This week, Bernard, CJ and Zach react to the Oscars! Listen to find out how they did on their predictions and hear their thoughts on the show’s overall presentation. Also, filmmaker Alex Proyas recently lashed out at movie critics following a landslide of negative reviews for his movie Gods of Egypt. The boys dissect his resentment and discuss whether the hate is misplaced, misguided, or perhaps even warranted. Plus, we’ve got three new, glistening, unbelievable, don’t-miss-it-or-we’ll-kick-your-ass amazing Indie Picks of the Week!

Topics

• Indie Picks (3:53)
• Oscar Reactions (15:46)
• Alex Proyas Critic Hate (1:00:57)

Articles Referenced

• Cemetery of Splendour TIFF Review
• The Witch Review
• The Witch Indiecast
• Impossible Light Interview
• Oscar Foreign Film Feature

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Invincible action stars are out of fashion. In the ’80s and ’90s we paid bookoo bucks to watch beefcakes like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme buzzsaw through bad guys by the thousands. Today, we’ve got Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington, and even Helen Mirren (all sexagenarians) playing highly-skilled death dealers, raking in the action blockbuster bucks formerly reserved for men with glistening, 24-inch biceps (the old muscle-heads are clinging on for dear life, but their flame has dwindled considerably). French director Pierre Morel more or less started the “aging action star” trend with Taken, and now he’s giving Sean Penn the “Neeson” treatment with The Gunman, an international action thriller that unfortunately won’t be Penn’s springboard into genre superstardom because frankly, the movie’s sort of a bummer.

A lot of the film’s mopey vibe comes from Penn’s face. You know that first ten minutes after you wake up from a nap when you’re a groggy, unresponsive asshole? That’s what Penn’s like for most of the movie. He looks really, really miserable all the time, and it rubs off on you. His character, Jim Terrier, is at his happiest at the movie’s outset: It’s 2006 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Jim, an American private security guard, has got a smokin’ hot girlfriend, Annie (Jasmine Trinca), a humanitarian aid worker whose group Jim and his team protects. They’re supposed to share a deep love connection, but they come off more like intense shag-buddies.

What Annie doesn’t know is, Jim’s real job is as a sniper for a mercenary group, led by their friend, Felix (Javier Bardem), who’s got a less-than-secret crush on Annie. Conveniently, a secret mission involving Jim assassinating a government mining minister provides Felix the perfect opportunity to steal Annie away: after the hit Jim is ordered to leave the country without so much as a goodbye to dear Annie, who’s left to save lives in the middle of the Congolese civil war without her man.

Skip forward eight years and Jim’s back in the DRC, digging wells to help provide water for the locals, and surfing on his downtime. An odd scene sees a shirtless Penn hit the waves for a while and run up the beach when he realizes he’s late for work. It’s odd because it plays like documentary footage of Penn vacationing in Africa, and is a laughably blatant excuse to show off the gym-rat pecs and abs he worked so hard on for the movie. Anyway, a group of men with guns show up to one of Jim’s dig sites screaming, “Where’s the white man?!”, a deadly run-in that sends him on a quest across Europe to hunt down his demons and atone for his sins. When he finds Felix married to Annie in Barcelona, things get personal.

From here, it’s old-guy action-thriller 101. There are double-crosses, verbal dick-measuring contests with Felix and an assortment of other tough guys, neck-snapping, choking, hiding, shooting, reunion sex…everything you expect, nothing more, nothing less. There’s a wrinkle in the plot involving Jim developing a harmful protein growth in his head due to the hard knocks he took during his time as a contract killer, but the only consequence of this contrivance is that Jim occasionally looks super constipated and then passes out at the worst possible moments (i.e. when baddies are around).

Though every step of the way the movie feels telegraphed and unsurprising, the good thing is Morel knows how to shoot and stage action scenes very, very well. The fights feel weighty and un-rushed, and some sequences are pretty inventive, like when Jim and Annie are trapped in a villa bathroom with all entrances blocked by grunts and Jim starts a fire to make good his escape. It’s always better to see Morel’s characters MacGuyver their way out of situations rather than Rambo their way out, and thankfully we get a few instances of the former to break up what otherwise is a movie that sleepwalks through genre tropes Morel helped establish with Taken.

Speaking of Taken, what made that movie work was that there was a sense of fun and adventure and locomotion to it, three things Gunman sorely lacks. Even when things are exploding or Penn is roughing up bad guys who deserve their comeuppance, the movie just never feels all that exciting. The film’s overriding tone is one of sadness and regret, and the plot revolves around characters who, across the board, are pretty big jerk-holes. There’s no ending to Jim’s story that would feel satisfactory because it’s hard to feel compassion for a guy who curses his old days as a killer one minute, and the next proceeds to mass murder dozens of men with finesse, precision, and flair.

Trinca’s character doesn’t sweeten the pot either. She’s written as a narrow-minded, sassy prize for Jim and Felix to fight over, which is a shame, because Trinca’s a hell of an actress. The rest of the cast are excellent as well and are often the only thing keeping the film afloat. Though Jim Terrier is far from a great role, Penn’s still a captivating screen presence. Mark Rylance, Idris Elba, and Ray Winstone have a few scenes each and have some fun, with Rylance (a decorated British stage actor) being the most memorable of all, modifying his voice with a gravely croak to hint at his character’s violent backstory.

Bardem has a lot of fun as Felix, playing him like a drunk, semi-incompetent Bond villain. He and Penn share some good exchanges, but it isn’t enough to save the film from its misery. The Gunman takes itself way too seriously. Maybe Penn—who received producer and screenplay credit for the film—let too much of his method-actor intensity seep into the film. Morel’s got style and class, and it’d be nice to see him out of his comfort zone with his next project.

