BLOGTOWN

Olympus Has Fallen was a forgettable Gerard Butler action movie vehicle best known for being the worse of two "Die Hard in a White House" movies released in 2013. (Here at the Mercury, at least, we haven't forgotten you, White House Down.) London Has Fallen was perfunctory "War on Terror" throwback schlock rife with tasteless xenophobia and mindless jingoism. But Angel Has Fallen, the third movie in the inelegantly named ______ Has Fallen series, pulls off an unexpected trick: It's actually pretty good! Star and co-producer Butler reportedly wanted to sunset the franchise in the spirit of 2017's masterful Logan, and damn if he didn't get pretty close.

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It’s strange that Netflix didn’t provide critics with advance screeners for the second season of Mindhunter, the true-crime thriller about the origins of the FBI Serial Crime Unit in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, the nine new episodes hit the streaming service last Friday with little advance fanfare, and this week the internet’s been playing catch-up with what’s turned out to be a largely excellent new season. Of course, a big chunk of that internet catch-up has taken the form of sticking the show’s slightly clunky title into the lyrics of popular songs like Hall & Oates’ “Maneater,” the theme song to Goldfinger, and Fiddler on the Roof’s “Matchmaker.” This is good fun, but it’s at striking odds with the somber, soft-roiling tone of the show, which explores the psychology of serial killers—a topic usually dealt with luridly—in muted, measured steps. As such, it’s become a show that explores not just our base fascination with murderers, but also the media mechanisms (movies, true-crime podcasts, TV shows like this one) that have transformed them an industry. It’s a show about subverting expectations, metaphorically and literally.

Mindhunter is often described as a David Fincher project; he directed four episodes of the first season (including the pilot), and returns to direct the opening three episodes of the second season. To be sure, Fincher’s imprint—his directorial precision—is all over Mindhunter, and the show deals with topics that recur in his work (Se7en, Zodiac). But I think Fincher is getting a little too much credit—it’s important to remember that the show is based on a book by actual FBI agents John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker; furthermore, English playwright Joe Penhall is the series creator, and was primary writer for the first season, and other writers including Courtenay Miles and Joshua Donen contributed to this season, which feels very writer-driven. The drama hinges on meticulously crafted scenes of dialogue in drab, sometimes oppressively stuffy rooms, and the result is exhilarating, but—back to subverting expectations—not in the way you expect.

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It was right around the time when newlywed Grace (Samara Weaving) punched her pre-teen nephew in the face and subsequently fell into a pit filled with decomposing bodies that I found myself completely shutting off to Ready or Not, the new horror-comedy from filmmaking collective Radio Silence.

From there, atrophy set in—rendering me numb to each subsequent act of violence that was supposed to shock and/or amuse me. In Ready or Not, the significant efforts—expended by screenwriters Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy, and co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—to riff on awful rich people and the dumb shit we all do in the name of family are completely undermined by every moment of screeching histrionics and squishing flesh, with the filmmakers' attempts to land a big gut punch with the film's final line feels instead like getting gently slapped with a wet nap.

Which is too bad, because there's plenty of promise at the outset as Grace—on the night of her nuptials to Alex (Mark O’Brien), the heir to a board game empire—is gently pushed into a deadly, ritualistic game of hide and seek with her new family. The seekers are a miserable bunch of monied white people who act badly, treat each other like shit, and seem to think that their survival depends on murdering their newest family member.

But the acidic laughs wrung out of this scenario (particularly through the performances of Nicky Guadagni, as stone-faced, bloodthirsty Aunt Helene, and Melanie Scrofano as Emilie, this clan's drug-fueled daughter) are soon overtaken by the sounds of cracking bones and ripping skin, and no one, not even the wide-eyed Grace or her embittered, alcoholic brother-in-law (Adam Brody, in his best deadpan mode), elicits any measure of sympathy. As Ready or Not rolls on, it all becomes much too much of everything—a bit of playful, clever wrestling that, after turning into a full-out brawl, ends messily and ignominiously.