Warfare: War films-particularly the modern ones that are set in Afghanistan or Iraq-occupy a tricky space in the world of entertainment simply because of how they go about portraying military conflicts. Odds are if we aren't talking about WWII or Vietnam, somebody has made a deeply dishonest, if not legitimately dangerous movie that romanticizes combat and downplayed or ignored the role various powerful governments around the world played in creating the violent conflict that's being portrayed on screen. The latest film from Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza-who served as the military advisor on Garland's last film Civil War-Warfare avoids falling into that camp. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find many films that portray military combat in a more honest, horrific manner than Warfare does.
Warfare deals with a 2006 mission in Ramadi, Iraq that Mendoza himself was involved in which a Navy Seal Team seizes a home from civilians to scout a suspected ISIS cell that's operating out of a market in the neighborhood that begins to go sideways when somebody throws a grenade into the home and wounds one of the team's snipers (Cosmo Jarvis). The rest of the film deals with the team's efforts to maintain their position while they wait for the medical evac team to arrive.
What makes Warfare such an effective film is that it completely removes any of the glamourizing dramatic barriers that you typically see in the genre. There's no rah rah speeches, slo-mo shots of American flags waving or moments of rousing heroism designed to boost recruitment for the armed forces taking center stage. Instead, it just bluntly presents the horrors and senselessness of combat in real time. The wounded are heard writhing in pain while they're shell-shocked counterparts try to calm them down and keep them alive until they can access proper medical treatment. Civilians scream in confused horror while their home gets laid to waste by gunfire, IED's and tank rounds. Limbs and entrails are spread over a street where people just have to continue to live after the US military rolls out of there. It's a disturbing, nauseating and gut-wrenching watch, which in my view at least is how all films depicting war should be. Mendoza and Garland deserve all the credit in the world for making a film that forces the audience to really sit with the unspeakable horrors that warfare inflicts on the soldiers as well as the residents of the countries that have been invaded.
Grade: B+
Drop: Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day franchise) breaks free from his meta slasher comedy comfort zone with this straightforward albeit knowingly ridiculous thriller about a widowed single mother (Meghann Fahy) whose first date with a charming photographer (Brandon Sklenar) at a fancy restaurant is disrupted by threatening airdrops from an anonymous individual who offers her a simple ultimatum: follow their instructions to kill her date or an assassin that's hiding in her home will kill her son (Jacob Robinson) and sister (Violett Beane). While it probably could've been more intense given the confined setting it almost exclusively takes place in and the identity of the airdropper is pretty easy to figure out by the time the second act rolls around, Drop mostly succeeds in providing the trashy thrills it aims to deliver. Fahy does a great job of being both blatantly distracted by what this mysterious person is constantly sending to her phone and cunning enough to buy herself time to figure out what the hell is really going on before she does something she can't undo, the single location setting paired with the claustrophobic panic Fahy's character is feeling allows Landon to deploy some cool, disorienting stylistic flourishes at important junctures of the film and the propulsive final act where the big picture behind this murder plot comes into focus is just the right amount of absurd. I can easily see this becoming a longtime favorite among people who get a kick out of all things self-aware and camp.
Grade: B
The Amateur: A merely serviceable spy vigilante thriller that's tailor made for your dad to half watch on a Sunday afternoon after drinking 3 Busch Lights? Real cinema is back baby! What The Amateur lacks in crackling action and explosive stakes it makes up for with good old-fashioned consistent narrative momentum and competent acting. Plus, there's just something kind of hilarious about a movie where a revolving door of veteran actors (Laurence Fishburne, Holt McCallany, Danny Sapani, Jon Bernthal) tell the CIA data analyst protagonist Charlie Heller (Rami Malek in a cold, awkward role that plays to his strengths as a performer) that he's too much of a nerdy pussy to get revenge on the four terrorists (Michael Stuhlbarg, Marc Rissmann, Joseph Millson, Barbara Probst) that killed his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) in London following an arms deal gone awry at the hotel she was staying at during a business trip, only for them to be legitimately shocked when he dispatches one of them with some jerry-rigged explosive device he made in a filthy Romanian hotel room and evades capture with his intricate knowledge of the various digital surveillance systems his friends at the CIA are tracking him with. It would kind of rule if Disney went all-in on making 20th Century the modern answer to Touchstone Pictures and churned out a handful of stupid non-franchise movies for adults like this every year.
Grade: C+
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