Film reviews round-up: Detroit, American Made, In Bed with Victoria, Bushwick

★★★★☆

Doug Liman, 115 mins, starring: Tom Cruise, Caleb Landry Jones, Domhnall Gleeson, Jesse Plemons, Sarah Wright, Jayma Mays

Tom Cruise gives one of his finest screen performances in American Made, a film which allows the normally clean-cut star to show his delinquent side. For once, he is not the action hero who saves the day in the final reel.

Instead, Cruise plays a gleefully amoral, reckless and sleazy opportunist who prides himself on “having a finger in every pie”. He takes drugs, moons for the camera and hangs out with Pablo Escobar in Colombia.

In the 1970s, Cruise’s character Barry Seal became one of the youngest pilots in TWA history. Barry had plenty going for him – good looks, a decent job, a beautiful and devoted wife in Lucy (Sarah Wright). Bored and with bills to pay, he dabbled in a little low-level cigar smuggling.

This was what brought him to the attention of the CIA and of his very strait-laced, office-bound handler Monty Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson). It was a period when the Cold War was in full swing.

In no time at all, Barry was spying in Central America for the CIA, smuggling cocaine into Florida for the Medellin cartel in Colombia and helping to arm the “Contra” rebels President Reagan hoped would topple the Communist regime in Nicaragua.

As he flew his missions, Barry excelled in pitting every side against the other and in taking as much money as possible both from Uncle Sam and from Escobar and his cronies. It is easy to see why screenwriters were so drawn to him. (Barry also features in the Netflix series Narcos.)

Director Doug Liman is telling two separate stories here. On the one hand, this is a cautionary tale about America’s bungled foreign policy and war on drugs (“just say no!”) in the Reagan era. On the other, it’s a closely focused study of an American anti-hero who had outrageous amounts of chutzpah.

The irony is that Barry has all the traits of the characters Cruise usually plays. He is an expert pilot who is enterprising and very courageous. Barry can land a plane on a tiny runway deep in the Colombian jungle. (It goes without saying that Cruise did all his own stunts.) He is chivalrous, generous and reliable, “the crazy gringo who always delivers” as he is characterised.

Liman plays on Cruise’s biggest quality as a movie actor, his likability, but then shows the character behaving in a despicable fashion. We always root for him anyway, whichever paymaster he is trying to please at any given time.

Barry is the kind of charismatic sleazeball that James Woods used to portray in films like Salvador and The Boost. “Goddam, you’re CIA!” he exclaims when he gets stung by Schafer for the first time. A more conventional movie hero would be utterly dismayed at being caught smuggling. Barry, though, reacts with a childlike glee at actually meeting a real spy… and then he begins to play the angles.

The film is set in the late Seventies and early Eighties. That allows Liman to throw in lots of disco, cheesy graphics and newsreel footage of Reagan’s folksy and eccentric TV addresses to the nation.

American Made is an example of the idea of “six degrees of separation” in action. Barry is the humble ex-TWA pilot whose circle of acquaintance ends up stretching all the way from Escobar in Colombia to Panamanian military hardman Manuel Noriega in Panama and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the figure at the centre of the Iran-Contra affair. (Coincidentally, Liman’s father, lawyer Arthur L Liman, led the Senate investigation into that particular scandal.)

Barry is blithely uninterested in his role as an important pawn on the geopolitical chess board. Nor is he particularly concerned with money, of which he ends up having so much that the local bank keeps it in a special vault.

One of his most engaging qualities is that he lives entirely in the present. He’s not prey to remorse. He rolls with the punches. If he is beaten up, arrested, threatened at gunpoint or forced to take off from a runway that’s far too short to be safe, he’ll accept whatever misfortune comes his way and simply move on.

The story comes with many layers of irony. Barry is self-motivated, hard working and always cheerful. He is indeed “American made” and that’s why so many US government agencies end up competing with each other to sling him behind bars.

Cruise still has that smirking, mischievous quality he first brought to the screen in Risky Business all those years ago. We soon realise that Barry isn’t such a departure for him after all. It’s a role that nobody else could have played better.

★★★☆☆

Kathryn Bigelow, 143 mins, starring: John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore, Jason Mitchell, Kaitlyn Dever, Jack Reynor, Anthony Mackie

In Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Kathryn Bigelow dramatised the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. In The Hurt Locker (2008), she followed a bomb disposal expert in Iraq. Her new feature is again set in a war zone but the very big difference here is that the centre of the conflict is a big American city.

During the summer of 1967, race riots broke out in Detroit. The police and National Guard were sent onto the streets to stop the violence. This is the background to what turns out to be a very tightly focused drama, one of unremitting brutality.

Bigelow’s filmmaking technique is awe-inspiring. She gives the events she depicts a juddering immediacy. This doesn’t seem like fiction but like fly-on-the-wall footage shot in the middle of the riots. She knows how to marshal crowds and how to shoot and edit in such a fast-moving and elliptical way that audiences will share the sense of panic, confusion and anger experienced by those caught up in the events.

Nor does she do anything to disguise the openly racist behaviour of the Detroit authorities. Evil here comes with a police badge on its lapel. At times, in its use of dramatic and newsreel techniques, Detroit has the same force as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle Of Algiers.

The downside to what is a powerful and gruelling film is its absolute lack of nuance. You’re unlikely to encounter a crueller, more sadistic villain in any movie this year than the young Detroit police officer Philip Krauss (Will Poulter). What Bigelow and her regular screenwriter Mark Boal fail to explain is what baffles his victims too. Why is he behaving in such a psychopathic fashion and where does his racism come from?

