'Watchmen' Season Trailer: Damon Lindelof Promises More Shocking Twists And Turns

HBO's Watchmen series kicked off with a bang last night, and by most accounts, Damon Lindelof is unspooling a story steeped with nods to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic comic, while firmly establishing a new path forward. But this indeed Lindelof, the guy who has made twists and turns his calling card for years, the first episode's shock conclusion already has viewers wondering what he'll do to top it.

If you were excited for the start of Sister Night's (Regina King) battle against the racist Rorschach wannabes the Seventh Kavalry, a new trailer for the season promises things are only going to be taken to a higher level. The footage promises more of Jean Smart as FBI agent Laurie Blake, one of the characters with a lineage stretching back to the classic Watchmen, as well as Hong Chau as Lady Trieu and Jeremy Irons who appears to be playing another legacy character, Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias.

Watchmen hits HBO every Sunday night. Check out the trailer below.

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'Watchmen' Trailer: Regina King's Masked Vigilante Uncovers A Vast Conspiracy

Adapting a classic like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is no easy task. The 1980s comic deconstructed the entire superhero genre in a way that redefined the entire comic book industry, with repercussions still felt today. So maybe that's why for HBO's new Watchmen TV series Damon Lindelof has decided to kinda do his own thing.

A new trailer for Lindelof's reimagined Watchmen shows a very different world, one set years after the original comic's events. Certain familiar aspects remain, however, such as the idea of costumed heroes being perceived as vigilantes. But with these masked crime-fighters shunned for so long, what happens when they are suddenly embraced once more? The question, as always, is "Who watches the Watchmen?"

I think most intriguing of all is Regina King as Angela Abar, who hides under a mask and tracks down a terrorist group with an obvious resemblance to the ink-blotted vigilante Rorschach. She's joined by a stellar cast that includes Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Jeremy Irons, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jean Smart, and Robert Redford.

SYNOPSIS: Set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws, WATCHMEN, from executive producer Damon Lindelof (Emmy® winner for “Lost”; HBO’s “The Leftovers”) embraces the nostalgia of the original groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name, while attempting to break new ground of its own. Nicole Kassell directs the pilot from a script written by Lindelof.

HBO debuts Watchmen on October 20th.

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Comic Con: HBO's 'Watchmen' Trailer Outlaws Costumed Heroes In Modern Times

HBO thrilled fans at Comic Con with the first trailer for the highly anticipated series, Watchmen.

The show is based on the graphic novel from Alan Moore. That story was set in 1980s New York, in an alternate reality where costumed heroes existed and Richard Nixon was still the president after success in the Vietnam War. The Doomsday Clock still ticked its countdown as the nuclear threat still loomed from the Soviet Union.

In 2009, Zack Snyder adapted the novel that had been previously considered unfilmable. The reception for that film, which starred Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, and Malin Ackerman, was mixed. And whether fans of the novel loved or hated Snyder's work, he proved the story could be adapted to the screen.

Which is where HBO comes in, ten years later, with the series from Lost and The Leftovers showrunner Damon Lindelof. The new series continues the original story, but moves it forward 30 years to modern day. Jeremy Irons stars as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. Regina King, Frances Fisher, Don Johnson, Louis Gossett Jr, Hong Chau, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

Watchmen comes to HBO this October.

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The Doomsday Clock Counts Down In HBO's New 'Watchmen' Teaser

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen is arguably the most influential comic book ever published. If you're going to adapt it, you better bring the damn goods. Zack Snyder gave it a go on the big screen and it turned out to be pretty divisive. Some dug the faithful translation, while others feel it was never meant to be seen in such a condensed fashion. HBO and Damon Lindelof may have the right idea with their upcoming Watchmen series, which is to take some of the core concepts and "remix" them into a new story.

HBO has dropped a new teaser for Watchmen which offers the best look yet. There are aspects that look familiar, but are noticeably changed. An army of soldiers are geared up for war wearing Rorschach masks, while the police wear yellow masks of their own. Jeremy Irons is seen looking quite meditative as an older version of Ozymandias, and we also get our first glimpse at Regina King as new character Angela Abraham.

In this world where superheroes are treated as outlaws, the seconds of the Doomsday Clock can be heard ticking down. Some things never change.

Also starring Don Johnson, Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Hong Chau, Andrew Howard, and Frances Fisher, Watchmen debuts on HBO this fall.

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Jeremy Irons Joins HBO's 'Watchmen' TV Series In Lead Role

Who knows what the future holds for Jeremy Irons as Alfred Pennysworth. Will he get a chance to come back for another Batman movie or Justice League sequel? We don't know the answer to that yet, but the good news is Irons will be a part of a different DC Comics adaptation. Deadline reports Irons has been cast in Damon Lindelof's Watchmen series for HBO.

