Soccer balls, bodies, & the occasional manhunt
“Over Your Dead Body”
Samara Weaving seems to be typecast as an onscreen punching bag. In the “Ready or Not” films and now this dour rom com/thriller, she plays a fetching can-do femme transformed by the masochistic madness of the plot into a purple bloody mess. Directed by Jorma Taccone, “Over Your Dead Body” is a remake of 2021’s grim Norwegian film “I Onde Danger” (lamely rebranded as “The Trip” in the United States).
The story begins with Weaving’s Lisa and her husband Dan (Jason Segal) having marital problems, not least of which are a two-year drought in the conjugal bliss department. He’s an indie film director who scored critical success early but now is relegated to making “pop-up ads.” Lisa is a struggling stage actress cheating on Dan with a fellow thespian. Money is another sizable problem. A getaway to Dan’s dad’s cabin on a lake in Upstate New York during a stunning fall season (the landscapes are shot in Finland but look legit) becomes an opportunity for Dan to off Lisa and cash in an insurance policy. But when he hesitates to apply Chloroform, she tases him and ties him to a kitchen chair to put her own permanent separation plan in play. But then, murder interruptus — a trio of escaped convicts (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine and Juliette Lewis) drop through the ceiling. The couple have to team up or die.
The main problem with “Over Your Dead Body” is that neither Lisa nor Dan is all that interesting or likable. It’s the trio of malevolent misfits that hold our attention, especially Olyphant’s smooth but demonic mastermind and Lewis’s edgy Allegra, who is sexually aroused by the clamor of violent confrontation. The movie may be even more gruesome than its Norwegian inspiration, though “Dead Body” somehow manages to make whimsy from the severing of fingers, ears and noses. Turns out romantic separation is always messier than it has to be.
“Balls Up”
The Farrelly brothers came out on fire in the 1990s with a trio of kitschy, slightly naughty laugh-fests — “Dumb and Dumber,” “Kingpin” and “There’s Something About Mary.” The brothers — Peter and Bobby — somewhat parted ways in 2014 after “Dumb and Dumber To” and have had varying results since, with Peter nabbing Oscar gold for the Civil Rights-era drama “Green Book” (2018). He’s back to his bread-and-butter low-brow sophomoric fare in this cloudburst of inanity about two condom marketing execs, Brad (Mark Wahlberg) and Elijah (Paul Walker Hauser, “Richard Jewell”) who prevent Brazil from winning a fictional World Cup.
The misfit combo impress the suits at Regal Blue Condom by devising a prophylactic that covers your beans as well as your franks. This stroke of genius (dubbed the “testicle sentinel”) gets them tickets to the World Cup final in Brazil, where Regal Blue is slated to be the official prophylactic of the game (the plot would have us believe World Cups inspire more amorous activity than Valentine’s Day). But then the duo gets fired for unbecoming behavior. They go full YOLO and head to the game anyway. A drunken Elijah asserts his manhood with a sausage mascot on the field and inadvertently thwarts Brazil’s shot to win the game. The stadium goes hush, Brad and Elijah go to jail, and when they get out, everyone in Brazil goes after them.
Their saving grace comes in the form of a drug lord, Pavio (“Borat” bad boy Sacha Baron Cohen), who bet millions against his country’s team and made a killing. The jokes can’t be repeated in a family paper; suffice it to say they’re flaccid. Hauser’s pretty much the lone bright spot in the film, showing the deft timing and sheepish-angry vibe of a young John Candy, while Cohen’s extra-strange Pavio feels inspired by Tommy Wiseau in “The Room” (2003). Wahlberg is often stiff and pretty much the same onscreen persona he always is, at home in middling streaming fare that’s not going anywhere.
“I Swear”
This palpably moving depiction of the real-world travails of a young, misunderstood Scottish man with Tourette’s syndrome should be must-see, especially for those at the highest level of government who have taken to mocking such people. The title refers to the condition that afflicts John Davidson, causing him to spout out racially and sexually offensive barbs (if you saw the clip from the BAFTA awards, you have a strong idea). They occasionally punch walls, the person next to them or even a dog minding its own business. Growing up with humble means and a frustrated mother (Shirley Henson) who can’t deal, Davidson, bullied relentlessly as a child (played superbly by Scott Ellis Watson), finds a glimmer of hope as a young man (Robert Aramay, in a break-through performance) when a mental health worker (Maxine Peake) takes him in and nurtures his calm side. From there, John gets a job as a caretaker at a community center (alongside the always great and gruff Pete Mulan), and, as he finds a shelf in life, advocates for young people struggling with what he went through.
