long ways out there, in other words, past the point, really, that our feeble 21st Century minds could grasp. It suggests a movie both narratively and visually abstruse, but that isn’t director Denis Villeneuve’s method, and so just like its Part One predecessor, “Dune: Part Two” is not looking forward but back. Whatever Frank Herbert’s original intentions with his 1965 sci fi source material (friendly reminder: I haven’t read it), Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaights are honoring old fashioned Hollywood storytelling by bringing vengeance and destiny up in the mix, crossing “Gladiator” with a more dystopian version of “Roman Holiday.” And even if this 166-minute behemoth does not so much run out of steam about midway through as get bogged down via a filmmaker who has publicly gone on record as not giving a flip about dialogue suddenly becoming overly dependent on it, a paradox weirdly proving his ostensible point, it also does not entirely matter. When “Dune: Part Two” fully engages with its own sense of spectacle, the sandworm will definitely turn for you, my friend.

When last we left Paul (Timothée Chalamet), last duke of the House Altreides, his father (Oscar Isaac) had been slain by order of the evil Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Fergusion) were holed up on the unforgiving desert planet of Arrakis with its rugged inhabitants the Fremen, some believing Paul to be their deliverer. Stilgar (Javier Bardem), leader of the Fremen thinks he is, though others, like young Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) are not so sure. Paul isn’t so sure, either, struggling to wrap his youthful mind around such a far-reaching destiny, having ominous visions as “Part Two” begins of a coming holy war. Heavy lies the crown, and all that. Yet, if heavy tends to be Villeneuve’s preferred tone, “Part Two” surprises for frequently being so light on its feet. Aesthetically, Villeneuve toggles between intimacy and enormity, never letting the scale overwhelm his sense of visual clarity and space, and in a sense, his storyline, at least at first, follows suit. 

Chalamet might come cloaked in the visage of a teenage heartthrob, but he also imbues his performance with the uneasy sense of being the new kid at school. The sequence in which he rides a mammoth sandworm through the desert, a feat of special effects intimating what it might be like to ride a wave at Bells Beach during a 50 Year Storm, might be evidence of the prophecy, but Chalamet gives it the air of a kid proving his self-worth, if not also seeking to impress the girl he likes. That’s Chani, of course, and though Villeneuve can lay the puppy dog love on thick, I’m also not made of stone, and one of the dialogue-centric scenes that works best is the two crazy kids having an intimate conversation alone amid the dunes because Chalamet seems to be pulling Zendaya toward him with his eyes. The scene in which the two of them arrhythmically walk side-by-side through the sand so as not to disturb those pesky worms lasts longer than the general 2.5 second edits honored by most modern movies but I found myself wishing Villeneuve would have held it even longer.

Percolating alongside our (possible) messiah’s road of trials are Baron Harkonnen’s ongoing attempts to harvest the spice of Arrakis and rid the planet of its Fremen. If Skarsgård is once again improbably cosplaying Pizza the Hutt then in reprising his role as Harkonnen’s villainous nephew, Dave Bautista has gone from cosplaying Darth Vader to cosplaying Dark Helmet, yelling, stomping comic relief. No, the emergent “Part Two” antagonist is Harkonnen’s other nephew Feyd-Rautha, played by Austin Butler in makeup making the erstwhile Elvis Presley look like Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett as a bloodsucking vampire, a sneering murderous psychopath speaking in a malevolent whisper. He receives a helluva introduction, demonstrating his skill in a gladiatorial arena as the warm colors of the desert give way to so much Brutalism in brutal black and white, as if Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” has been reduced purely to its most primitive urges. As soon as you see this sequence, you know where it’s heading, to a duel between our (maybe) messiah and our mercenary. That, however, is when this “Dune” gets stuck in the mud.

If Villeneuve and his editor Joe Walker hardly crosscut at all for the first half, as “Dune: Part Two” moves into its back half, the scenes switch between the good guys and the bad guys and Jessica, too, who takes a worm ride to the south of Arrakis to peddle her son’s prophecy, transforming a movie of sensation and spectacle into one all about moving the plot forward even as it assumes the air of running in place, epitomized both in huge chunks of expository dialogue and in the character of Feyd-Rautha, who after that electrifying introduction is just sort of reduced to figuratively tossing cards into a hat, waiting to go mano-a-mano with Paul. And if Villeneuve proves too literal minded for the more fantastical elements that gradually infuse the plot, like Jessica sipping the so-called Water of Life, he simultaneously proves too evasive to do much with all the political and religious subtext, none of which amounts to much more, really, than whatever the masses watching choose to project onto it.

