REVIEW: Straight Outta Compton (2015)

Straight Outta Compton is a biopic of the influential NWA and follows the typical beats of the music biopic. You can guess how the film plays out – from the early meetings as slumming musicians to the energy and excitement of the first inspiration to the wild success, debauchery and lawsuits. However, there is something different about Straight Outta Compton that makes it initially stand out – it’s angry, political outsider status.

Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr, Ice Cube’s real-life son) and Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) are the focus of the film. Key moments includes the controversy of the NWA song ‘Fuck Tha Police’, the band’s arrest in Detroit for playing the same song, the aftermath of the Rodney King beatings and the various disputes between the members of the band and their manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) and individual labels following the dissolution of the band.

The film is executive produced by Ice Cube and Dr Dre, so it is easy to think of the film as a clean, officially sanctioned view of the two of them. Though it is true that a healthy degree of scepticism is required towards any music biopic, Straight Outta Compton does display a certain even-handedness, given that Ice Cube and Dre themselves were on opposing sides of several disputes. Much of the blame is placed on Jerry Heller (who is now suing) and on Eazy-E (who died of AIDS in 1995), but Ice Cube and Dre are not free from some blame.

Having said that, this somewhat messy film is not particularly interested in the ins-and-outs of any of these legal disputes. In fact, it is difficult to work out what exactly the film’s main focus is. It hits the typical beats but in such a desultory way that it can be difficult to work out what is going on. The film ends suddenly with Dre announcing that he is leaving Death Row Records to start his own label, a non-ending that would suggest erroneously that the focus of the film has been Dre’s growing independence. It is an oddly restrained ending to a film that so frequently verges on craziness. Indeed, the messiness of the film is part of its appeal, the film acting more as a collection of big moments rather than a sustained piece. The sequence of the genesis of ‘Fuck Tha Police’ is great – moving from a tense and humiliating confrontation with some racist police straight into the recording of the song and, later, the performance in Detroit – capturing the anger that helped create the song but also the social situation that made the song matter.

Less successful is the film’s attempts to deal further with the socio-political situation, particularly the Rodney King beating, the subsequent trial and the LA riots. The film shifts with great difficulty between these scenes and further scenes of band members squabbling and trying to get out of contracts. The film never regains the balance between the politics of resistance and the music, and these two strands of the film end up belittling each other. Equally, the film does represent a good deal of misogyny and one mention of anti-Semitism, but only to acknowledge that it existed, never to question it. The film might transcend the formula of the music biopic thanks to the politics of the band, but the film itself has nothing to do with it. Given the current situation in America – where the music of NWA feels positively contemporary – there was the possibility of making a film about NWA that would have been as shocking, angry, defiant and unapologetic as the band’s music. But nowhere in this film is there a moment to equal even Spike Lee’s opening to his otherwise fairly safe biopic Malcolm X in which footage of the Rodney King beating, a contemporary issue at the time that the film came out, is intercut with a burning American flag. Straight Outta Compton could have made a convincing argument for the band’s continuing relevance or adapted the criticism to 2015 in much the same way that last year’s documentary Nas: Time Is Illmatic, which fared much better in making the argument for both the music’s socio-political significance both then and now. Instead, we get weird moments such as Ice Cube laughing his head off at the script to Friday (directed by F. Gary Gray himself) and a closing montage celebrating, amongst other things, Ice Cube’s performance in XXX: State of the Union and Dr Dre’s Beats headphones (flogged often enough in several music videos). Here, the film feels like a cash-in, and watching it, one could forget that this is a film about a band that frightened the FBI. The film could and should have been just as radical as the music. Sadly, we are left with the safe story of unsafe music, with a politics of resistance diluted for the mainstream and a contemporary phenomenon relegated to the past.

Straight Outta Compton then is a watchable film with some great moments, but it is tame when it should have been challenging. Unlike with ‘Straight Outta Compton’ the album, one is left wondering ultimately if the film’s main aim is box office and awards, rather than a valuable contribution and a voice. Perhaps there is a case to be made that putting these ideas into the mainstream is the best way to effect change, but it does feel that no one here is expressing with their full capabilities.

REVIEW: 22 Jump Street (2014)

It is a well known fact in Hollywood that the bigger, louder and much more expensive sequel to a recent surprise hit is never going to be as good as the original. The sequel will be a quick cash-in and a badly thought out retread of the original – which probably wasn’t that good anyway – repeating all the jokes and plot devices and offering turgid references and cameos pointlessly referring to the original film but without an inch of originality. 22 Jump Street is very much this kind of film, but the great thing about it is that it knows it.

Picking up exactly where the previous film left off, Schmidt and Jenko (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) are investigating drug smuggling via internet college. After one big expensive action set piece, it is decided that their best option is to infiltrate a college and find the dealers from the inside – exactly like they did before, which worked surprisingly well. However, once in college, their loyalty to each other is strained when one of them has the time of his life while the other one suffers.