A film which starts on a very broad canvas eventually becomes constricted and claustrophobic. Barring the street riots at the beginning and courtroom scenes at the end, the main drama all takes place within the Algiers Motel.

The streets may be burning but the guests here (at least initially) are oblivious to the violence. The motel is an oasis of (relative) tolerance and harmony. Blacks and whites are hanging out by the pool and partying. It is here that young R&B singer Larry Reed (Algee Smith) heads for respite after what could have been a breakthrough concert for his band The Dramatics is cancelled.

1967 was the Summer of Love. For a few moments, the good vibes of the hippy revolution are felt as the guests relax and shoot the breeze together. Larry and his friend Fred (Jacob Latimore) meet two young white women who in turn introduce them to their friends. They joke around. Then comes the fateful moment when one man lets off a starting pistol. The cops and National Guardsmen get it into their heads that there’s a sniper in the motel. They react with an overwhelming and utterly disproportionate show of force.

Easily the richest character in the film, the one whose inner life we at least get some sense of, is the private security guard Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega). In an impressive performance a very long way removed from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Boyega conveys the character’s seething and desperate moral confusion. Melvin believes in authority. He wants to do the right thing. He wears a uniform and carries a gun. At the same time, he is a black man in a city in which racism appears to be institutionalised.

The long episodes of the film in which Krauss terrorises the guests at the motel, and tries to persuade his colleagues to do likewise, play like something out of a horror film. He is evil incarnate and they’re the innocents who have the misfortune to be under his influence.

English actor Poulter is effective in the role partly because he is so young and fresh-faced. It seems only a very short time since he was starring as the mischievous, Sylvester Stallone-loving kid in Son Of Rambow. He has a likeable demeanour which makes his behaviour all the more chilling.

The “Algiers Motel Incident,” as it became known, is still shrouded in mystery and controversy. The film may be a dramatic feature but it also stands as a piece of investigative journalism. Bigelow and her team have clearly researched events exhaustively and have tried to come up with a definitive account of what actually happened over the course of a night in which guests were harassed, humiliated, beaten and killed by police officers.

The filmmakers have taken some dramatic licence. (Pouter’s Krauss is a composite character, based on several different officers involved in the incident.) Nonetheless, as the end credits make clear, this is an attempt to peer behind the official version and to reach for the truth.

In its own polemical way, it is very powerful filmmaking but, as storytelling, it is one-dimensional. There is too much “docu” here and not enough drama.

★★★☆☆

Justine Triet, 96 mins, starring: Virginie Efira, Vincent Lacoste, Melvil Poupaud, Laurent Poitrenaux, Laure Calamy, Sophie Fillieres

Memories of old Hollywood battle of the sexes comedies are invoked in Justine Triet’s droll and acerbic In Bed With Victoria. Its main protagonist, glamorous Parisian lawyer Victoria (Virginie Efira), is a Gallic variation on the type of character you could imagine Katharine Hepburn playing. She’s haughty and formidably bright but with a very chaotic domestic life as a single mother of two young children.

The film is full of screwball elements. Its climactic court case involves a dog taking the witness stand and the use of a photograph taken by a chimp which reveals whether one of the plaintiffs really was wearing underwear at a wedding party.

Victoria has a knack of attracting devious and very needy men, both as lovers and as clients. Melvil Poupaud plays a friend whose case she very unwisely takes on. (He’s a charming but sociopathic womaniser.) Victoria also has to deal with her clinging ex-husband who is writing a roman a clef about her. The only stability in her life is provided by a young ex drug dealer (Vincent Lacoste), who wants to study law and, somewhat improbably, ends up as her nanny and home help.

Efira (seen recently in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle) excels as the strong-willed and impulsive heroine struggling to make sense of her life. She enlists psychics and shrinks but still can’t work out what is driving her or whether or not she is happy.

★★☆☆☆

Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion, 94 mins, starring: Dave Bautista, Brittany Snow, Christian Navarro, Jeremie Harris, Arturo Castro, Myra Lucretia Taylor

It’s not Martians or Russians or Isis zealots that lay siege to Brooklyn in low-budget thriller Bushwick. The invading forces are members of a mercenary right-wing US army trying to force Congress into allowing the Southern states to secede from the Union. This is a timely premise for the supremely muddled-up Trump era but the film itself is clunky.

Dave Bautista (the hulking wrestler turned Guardians Of The Galaxy star) plays Stupe, a grunting, monosyllabic Rambo-like janitor who used to be a soldier. He’s thrown together with Lucy (Brittany Snow), a young student who was travelling through the subway with her boyfriend when, suddenly, the invasion started. Just as in the Purge movies, passers-by are all fair game. Old and young alike are shot and killed.

The performances and dialogue are very crude. The most impressive aspect here is the wildly energetic cinematography by Lyle Vincent. He shoots handheld and holds shots for minutes at a time as he follows Stupe and Lucy down New York streets and alleyways.

They’re trying to reach a demilitarised zone from which they may be able to escape. Lucy’s drug-addled sister doesn’t even notice the carnage. (She thinks it’s just the noise from people playing Call Of Duty too loudly.)

Directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott throw in plenty of explosions, fights and chases to distract us but whenever the action stops, the film begins to seem very silly indeed.