Tag Archives: Dave Bautista

‘Knock at The Cabin’: Get A Doorbell


M. Night Shyamalan is impossible to read, sometimes literally.

The writer/director/producer can burst from the cinematic gate with a film like The Sixth Sense, then drown in The Lady in The Water. He’ll post Signs, then fold in The Last Airbender. Split will shatter in Glass. The guy is as mercurial as quicksilver.

Alas, the thermostat is turned way down in Knock at The Cabin, a tepid suspense film that aims to bring the world to the edge of extinction, but instead brings the viewer to the brink of slumber.

Starring the behemoth (and talented) actor Dave Bautista, Cabin imagines a world facing mysterious and unexplained End Times, much like the turgid The Happening, which posited humankind’s demise by a gentle breeze (?).

Here, the threatening closing curtain comes from God Almighty, a stark and unfortunate break from Shyamalan’s previous works. He’s always been fascinated by the supernatural, but rarely do we see him quoting Scripture.

He doesn’t exactly do it here, but his four menacing home invaders do. They even wear the colors of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse. But they don’t bring Conquest, War, Famine and Death. They bring an ultimatum to a vacationing family of three: Kill a loved loved one, or the world will exist in a “permanent midnight.” To prove their point, they inflict some savagery on each other.

Of course, in the Bible, even God said “psyche!” before Abraham was ordered to murder his son Isaac. Either Shyamalan didn’t read that far — or realized that wouldn’t make much of an impression in Hollywood, which is agnostic at best.

Cabin doesn’t make much of an impression, either, even when it’s streaming on Amazon.

Eric (Jonathan Voss) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) bring their adopted daughter Wen (newcomer Kristin Cui) to a remote Pennsylvania cabin for a getaway vacation. But it takes about five minutes for the excursion to turn menacing when Leonard (Bautista) and his unmerry band show up to tell them the bad news.

Though based on a popular book by Paul Tremblay, the movie’s 100-minute runtime wedges the story into an impossible corner of brief monologues to substitute for viable character fleshing (save for Bautista, who is terrific). The rest simply look scary or scared.

Religious rapture comes from sinful living. Cabin’s rapture comes from sinful screenwriting; We get no explanation for humanity’s eviction letter besides, you know, times are cuckoo. It’s not enough, and thus neither is our interest. The film doesn’t telegraph its ending: It broadcasts it in 4K.

There are a few glimmers. Bautista is mesmerizing in everything he does, and Cui holds more than her own. Shyamalan is great at casting kids, from Haley Joel Osment in Sense to Abigail Breslin in Signs.

But they are glimmers, not gold. Shyamalan is best when he’s exploring demons within, and too many run crisscross unleashed here. Even on a streamer, viewers are due at least a partial refund for this stay.

Taxi!

Image result for stuber

 

Here’s the recipe for a summer buddy-cop film. One guy, usually the cop, is as big as a house with an inclination to break things: rules, orders, villains’ faces. The other guy is typically much smaller and much funnier and kind of goofy — and he’s driving the other guy nuts, even as circumstances force them to partner up and take on some bad people.

Sure, May-December cop buddy flicks were have been a cliche since 48 Hrs to Midnight Run to Rush Hour to Men in Black to Ride Along to Central Intelligence to The Heat to the most recent example, Stuber. But given the summer overflow of big-budget sequels, Disney remakes and comic book reboots, this paean to cop films of the 80’s and 90’s seems like a nostalgiac nod to stupidity. And, somehow, most of it works.

It’s hard to overstate how refreshing it is to see a studio movie as silly and self-contained as Michael Dowse’s Stuber. The biggest action scene takes place in a sporting goods store. The Avengers are nowhere to be found. And the hero isn’t fighting to save the planet, just to help pay for the small business he wants to open with his crush (a spinning class geared towards single women called “Spinsters”).

What makes Stuber a fresh approach to a tired genre is that it joins those rare films that are perfectly synced with the American zeitgeist. Just a  You’ve Got Mail came during the AOL boom and The Social Network hit shortly after Facebook became omnipresent, Stuber will likely go down as the first big-studio film to take on ride sharing services. It won’t stomp the competition at the multiplex, but Stuber hits all the topical notes for young viewers: overprotective parents, the crippling addiction to cellphones and the roulette wheel roll that is calling a ride share service.

Much of the comedy credit here goes to Kumail Nanjiani (the HBO series Silicon Valley, The Big Sick). Nanjiani’s deadpan expression to people getting rowdy, drunk and nauseas in the back of his leased electric car could likely carry its own film. But that wouldn’t make for a buddy cop flick, so Dowse cannily casts Dave Bautista as Vic (Guardians of the Galaxy) a cop colossus with anger issues, severe myopia and a temper that sends him through walls like a drunken Kool-Aid Man.

It’s a silly pairing, but silly is the point. This movie, after all, is called Stuber because the protagonist is named Stu and he drives for Uber. Get it? Subtle intelligence takes a pronounced backseat to mindless escapism.

Stuber stumbles when it actually tries to break from comedy cliches with some adult-level violence. As the pair close in on drug dealers Vic is chasing, Stu has to face off against the martial marts actor from The Raid. Even for a comedy this goofy, it’s a plot stretch. Not only does the film skewer the tropes of Hollywood cop films, it embraces more than a few.

But they aren’t fatal flaws, and the pairing of Nanjiani and Bautista is inspired, particularly Bautista. He may be built like a Mack truck, but he displays enough tenderness he may escape Hollywood’s villain circuit.

Stuber is intentionally dumb and a little bit clunky, but Nanjiani and Bautista click, the action sequences are well-filmed and the humor is sometimes brutally funny. In a summer of repetitious travels, Stuber makes for a refreshing escapist ride.