Tag Archives: josh-hartnett

“Verity”

3 Oct

Lifeless on page and on screen

⭐1/2 Rating: 1.5 out of 4

The movie version of “Verity,” Colleen Hoover’s hackneyed page lift of Daphne du Maurier’s great 1938 Gothic psycho thriller “Rebecca,” has an all-star cast that may not be enough to give the romance novelist a fourth box office success. 

Some of that is due to the source material. Where du Maurier understood and gave shape to corrupt and conflicted souls, Hoover’s works play like soulless connect-the-dots exercises, and come off that way on screen. The script by Nick Antosca is unfortunately too loyal to Hoover’s novel, and director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick” and “The Idea of You”) is merely a serviceable filmmaker with a knack for small, cloistered melodrama. (In contrast, du Maurier’s was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, and won the Oscar for Best Picture.)

The cast, though, is an impressive assemblage, led by Anne Hathaway as the titular Verity Crawford, a wildly successful author who pens dark psychological thrillers by, for and about women (art imitating life?). It’s her fifth movie this year, and this is the one she’d probably hope people forget. Josh Hartnett plays her hunky husband and Dakota Johnson, who unfortunately regresses from her breakout in “The Lost Daughter” (2021) to her cinematic roots in the kinky sex nonsense “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015).

Johnson’s Lowen Ashleigh is, like Verity, an author, but more literary. She’s also struggling financially; we meet her at a small independent bookstore in Manhattan reading to an audience of three. Later, as she’s packing up the apartment she’s being evicted from, her agent (Ismael Cruz Cordova) tells her of a big opportunity at publisher Hachette. Lowen dresses up and heads to the meeting, only to be spattered by blood when a cyclist is struck by a streaking car just feet away. Before she can even react, a chivalrous stranger (Hartnett) swoops in to literally give her the shirt off his back so she can go to her meeting. And after Lowen signs the NDA so she can learn about the offer, in walks Hartnett’s Jeremy, to tell her his wife, the famous author Verity, just had a car accident, is paralyzed and can’t speak. So Hachette wants to pay Lowen some good buck to ghost write Verity’s series.  

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Trap

10 Aug

Hard to enjoy this concert when the FBI is closing in

The latest from M. Night Shyamalan, whose plot twist sleight-of-hand shenanigans captivated audiences early (“The Sixth Sense” and “The Village”) but faltered over the years (“The Happening” and “Lady in the Water”), is in line with his more recent fare “Old” (2021) and “Knock at the Cabin” (2023) – serviceable suspense despite ridiculous carrying-ons. The set-up’s fairly simple: A serial killer by the name of The Butcher, whose kill spree is at an even dozen, is purportedly at a pop diva’s concert, which the FBI and local police have targeted as the venue to apprehend Philadelphia’s most wanted. The task isn’t a simple grab-and-nab, as the authorities don’t know what The Butcher looks like, just that he has a tattoo of a bunny on his wrist and likely drives a dark-colored sedan. The latter is a deduction made by the veteran profiler on the case, Josephine Grant, played by ’60s icon Hayley Mills in a cheeky bit of casting – as she starred in “The Parent Trap” (1961). Grant believes the OCD nature of the crime scenes suggests The Butcher wouldn’t drive an ostentatious vehicle of light color, because dust and dirt would show too much. Given his moniker, though, it’s hard to imagine such exact order at the killing sites.

Attending the concert is Philly firefighter Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett) and his teen daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue), a ravenous fan of Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka) who’s of the same pop queen royalty as Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. Dad’s not too hip and has to get explanations of the happening lingo of the moment – “crispy” and “jelly,” to name two – which wasn’t too far off from me getting a recent lecture on “rizz” from my teenage daughter, whom I similarly took to a Katy Perry show. It’s not too far into the show when dad, sussing out all the extra security precautions, starts to get antsy, and it’s not because he’s the only dorky dude towering above a sea of shrieking teens, but the killer himself. Early on, in one trip to the restroom, Cooper pulls up video footage of a panicked young man imprisoned in a basement. The film could have easily been titled “Serial Dad.”

The cat-and-mouse ferreting works pretty well for a while, and the concert orchestration is pretty dope. Saleka, who’s had small parts in her dad’s films before, wrote and performs all the songs with convincingly Swiftian appeal and nearly steals the film. Hartnett’s fine as the dad-joke pop with a sinister side, and hauntingly reminiscent of Robert Urich playing a firefighter in the film “Turk 182” (1985); Donoghue’s career, as evidenced here, should continue to rise. That said, there’s a dramatic shift in the film and locale about two-thirds in where the wheels of plausibility start to come off the bus. That’s frustrating, because until then “Trap” manages to hold your attention while you grit your teeth. Like the recently released “The Instigators,” the film could have used a better title and a less ludicrous wrap-up, though the last sequence almost does enough to redeem.

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