Reviewed: ‘Secret Mall Apartment,’ ‘Drop’ and ‘A Working Man’
‘Secret Mall Apartment’ (2024)
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Reviewed: ‘Secret Mall Apartment,’ ‘Warfare,’ ‘The Amateur’ and ‘Drop’ in theaters
Thursday, April 10, 2025
‘Secret Mall Apartment’ (2024)
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Jeremy Workman’s documentary recounts the antics of eight Rhode Island artists who in 2003 covertly built and lived in a hidden 750-square-foot apartment within the Providence Place Mall. To build the secret enclosure within a dead space in the massive mall, the team had to smuggle in cinder blocks and furniture. The apartment remained undetected for more than four years. The focal point of the film is Michael Townsend, a Rhode Island School of Design instructor, installation artist and something of a merry pied piper who sees the world as his canvas. Earlier Townsend projects include a creepy-cool community of mannequins in a post-apocalyptic setting under an overpass and along an industrial canal, as well as a 9/11 memorial depicting the faces of the fallen. The mall apartment, by default, was something more whimsical, and those involved videotaped the progress on grainy lo-res camcorders. Some of the banter about sacrifice for art and commercialism amid a retail center provokes, coming most to an edge when Townsend and his then wife, Adriana Valdez, one of the eight, get into a jocular tiff about life goals and values – she wants to build a real house in the world. The apartment, replicated on a soundstage for the documentary, makes a nice backdrop for the talking-head testimonials of Townsend and others, but it borders on the cheesy when Townsend acts out moments from the past. The apartment became second-tier national news when exposed; when asked then if he’d been curating a piece of art or living in the mall out of necessity, Townsend gleefully says, essentially, “life is art and art is life.” The son of military parents, Townsend makes for an intriguing character study in real time, archival footage and cheeky reenactment.
‘Drop’ (2025)
A semi-effective, one-trick thriller that delivers for a good stretch, arduously turning the screw on Violet, a single mom (Meghann Fahy, “White Lotus”) on a first date with a promising prospect (a generic but amiable Brandon Sklenar). Someone in the swank high-rise Chi-town restaurant they’ve met at has targeted Violet by airdropping (thus the title) prankish memes to her phone that become more ominous, dark and foreboding as the small talk and Malbec go down. Initially Violet lets Henry in on the strange happenings; then she gets a text telling her to look at her home security camera, seeing a masked man beat the stuffing out of her sister Jen (Violett Beane), who’s been called in for babysitting duty, and stand outside her son’s bedroom door with a big-ass silencer. Violet must do whatever she is commanded and not tell anyone of the duress she’s under, ask for help or call the police – otherwise the kid gets it. Before he’s frozen out, Henry tells us that you can “drop” only within a 50-foot radius, so whoever is behind the “Saw”-like machination has to be someone in the posh, sky-high eatery. The ferreting-out process and raising of the stakes by director Christopher Landon, who’s been involved with the “Paranormal Activity” films, is effective and well handled until cards start to get laid down. Once you start to glean the what and why, the provocative premise becomes instantly ridiculous and implodes. It’s not to hard to get ahead of the script, too; we went down this path with M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Trap” last year. Fahy holds it together as much as she can, working overtime to convey repressed fear while her Violet tries to carry on first-date formalities with a twinkle and smile that are just a tad off.
‘A Working Man’ (2025)
Bet you didn’t know that Sylvester Stallone penned screenplays for Jason Statham beatdown flicks. Alright, that’s a bit of an oversell, as only two films fit that description: “Homefront” (2013) and this “Jack Reacher”-esque adaptation of Chuck Dixon’s 2014 novel, “Levon’s Trade.” But there’s something righteous and ultramanly in the pairing, and the two have also joined up on screen to kick some nefarious ass in Sly’s “Expendables” series. Here, Statham (“The Transporter,” “The Meg”) plays Dixon’s titular hero, a working man with a past as a special-ops commando. Levon is widowed, and his young daughter Merry (Isla Gie) lives with her maternal grandfather, a bitter man with tons of cash who blames Levon for his daughter’s death and throws piles of green to his army of lawyers to make it so Levon has no place in Merry’s life. The owners of the Chicago construction company Levon works for, Joe Garcia (Michael Peña) and his wife Carla (Noemi Gonzalez), have taken him in as family, a detail that gets overplayed. So when their daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped by the Russian mafia, Levon reluctantly puts on the flak vest and works his way up the crime syndicate’s ladder. In his way are a biker bar full of ex-military drug dealers, two gangsters in satin pajamas and ridiculous bucket hats, a guy named Dimi with hair that would make Fabio envious and goth flunkies who look like they escaped from an “Addams Family” project and got their hands on high-level weaponry. The fight choreography is pretty tight, but the film goes on too long and has too many dead spots, not to mention that each kill feels redundant and cold. David Ayer, who’s been down the macho vengeance road before and better with “Harsh Times” (2005), “End of Watch” (2012) and the Statham-starring “The Beekeeper” last year, seems to have lost his fastball of quick pacing and has too much packed into the script. Statham holds it all together with his cool bristle, but “A Working Man” could and should have been so much more of a plucky can of whoop-ass.
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