21 Jump Street was a surprisingly good film – up until the action sequence at the end at least – which had fun with the idea that it is a thoughtless reboot of a dead franchise, which no one remembered. The film spoofed the genre fairly well and also had the benefit of actually being funny and quite inventive. The sequel is the same again, but it manages to make a virtue of the repetition, now spoofing not only the genre but also the mechanics of the industry where money is thrown blindly at totally hopeless products and excess replaces talent. And while this set-up may seem to be rather limited and it sometimes seems inevitable that the film will soon run out of steam, it remains inventive and fast paced enough not to outstay its welcome.

Like the first film, the main virtue of 22 Jump Street is that it is funny. The meta element is funny and often really rather clever, but the film is not limited to these kinds of jokes. Indeed, one of the biggest laughs (I saw the film in a packed screening), one that totally obscured the next few lines, was entirely down to the direction, Channing Tatum’s timing and a very well chosen sound effect. The film may be mostly low-humour but it is done with such verve and obvious energy that it never feels lazy. Compared to other recent comedies – the unbelievably turgid and vain This Is The End is a recent low point – 22 Jump Street has an incredible amount of energy and a real passion for what it is doing.

The film doesn’t hang together perfectly and it does have its wandering moments and the action sequences are always never as funny as they need to be (when are they ever?), but the film is consistently funny throughout and that is really all one needs. Comedies come under more negative scrutiny than other types of films (and are much harder to review) but if one looks at 22 Jump Street in terms of what it sets out to achieve and how it achieves it, then it is very clearly a real success. Ultimately, its success is down to good timing, good writing, good performances, good direction and, maybe more than all of this, effort.

REVIEW: Rampart (2012)

  Rampart is another ‘bad lieutenant’ film, this time set in Los Angeles in 1999, as the LAPD experiences the fallout of the Rampart scandal.

  Dave ‘Date Rape’ Brown – the moniker coming from his alleged murder of a suspected rapist and one that he hates – is an LA cop. He is tough, ruthless and confrontational and, after footage of his beating of an out of control driver makes its way onto the evening news, he becomes the police department’s scapegoat. After a string of, as Brown sees it, claims from “Rodney King wannabes” and increased media pressure, the LAPD is desperate to move shift the spotlight away from the on-going Rampart investigation. Brown’s becomes the media’s whipping boy and finds himself increasingly without friends, becoming ever more suspicious that the department, and, maybe, everyone else, is conspiring against him.

  The film is entirely hinged upon Woody Harrelson’s performance and, largely, stands up because of it. Though Harrelson was much more fun in The People vs. Larry Flynt, his performance here may just be his best yet. Though director/co-writer Oren Moverman may focus on Harrelson a little too much at the expense of practically everything else in the film, Rampart remains a strong and well-made film anchored by a surprisingly subtle performance.

  However, while Harrelson might keep the film afloat, Rampart sags awkwardly elsewhere. The story is rather uninspiring, tracing as it does the inevitable fall from grace of a dirty cop with unsympathetic higher-ups on one side and a family that has had enough on the other. Co-written by James Ellroy, who has always been upfront about the ‘for the money’ nature of his work for the movies, the film does retain a degree of comical perversity and a somewhat multi-faceted narrative, but for every element that works, there is something that doesn’t. Moverman casts the minor roles (read every role except Harrelson’s) with a series of recognisable faces, which undercuts the drama and feels oddly like name-dropping. Worst of all is the fact that the film has no idea where and how to end, offering a collection of possible endings before just stopping. Admittedly, it is all the better for not going through the motions of cleanly wrapping up what is an impossibly troubled situation, never, as a result, becomes ridiculous or distancing. That said, the film ends without any real conclusion, finishing in a manner that feels completely arbitrary or, even, accidental, as if a final reel went missing.

  The film is nevertheless powerfully atmospheric, not unlike We Need To Talk About Kevin, which also spited its story flaws with several scenes in which the sheer confusion, fear and self-loathing of a character is palpably brought out by the film’s camerawork, editing and some great acting. Rampart does manage to get inside its character’s head, but it is difficult to get swept up in a character that, though convincingly played, is such an archetype. Herzog’s recent The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans sacrificed nuance and believability to present a grim and hilarious caricature of the dirty cop, one that probably marked the end of that character, just as spoof spaghetti westerns marks the end of that cycle by the 1970s. As a result, Harrelson’s dirty cop feels somewhat archaic, an anachronism from a 1980s straight-to-video action film.

  Moverman’s film is well made and has a great central performance, but it remains an unfocussed film that doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants to say. It also feels like a film that is hopelessly out of time, with Dave Brown’s line that he isn’t a racist because he hates everyone equally (lifted all-too-noticeably taken from the now over forty-year old ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan) feeling like the final nail on the coffin for the 'bad lieutenant' film.