Vegetable Simple: A Cookbook

film roundup

KEITH UHLICH

Nobody (Dir. Ilya Naishuller). Starring: Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen. Bob Odenkirk gets a John Wick to call his own with Nobody, which was written by Wick scribe Derek Kolstad and directed by Ilya Naishuller, of the manically puerile first-person action flick Hardcore Henry. A similar aura of asinine shamelessness pervades here. Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell is a suburban family man going through the motions at a dead-end job. But what few people know is that Hutch is a retired assassin suppressing his murderous instincts for a chance at what most of us rubes would call a normal life. The habitual state of man, the film argues, is bloodthirsty and barbarous, something Hutch re-discovers when he crosses paths with a band of hooligans on a city bus. One “I’m gonna fuck you up!” and some brilliantly choreographed fisticuffs later, and Hutch has inadvertently run afoul of a Russian mobster (Aleksey Serebryakov) with vengeance on the brain. From there, Nobody becomes unrepentantly flip and vile, to the point that Odenkirk’s game attempts to ground Hutch’s macho wants and needs in some recognizably human reality are nullified. [R] HH

Godzilla vs. Kong (Dir. Adam Wingard). Starring: Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall. A giant lizard fighting an oversize simian? Seems, entertainment-wise, like a sure thing. Yet, the fourth feature in the ongoing MonsterVerse series illustrates otherwise. The G-Guy does indeed fight the K-Guy—for about ten minutes total across the barely two-hour runtime. That wouldn’t be a problem if the rest of the film had something approaching a distinct vision, like Gareth Edwards’s astonishing sense of human-to-monster scale in 2014’s Godzilla, or a performer, like Ken Watanabe in 2017’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, who might lend resonant gravitas to scenes without beast-on-beast brawling. Yet everything human in Godzilla vs. Kong (Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, and Rebecca Hall are among the anthropoid cast) is unfortunately perfunctory and disconnected from the tedious spectacle conjured by director Adam Wingard and his army of tech-head collaborators. There is some pleasure to be had in several of the vistas, such as a topsy-turvy Center of the Earth and a Hong Kong that’s basically a glowing-neon target for our towering protagonists’ destructive instincts. Overall, though, this is an empty-headed and hearted extravaganza. [PG-13] H

The Empty Man (Dir. David Prior). Starring: James Badge Dale, Marin Ireland, Sasha Frolova. Between inclement weather, attempted studio interference, and a ravaging global pandem-

ic, writer-director David Prior’s feature debut had a torturous road to release. Fortunately, this blood-curdling horror movie is now turning into a deserved cult hit. Prior’s confidence and talent is evident from the 1990sset extended prologue in which a quartet of backpackers in Bhutan run afoul of a malevolent entity. The film then jumps ahead to present-day Missouri, where former cop James Lasombra (James Badge Dale) is asked

to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl (Sasha Frolova). We’ve seen many of the elements of this story before (a ghostly urban legend; a lawman with a tortured past; a strings-pulling organization that may be involved in the occult), but not quite in the way Prior presents them. There’s something intentionally hollow about the situations in which Lasombra finds himself as if they’re scales before his eyes that need to be clawed at for a deeper, darker truth to emerge. Like the best scare films, The Empty Man is very much of its moment, but not self-consciously so. [R]

The Empty Man.

HHHH1/2

Mortal Kombat (Dir. Simon McQuoid). Starring: Lewis Tan, Joe Taslim, Hiroyuki Sanada. It certainly took Hollywood long enough to do a hard-R adaptation of the hysterically gore-drenched video game series. The kills, though, are backloaded in first-time feature director Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat, which, though far from a flawless victory, still has plenty of degenerate delights. Initially, the film is in extended training montage mode, detailing how low-level MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) and a ragtag crew that includes Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Kano (Josh Lawson), and Jax (Mehcad Brooks) come under the tutelage of the celestial Lord Raiden (Tadonobu Asano) as prep for an otherworldly martialarts tournament. There’s a lot of lame-’n’-profane quipping between squad. But that eventually gives way to some entertainingly grisly skirmishes, such as the one involving the four-armed behemoth Goro and another a flying hat, courtesy the haughty Shang Tsung (Chin Han), that becomes an entrails-demolishing buzzsaw. Even those outside the arcade faith will be moved to cheers when the great Hiroyuki Sanada, as the fires-of-hellforged fighter Scorpion, tells his arch-nemesis Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) to “get over here” [R]

HH1/2