The box office charts show exactly what people want in the summer. High in the top ten list right now you see these: F1 The Movie, How to Train Your Dragon and Elio. Further down there’s Lilo & Stitch and Mission Impossible –The Final Reckoning. The Smurfs and Superman will be here soon and this week we’ve got another contender, the latest in the ongoing Jurassic Park series. Plus a couple of films with more serious aims.
And I’ve been hearing good things about Heads of State starting up today on Prime Video. The US president and UK Prime Minister in an action thriller? If you’re into escapism, sure.
But widely available we have these:
Jurassic World Rebirth: 3 stars
Sorry, Baby: 4
40 Acres: 2 ½
Heads of State: 2 ½
JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH: It’s summer, and we haven’t had a Jurassic dinosaur adventure for three years. So it’s time for this new one and there will be more. It’s hoped this will be the start of yet another trilogy, following the one that ended with the mediocre Jurassic World Dominion. This one is not mediocre. Not especially new, but back to the feel of the original, Jurassic Park, seven films ago and bigger, with more-than-believable creatures that come and snap at you from out of nowhere or sneak up in the background and chomp on people when they attack.
For three films, the series has let dinosaurs loose in the human world (just like those monster films from the 1950s). Here, humans go back to their world, as scripted by David Koepp, who wrote the first two films and directed by Gareth Edwards, who has done some Star Wars and a Godzilla movie and made a small film called Monsters early in his career in which dinosaurs were loose in the Mexican wilderness. It now seems like a trial run for this.
The story picks up from Dominion where Big Pharma got involved and now sends a team to get some DNA from the creatures which are roaming free where the original theme park was shut down. The genetic material will be used in a new heart medicine and thereby save thousands of lives, says Rupert Friend, as the company man.
For the mission, he recruits Scarlet Johansson, as a secret operations expert with flexible ethics, two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali as her cohort and another award-winner, Jonathan Bailey, as a paleontologist. They rescue a father and his children from a sailboat that’s attacked and tipped over by a water-borne dinosaur (we see it all happening in seat-gripping tension). All are then stranded on the creatures’ island, trying to stay out of their jaws and at the same time trying to get their DNA. It’s got too many visual reminders of other movies, but it’s thrilling anyway. As Koepp has said, the third act is simply “Run like hell.” (In theaters) 3 out of 5
SORRY, BABY: Trauma and comedy in the same film? Surprise, but yes, and the trauma is honest, well-delineated and moving. That’s because we connect with the victim and only talk about and don’t see the incident that caused it. We do connect with a number of scenes, several of them funny, that followed. And efforts to recover.
The film was a standout at the Sundance Film Festival. Eva Victor wrote, directed and stars in it and shows she’s a filmmaker to watch for her skills at communicating women’s issues and manners. It starts right at the beginning as she, playing Agnes, and a friend (Naomi Ackie) cheerfully banter about men and sex and the friend’s pregnancy, whether she wants a baby herself and whether she would sleep with the English prof who she’s going to see the next day. She’s on the faculty too.
That meeting with Preston Decker, played by Louis Cancelmi, is cut short for what sounds like a facile reason. He invites her to his house to continue the talk later, and then we see her leave the house looking somewhat stunned. There’s an eerie atmosphere as she drives home. Later, she tells her friend what happened, about his hand “down there” and “something in me.” You get the impression of shock with even these few, non-graphic words. And we get a good idea of what she's going through in the aftermath. At home, she shivers at sudden noises and fears opening a door. The university won’t get involved. A doctor asks for details, one of two counselors says “we know what you’re going through. We are women.” A smarmy student cheerfully admits she slept with the prof. It’s a vibrant mix of funny observations and consternation served up by Victor, who’s also known as an online comedian. (In theaters: Toronto now, Montreal and Vancouver next week, more the week after) 4 out of 5
40 ACRES: Careful with this one if you’re bothered by violence. There’s a lot of it here and though it makes sense in the context of the story, it’s pretty hard to take. This is a Canadian entry in the post-apocalyptic genre. It’s set 14 years after a pandemic killed 98% of the animals, 12 years after a civil war and a collapse of food production that led to a worldwide famine. Now the most valuable resource on earth is farmland. While that’s an astute observation about what’s really important, now and in the future, the film goes overboard in proclaiming it. The few operating farms are under attack by marauders—as we see in a battle in a cornfield at the very start—and as we learn later, people have turned to cannibalism. The film tells all that as a statement about the effects of colonialism. But the connection is not convincing.
The Freeman family is in danger on their farm. The mother, Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), is an ex-soldier and now a strong family protector. She wants them isolated from the outside world. Her son (Kataem O’Connor) wants to go out there, especially after one excursion, when he meets a woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) and is intrigued. That sets up a typical parent-child disagreement and that does play true.
Hailey is a descendant of Blacks who came to Canada from the US after the Civil War. They had been promised 40 acres and a mule, which they never got. Her husband (Michael Greyeyes) is Indigenous. Colonialism makes more sense with his life. They both fight off attackers, she with a machete; he with a tomahawk. The kids do too, with knives and guns.
Director R. T. Thorne sees it as an allegory for the many threats Blacks face today. He wrote it while the Black Lives Matter movement emerged after police shootings of Black men and the pandemic brought on fears of possible food shortages. The film is an uneasy mix of all, along with Indigenous rights issues. It doesn’t quite work. However, the Toronto International Film Festival named it one of the 10 best Canadian films of last year, possibly because it is beautifully crafted. (In theaters 2 ½ out of 5
HEADS OF STATE: This one has a lot of violence too, but it is of the cartoonish kind and easier to take. You get extended bouts of shooting and fighting with grace notes of explosions (big and small) and car chases through old streets in Croatia and other European cities. The film gets kudos for the propulsive momentum with which it delivers all that but is deducted marks for the not very wise but familiar story that ties it together. John Cena plays the US president and Idris Elba is the UK Prime Minister. They’re expected at a NATO conference, which one describes as “a group of friends” but is actually in danger of falling apart. They’re detained though, apparently shot down in Air Force One and, while the world thinks they’re dead, they have to find their way back from Belarus to Trieste, Italy before the member countries vote to dissolve NATO.
You get great locations along the way, repeated attempts to finish them off and constant bickering between them. The PM accuses POTUS of “American arrogance” and unsuitability for his job, which he won because he was popular as the star of action movies like Water Cobra, a classic.” His goal, he says, is to bring hope to the people. The PM calls him “the popcorn president,” says hope is just delayed disappointment and is himself criticized as a do-nothing PM. So it goes as a conspiracy is building led by a Russian arms dealer and his son who hack into government systems to cause economic sabotage, influence elections and spill secrets that set the NATO members against each other. There’s a mole helping them and Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra Jonas, as an MI6 agent, is helping find who it is. They also get into spirited fights and gun battles (many of them) and play down a romantic past with one of the two leaders. The film is crowded with plot and sly allusions to a real American president, though overall it's more frivolous than wise. (Prime Video) 2 ½ out of 5
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