All that might not even have mattered so much had the movie stuck the landing, but where Chalamet’s youthful air works to his advantage early, it hampers his turn in the back half, as he winds up coming across more reluctantly committed to his fate than twisting into the kind of believer of his own hype the plot would otherwise suggest. And if Chani is meant as the counterweight to Paul’s turn, Villeneuve hangs Zendaya out to dry by mostly just communicating it through unimaginative reaction shots that cruelly leave her looking passive and winsome. The ultimate showdown, meanwhile, between Paul and Feyd-Rautha as well as the emergent cliffhanger pointing toward Part 3 all move with a clinical stateliness that is impressive logically though, unlike the best moments, you never quite feel in your bones. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Kill Me Again (1989)

Time is fickle. When I first saw John Dahl’s “Kill Me Again” (1989) sometime in the mid-90s, probably rented from Hollywood Video, my knowledge of noir would have been scant, if not entirely non-existent. So, maybe it’s no wonder that I remembered loving it, having nothing, really, to compare it to, or having no real sense of how it drew from myriad predecessors. Seeing it again years later, after feasting on American noir for decades, it’s difficult to not see it for what it really is, or mostly is, anyway. Like Fay Forrester (Joanne Whalley) standing in the entryway of a semi-hapless private eye’s office as the camera ogles her by tilting up, “Kill Me Again” is striking a pose. 

Conveyed as an escalating series of double crosses, Fay and her psycho boyfriend Vince (Michael Madsen) rob a pair of mobsters of a briefcase full of money before Fay robs Vince and then hires cash-strapped Reno private detective Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer) to help stage her death. But after ‘dying,’ she absconds with half the money she owes Jack, making it two lovelorn dudes trying to track down Fay to get what they are owed. (Don’t rewrite in a review, yada yada, so it’s in a parenthetical, but I couldn’t help imagining an alternate movie in the vein of “There’s Something About Mary” in which Jack and Vince team up to go after Fay, and then maybe end up in the company of, say, Jonathan Silverman as, say, Paul, a third guy who gets duped by Fay and joins the team.) And this is to say nothing of the hoodlums seeking to collect $10,000 from Jack in gambling debts. 

The plot might be convoluted, and the characters might get the short end of the stick, but Dahl at least connects the myriad dots with some stylish kick, like an early cut from Jack looking at a broken photo of his wife to Fay peering through the broken window of his office. And in these weird days when a Tubi stream becomes more picturesque than digital film on a big screen, the way the late afternoon light reflected off the red rocks falls on Kilmer and Whalley’s face on Lake Mead makes it look like an old noir poster come to life. But then, this is the hottest moment, really, in a movie that never quite takes full advantage of just how hot Kilmer and then-Whalley-Kilmer were together. There’s a lot of talk these days about how movies used to be hotter, and broadly speaking, that’s true, but boy, even back then, they never fully took advantage of this couple comet blazing across the sky.

The character of Jack Andrews melds two noir archetypes into one, the private investigator and the sap, and Kilmer really leans into the latter, making him overly polite, too nice, just an absolute sucker. Its strangely effective, playing against the public persona he would have possessed in 1989 even as he occasionally evokes nothing less than his Nick Rivers character of the spoof “Top Secret!,” like when the moment when Jack phones for his bank balance (!) and pitifully realizes it’s $7.89, not $789, by forlornly adding the decimal point on a piece of paper. When Jack keeps getting roped in by Fay, you can’t help but want to pat this loser on the head, even as Kilmer’s convincing sheepishness cuts against the romance, not to mention his character’s ostensible gambling addiction and anguish over his wife’s death.

Whalley, meanwhile, winds up just as hampered by the twists and turns of the screenplay as the movie itself. There are so many double crosses, that we don’t so much come to wonder if she is who she says she is as we gradually discover we have no real idea of she is in the first place; she’s not a person, just a function of the plot. All those twists and turns, which come fast and furious as “Kill Me Again” wraps up, have the odd effect of working so hard to make it seem like you never know what’s coming that instead everything winds up being paradoxically obvious while the craft in engineering a climactic title drop – “Kill me, kill me again” – is admirable even if it can’t help but fall flat. 

The Bricklayer

“This type of scandal could destroy the U.S.!” This is the resplendent line of exposition some nameless journalist exclaims as Renny Harlin’s “The Bricklayer” begins, suggesting not just a rollicking good time but a modern conspiracy thriller in so much as the scheme to which the nameless journalist refers involves many of her own being killed in such a way to make it appear as if the CIA is responsible. Alas, neither really proves true. The tantalizing angle of present-day palace intrigue proves merely an engine for the plot, never explored in an interesting, forget about meaningful, way, and though in playing the eponymous Bricklayer, Steve Vail, a one-time Central Intelligence go-between for the Greek and Russian mafia, Aaron Eckhart wears a perpetual smirk, what ensues isn’t much fun. When Vail literally drives through a brick wall during a car chase, “The Bricklayer” doesn’t recognize the irony, allowing the punchline to sail right over its own head. No, Harlin’s movie is as by the book as Vail’s CIA babysitter Kate Bannon (Nina Dobrev) as evinced in how the director dutifully though unexcitedly lays every action movie brick, moving from a rooftop in the rain to a neon club to a dark apartment to a café. The fight in the neon club left less of a mark, in fact, than the song that played during it. By Victoria Celestine. I looked it up after. It’s good. I’ve been enjoying it.