Directed with care by Kirk Jones (“Nanny McPhee,” “Waking Ned Devine”), warmth and a necessary layer of honest grit, “I Swear” is most assuredly not your typical feel-good heart-string-tugger. I’m not sure how Aramay got so into character — the tics and outbursts feel so sudden and real. For validation, wait for the credits that show some of the footage from the 1989 BBC documentary “Mad John,” and you’ll be astonished at how absolutely dead-on Aramay is. At its core, “I Swear” not only puts a lens on the plight of those who are neurodiverse, it’s also about acceptance, tolerance and understanding. Onscreen one of the funnier, funny-not scenes has John confronted by police and shouts out, “I’m carrying drugs.” IRL, besides that BAFTA tic, when John receive an honor (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) from the Queen, he purportedly barked, “F*** the Queen.” If only John could land an invite to the White House.
“Apex”
This occasionally taut, middle-of-nowhere thriller is a strange mash up of “The River Wild” (1994) and “Split” (2016), featuring James McAvoy as a multi-personality psychopath. Ben — the stand-in for McAvoy’s malevolent captor Taron Egerto (Elton John in “Rocketman”) — stalks adventurous campers with a high-tech crossbow (armed with filed teeth) in the lush, mountainous Australian wilds. Ben’s a woefully underdeveloped character that Egerton pours a lot of energy into. The why never really adds up, but that’s okay because we get Charlize Theron as the film’s centerpiece and Ben’s quarry du jour.
Theron’s Sasha is a mountain scaling enthusiast who’s mastered elite rock faces but is haunted by the death of her husband (Eric Bana), who tumbled from her tether during a flash snow squall. Sasha heads into the remote Blue Mountains to find solace and test her solo climbing skills. She crosses paths with Ben, who plays nice at first, but then gives her a gnash-metal tune as a head start before he comes for her. A lot of the film is Sasha jumping off a cliffside and into raging white water rapids. As you might expect, there’s a life-or-death climb in there — one that triggered blood pressure rising acrophobia for me. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur (“2 Guns”), the film, whose title evokes peaks, top predators or both, hangs too much on the frayed flimsiness of Ben. He’s a plot device sans credible motivation. Theron, chiseled and all in for the part, nearly saves it, but the Ben invention is just an avalanche of psycho mumbo jumbo.
“Mother Mary”
David Lowery is the director who took a sheet with two holes in it and made a pretty compelling love story with Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck as a couple separated by life and death. That DIY movie, “A Ghost Story” (2017), cost a mere $100,000, unthinkable for something of that caliber in this day and age. His latest, “Mother Mary,” likely cost at least 50 times that (A24, the plucky studio behind it, hasn’t released financial details at this time). This film also centers on a piece of fabric with supernatural properties, a red sartorial adornment providing a terrifying physical incarnation of a friendship gone bad.
Sam (Michaela Coel, “I Will Destroy You” and currently also onscreen in “Two Christophers”) is a famous fashion designer prepping for a big show. Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway, soon to also be on two screens in the same cineplex when “The Devil Wears Prada 2” opens) is a pop star in the vein of Lady Gaga, who for reasons of personal trauma has been on a self-imposed hiatus. For her comeback tour she wants Sam to design her costumes, but they haven’t spoken in years. Mother Mary (we never get her birth name) drives her Range Rover through a downpour to Sam’s country estate and in essence, crashes the fashion planning session. What happens from there is a self-guided therapy session between the pair, propelled by veiled, trite accusations. All the action in “Mother Mary” takes place at Sam’s rustic retreat, and with such strong leads, at times feels like it could have been better suited for the stage.
Lowery, so adroit at blending reality, dream and the in-between in “The Green Knight” (2021), registers some trippy scenes of the supernatural that resonate and haunt through the power of sensual immersion. The flashback sequences impress as well. Hathaway is toned and cut (allegedly she worked for two years on getting into dance shape). A lot is asked of her both physically and emotionally, and she’s game, but the superficiality of the script undermines what could be stronger performances. The reasons to see “Mother Mary” are Lowery’s all-consuming dreamscapes, Hathaway’s fierce physicality and Coel’s alluring countenance that becomes a frame-filling wonderment.
For What it's Worth 
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