Sean Penn bulks up, whoops some ass and atones for his sins in The Gunman, a dark thriller with a stacked cast, directed by Taken helmer Pierre Morel. Penn plays Jim Terrier, a sniper mercenary who, years after carrying out a high-profile assassination in the Congo and abandoning the love of his life, must chase demons from his past across Europe and reconcile with his lost lover. Fans of Morel’s measured, cerebral approach to action will find the French director staying true to form as he gives Penn the Liam Neeson “grizzled tough-guy” treatment. Javier Bardem, Jasmine Trinca, Ray Winstone, Mark Rylance, and Idris Elba round out the cast.

While visiting San Francisco Morel sat with us to talk about his psychological approach to action; the mentality of men who kill; Sean Penn’s intensity on set; Mark Rylance’s raspy voice; his inability to settle down in a single location; and more.

One of my favorite sports journalists said something fascinating recently. He talked about how most people would like to think that, if their family or significant other were threatened on the street, they wouldn’t hesitate to protect them and inflict violence on the attacker. But in fact, most people aren’t able to do it. It takes a certain type of person who is capable of answering that call to violence at the drop of a hat. You’ve made a few movies about men with this capacity. What do you understand about the mindset of this kind of person?
I don’t know this kind of person, but the characters we’re portraying are what we all wish to be. It’s that fantasy: If my kids were threatened, I would immediately react and do what needs to be done. Many people cannot do that. But in a perfect world, we’d love to. Making these characters in movies is a way to personify our hopes and expectations of ourselves, which we may never fulfill.

It’s a bit strange to watch these men mass murder people. I think your movies are concerned with the psychology of that more than most action movies. I know you don’t consider your films straight-up action movies, and one of the things that allows your work to transcend that genre is your cerebral approach. Your action sequences aren’t necessarily about head-to-head fighting or brute strength. These guys are stuck in a corner, and they have to maneuver their way out with their brain.
I love that kind of thing. It is an action movie — it’s entertaining — but it’s not just that. It’s about the psychology of these guys and what leads them to do what they do. That’s more interesting than action for action’s sake to me. There are several layers of complexity in guys who actually do this kind of business. We met a few guys who do that kind of business.

Snipers?
Yeah. Snipers, black ops. They have a mindset. For those who have been close to danger, they have a mindset to get out of dangerous situations. It requires being very well prepared, also. It’s not something you can improvise, I don’t think. If you’re stuck in the middle of a massive fight and you’re not trained for that, you’re like a rabbit in headlights. If you’re trained, you can get out of it. The movie’s about that, but it’s also about the other side of it. There’s a cost to that kind of [mindset], a psychological and physical cost. The cost of killing is something that takes its toll on you, I think.

We see both mental and physical repercussions to Terrier’s work. Is his brain condition in the movie a real thing?
It is. It’s the same condition you find in football players or boxers. It’s repeated concussions that ruin the brain, causing it to create bad proteins that build up and disable your ability to act and function properly. It’s not a psychological condition like PTSD; it’s a physical condition. It impairs your ability to move, so if a crisis occurs in the middle of a fight, it impairs the hero’s ability to fight. It was interesting to us to give flaws to our hero. I like heroes that are human and have issues, not superheroes. If you know already that he’s going to win, what’s the point?

I enjoyed Mr. Rylance’s performance. Did he alter his voice a bit for the role? It’s wonderful.
People don’t necessarily know Mark Rylance because he’s a British stage actor, one of the most gifted stage actors of his generation. Sean had never done action, and Mark hadn’t either. He wanted to build a different kind of characters. In a few shots, you can see there’s a big scar on his neck, and he imagined he’d been hurt in combat before, so he modified his voice. That was his backstory for his character.

Mr. Penn got in great shape for the movie. You can tell he put a lot of work in at the gym. Is he intense to be around? He seems to take his craft very, very seriously.
One of the things that makes him so talented is that he doesn’t compromise. He’s a gifted actor, and he doesn’t compromise, so when he’s in character, he’s one hundred percent that character. He works hard. It’s easy to work with him because we had great connections and moments on set. We had early-stage conversations about what the movie’s about, who the character is, what his journey is, what his arc is, so on set you just make adjustments on an already great performance.

He and Javier have good chemistry.
It’s interesting to see them work together. They come from different schools, I’d say. Sean is method acting to the core, and Javier is from Spain so he has a different approach to acting. But ultimately, however they built their characters, the chemistry was pretty intense.

Do you enjoy putting your characters in hopeless situations and then try to plot out how they’ll fight or think their way out of it? Is that fun to you?
Yeah, it’s always fun. You work on the floor plans for your sets, like, “Okay, they’re coming in from here and over there…what do you do [escape]?” Cool action pieces are fun. I love them.

What new skills have you acquired on this film as a director?
I don’t know. I learn every time. Every day is a new experience. You learn many things on each film, but I haven’t analyzed that yet.

Is it a subconscious thing?
Completely. Very instinctive. I’m not very intelligent. [laughs]

I’ve seen and read a lot of your interviews. You seem to very much love what you do and get a lot of joy from filmmaking.
It’s fun. What’s not to love in making movies? Come on! It’s fantastic. It’s less a job than it is a passion. I watch movies as much as I can. You have to be a movie lover before you can make movies. I love movies, so I’m happy on the set.

And filming in these beautiful places doesn’t hurt, I’m sure.
That’s another part of me. I can’t settle anywhere more than a few months. [laughs] It’s a big problem of mine. But yeah, we moved a lot. We went to Spain for this movie, mostly. Barcelona is a pretty cool city, a beautiful city, and a really easy place to shoot. Wherever you put your camera is going to look good. [laughs] We shot in South Africa, which is probably the easiest part of Africa to shoot in, because it has an existing industry. It’s a world on its own, I think. Gorgeous.