In Which The Train Crashes And Only Emily Blunt Is Left Alive

Sippy Cup

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Girl on the Train
dir. Tate Taylor
112 minutes

Rachel (Emily Blunt) is great at drinking. I guess maybe it is just Emily Blunt who is fantastic at becoming inebriated. She sucks on this water bottle full of alcohol as she rides Metro North home to Ardsley-on-Hudson. This is great drunk acting, the best since Johnny Depp and he had a lot more training. I'm not exactly sure what she is drinking, but since she winces when she sips it we can presume the liquid is vile. The Girl on the Train is entirely recalled by an alcoholic, which means it is frequently unreliable and consistently repetitive.

Things start to pick up a bit when Megan (Haley Bennett) starts going out to have sex in the woods after sessions with her therapist (Édgar Ramírez). The therapist is a major suspect in Megan's murder, because his questions are usually along the lines of, "How does that make you feel?" and his solution to most problems is to put his fingers in her mouth. When she does it the first time, he says, "Don't make it difficult for us to work together." When she doesn't listen and continues to try to have sex with him, he begins speaking in Spanish.

Bennett is a marvelous actress with impressive range. She is a little too suited for most of these roles, which demand she project an unsustainable sexuality which is not really in her nature. "I've had a lot of different jobs," she narrates, and informs us that the sex she has with her husband Scott (Luke Evans) makes her feel like a whore. Fortunately we do not have to think too hard about the implications of this, because Megan is a corpse.

This is definitely the Emily Blunt show. Blunt sort of gives up on the English accent about halfway through. (I guess maintaining it for half the movie was a concession to the novel's original London setting.) The fact that life could be sufficiently indistinguishable in a suburb of New York as one thousands of miles away frightens all thinking people.

Rachel's friend Cathy (Laura Prepon) gets tired of her drunken rages and kicks Blunt out of the room she rents her friend. When Blunt is drunk, she heads over to her old house where she lived with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux). Besides giving us a giddy anticipation for a future time when Jennifer Aniston will divorce Theroux and reunite with David Schwimmer as God intended, it seems like a mistep that Blunt's real life husband was not in this movie to give it that extra edge of versimilitude.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson smartly avoids incorporating any comedy into this milieu. This is not a single moment where we have a chance to think about how silly the whole thing is. Theroux is the only one who hams it up at all, and I think he does not even mean to — he is simply used to talking in that weird, husky voice to make himself seem larger than 5'3". Instead of adding to Blunt's emotional disarray, the direction itself takes no chances at all.

Theroux's new wife, Anna, is played by Rebecca Ferguson, who looks like Haley Bennett if she went through a washing machine. She is worried about Emily Blunt lurking around her house, so she goes to a police detective (Alison Janney), who informs her that she has no case even though Emily Blunt briefly abducted her baby. The concept of a restraining order is presumably unknown to these people.

The movie kinda slows down a lot with Emily Blunt's terrible investigation of Megan's murder. After Megan's husband is cleared, we get a few scenes with Alison Janney and Blunt where the film picks up a lot. In this one scene in a police station, Alison Janney is stroking Emily Blunt's arm. It never got more exciting than that.

At one point someone asks Emily Blunt if she has any hobbies or whatever. She can't think of any. People without interests frighten me. I suppose she likes drawing — sometimes she sketches pictures of the people she loves. She has no other self-consciousness, and because she is so flimsy in comparison to all the other people in this story, you have to wish the worst on her. Anything else would be at the expense of something real.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Wage A War That Never Changes

Where Is Kristen Stewart When I Need Her?

by DICK CHENEY

The Huntsman: Winter's War
dir. Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
114 minutes

One minute Sara (Jessica Chastain) and Eric (Chris Hemsworth) were children raised in kingdom of a sorceress named Freya (a weird-looking Emily Blunt). The next they are in their late 30s, except they are young lovers. I guess to a child anyone who is an adult is old anyway, so who cares if it seems like thirty years passed in the crow's feet of Jessica Chastain? Her agent probably has a substantial fixed rate mortgage.

Charlize Theron shows up for like three scenes in The Huntsman: Winter's War. She has been replaced in her entirety by the plot of Frozen. I can't complain since frankly the Disney version needed a darker, more adult take. Emily Blunt's eyebrows are on point, but when she finds out that two of her child/adult soldiers are in love, she is very upset with them. Personal tragedy colors her opinion of the situation, as does the fact that Hemsworth is inexplicably the only person in her entire kingdom with an Australian accent.

As children, Chastain and Hemsworth hefted bows too large to properly draw, but their soldiering is unquestionable. "Who are those children?" screams Blunt, and her assistant is like, which ones, and she replies, "THE BEST!?!?!" She separates the happy couple with an ice wall and her African-American servant stabs Chastain in the back. Hemsworth flails at the ice for two seconds, but he knew what he was getting into when he had sex with a ginger in a hot tub amidst an ice kingdom. How could he not?

A further decade passes and Snow White ascends the throne, displacing Charlize Theron on the grounds of superior femininity. Anticipating a sequel, they should have shot a few key scenes with Kristen Stewart but no one wanted to pay her salary or deal with her constant playing of Sufjan Stevens and whining on set.

After the ginger has been forcibly removed from his life and Kristen Stewart also declines a romantic relationship, Hemsworth's Huntsman character is quite surly. Dwarves (Rob Brydon and Nick Frost), perhaps not very knowledgeable, proclaim he is the finest tracker in the south. He leads them to a mess of corpses, which he strolls over slowly, recalling the battle like he is the mentalist.

I would be lying if I said I understand very much of what Hemsworth said, but there are some disgusting things about dwarves and women and female dwarves. Finally Chastain shows up even though Hemsworth thought she was dead from the tiniest stab wound I've ever seen. She saves him from some evil men and knocks him unconscious, and it turns out she is very upset that Hemsworth abandoned their marriage pact.

"You're still my wife," he tells her when she does something that he does not like. He bullies her and makes fun of her age, telling her that she is too old to be in this movie and that she makes Emily Blunt look like Demi Lovato. The Huntsman: Winter's War seems intent on brilliantly exposing the canard that female beauty can be at all tarnished by age, as its characters search for a literal and metaphorical mirror. After they bathe themselves in its golden reflection, they will be as they once were.

Accompanied by the two dwarves, Chastain and Hemsworth run into a female little person, who wields a crossbow and is given an unattractive haircut. She also forfeits the gobs of makeup bestowed upon Chastain and Blunt in every scene of The Winter's War. Later on, when Emily Blunt sees her, she is completely overwhelmed.

Instead of explaining why he abandoned her for the last decade or mentioning the entire events of the previous film, Hemsworth starts flirting with his wife and giving her little negs, like "We both look different I guess IDK" and "You're no female dwarf but you're pretty in your own way IDK." You would think this would be unnecessary given that they are already wed, but there is a precious lack of anything else going on in The Huntsman: Winter's War.

It is honestly embarrassing that Charlize Theron was featured so prominently in the promotional material for this movie. I mean I understand a fat check is somewhat reassuring when you have to cope with the emotional fallout from your breakup with Sean Penn, but she could have at least demanded a new costume designer, because everything she wears in this is not good (see above).

Chastain is the only one even attempting to act in The Huntsman: Winter's War. "It seems like I have to love you, but I don't," Chastain informs her husband, demanding that he let her go. "The one you love is dead, and I don't remember what it was like to even be her." She goes on to inform him that she has done unforgivable things. He responds, "So have I," and she gets this look on her face like she was just kidding before they have sex. Disappointingly, the wintercourse is missionary-style, but it is still penetration, thank god.

The next morning, his first sentence to her is, "Have you been true?" He holds up her knife to his heart as he asks the question. Because if she has so much as tongue-kissed another man, he doesn't care about her anymore. She doesn't answer, I mean, what could she realistically say? "I blew a guy after you ran off, sorry."

At that moment Emily strides up, riding a really cute bear.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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In Which We Have Heard Enough About Your Border War

Take Me Back to Phoenix

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Sicario
dir. Denis Villeneuve
121 minutes

In his previous film Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve proved capable of making an entire film without a single joke in it. Prisoners could make a convincing argument for being the most humorless movie ever made, and in Sicario the director nearly accomplishes this feat again. Sicario is a numb, boring mess, the kind of effort only interesting to people who never go to the movies or watch television, where the "thrills" of the U.S./Mexico border war have been uncovered in more empathic and gripping fashion by dramas that actually have something to say.

Benicio Del Toro plays Alejandro as a poor man's Javier Bardem, attempting a portrayal of masterful subtlety that never comes together in the least. Alejandro is a corrupt government operative who plans to eliminate one cartel and put another in its place. His master plan is about as complicated as eggs on toast. Usually Del Toro is at least fun to watch, but here he seems like a parody of himself, too familiar to us from his previous roles and self-consciously hogging the camera at every opportunity. His performance is far short of a disaster, but it mainly sits there like a lump.

Most of Sicario is Emily Blunt whining to Josh Brolin about how she is upset about where he is taking her. He says they are going to El Paso to look for information about a mass grave in a booby-trapped house, but they are actually on the way to Juarez where they plan to shake down a guy for reasons. Blunt has improved her craft immensely in recent years, but she does not really have the charisma to carry the underwritten role of a flustered and naive cop. Brolin looks like her dumpy father rather than a peer.

In between extremely dull sequences of violence, Villeneuve places extensive aerial shots of crowded border crossing. It is a sight familiar to everyone familiar with this turgid topic. Blunt just wants to do the right thing, but it soon becomes apparent she has no actual idea what that is. "You're doing nothing in Phoenix," Brolin says. "Do you want to find the guys who did this?" She nods furiously.

When she is not complaining about the hidden motives of her superiors, Blunt meets a local officer (Jon Bernthal) in a bar and rides him at length. During their liasion, she spots a telltale band that the cartel uses to wrap drug money. She immediately goes for her gun. He renders her helpless, to be saved by the unlikely intervention of Del Toro. It was kind of difficult to hear what Del Toro said after that because he was muttering, but I doubt it was that important.

Why did Sicario receive such glowing reviews when it is basically the equivalent of dumping a cliched bag of shit onto a movie screen? I'm not really sure. Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy made a hilarious, insightful trainwreck of a film on the same subject in 2013 called The Counselor and everyone hated it. I would say it comes down to Blunt herself, whose angular, ghostly face is expert in taking on an identity nothing like her own.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.