Irons is said to be taking a major role in the series, and while the character he's playing isn't confirmed he's described as an aging imperial lord in a British manor.  He joins Regina King,  Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Louis Gossett Jr., Adelaide Clemens, and Andrew Howard in what promises to be a very different version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic graphic novel series. Nicole Kassell (The Leftovers) will direct the pilot.

Any chance to give us more of Jeremy Irons on a regular basis is a good thing, so let's hope the show is a success. HBO could use something to fill the Game of Thrones void, too.

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Review: 'Red Sparrow', Jennifer Lawrence Plays Spy Games In A Chilly Thriller

Don't be fooled, while the trailers for Red Sparrow may suggest Jennifer Lawrence in her first true action vehicle, the film is closer to Bridge of Spies than Atomic Blonde. Sexual power and international intrigue are the heart of this spy thriller by director Francis Lawrence, reuniting with the other Lawrence after a handful of Hunger Games movies. He doesn't immediately strike anybody as the type to pull a John Le Carre, and his inexperience with the genre is the film's greatest weakness, but his star makes for a compelling Russian femme fatale even as the story gets muddier than a bowl of borscht.

Lawrence has made a career of playing strong-minded women in empowering roles, from Winter's Bone to perhaps her defining one as the defiant Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. In Red Sparrow she plays Russian ballet dancer-turned-spy Dominika Egorova, another woman seeking to reclaim her life and identity from a bunch of powerful, corrupt men. All her life the state has pretty much owned her; they allow her to dance, they own the house she lives in with her mother (Joely Richardson), and take care of her mother's mounting medical bills. So when a crippling accident ends Dominika's career, she's desperate to find another way to remain valuable to her country. Matthias Schoenaerts, looking slicker and more polished than his usual ruggedness, plays her uncle Vanya, a high-ranking Intelligence official who has a plan to help Dominika out. Recognizing a little too closely just how alluring his niece can be, Vanya recruits her for an assignment that allows Dominika to use her sex appeal. When the mission goes south, she's forced to become a Sparrow, and sent off to what is literally referred to as "whore school", run by Matron (Charlotte Rampling), where Dominika learns how to use sex as a deadly weapon to force information from Russia's enemies.

Of course, Dominika isn't as malleable as the others in her class. She's killer when it comes to using a person's need for human connection against them, but she also has her own agenda that runs counter to what her superiors demand.

“Don’t give them everything, not every piece of you," warns her mother, who knows all too well how becoming a Sparrow can strip away one's humanity.

Meanwhile, Matron has other words of advice...

“You must inure yourself to what you find repellent,” she commands, after yet another demand for her charges to strip and do something lewd at a moment's notice. Let's just say the curriculum doesn't include Algebra or Classic Literature. Date Rape Survival 101, that might be a thing, though.

Red Sparrow is most engrossing when focused purely on Dominika as she makes one compromise after another to achieve her goals. As such, the best parts of the movie involve her training, which finds her weighing which parts of herself to give up, how much of her soul she's willing to part with. The screenplay, adapted by Justin Haythe from Jason Matthews' novel, could have dug deeper into what makes her tick. There's the suggestion that Dominika is out for more than self-interest and vengeance, that perhaps a part of her likes the power she has over men. But it's, sadly, never followed up on in any recognizable way. Lawrence gives a performance that is sexy and as complex as she can make it, but we leave thinking there was more about Dominika that could have been explored.

Less compelling is just about everything that has to do with U.S. spy Nathaniel Nash (Joel Edgerton), a CIA operative who has blown his cover to protect a top-level source within the Kremlin who has been feeding them intel. He and Dominika cross paths when she's assigned to ferret out the mole by shadowing Nash, a man she comes to trust. But can he trust her? And where do her loyalties truly lie? With the country she loves that has used her all of her life? Or with the Americans who don't know whether the Sparrow is playing them? Deception is what she knows best, after all.

There's the expected tension between Dominika and Nathaniel, but the biggest problem is the lack of palpable chemistry between Lawrence and Edgerton. Not much can be done with that, but it doesn't help a plot that is twisty yet predictable at just about every turn. The film unfolds in every way you expect it to, and Francis Lawrence isn't skilled enough with the genre to craft a properly murky atmosphere that could cover for it. In more experienced hands the pace would be described as deliberate and aloof, but under Lawrence's direction it's just slow and occasionally dull during its bulky 139-minute runtime.

Red Sparrow is at least an attempt to offer the kind of mature espionage film audiences are frequently denied, and overall it's a solid effort for fans of the spy genre. Others expecting more than just a by-the-numbers effort  may find that this Sparrow never soars as high as it should.

Rating: 3 out of 5

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'Red Sparrow' Super Bowl Spot: Jennifer Lawrence Goes Super Spy For The Super Bowl

Here we go. The night's cavalcade of Super Bowl spots begins with Red Sparrow, the action thriller that looks like Jennifer Lawrence if she were doing a Black Widow movie. The film is directed by her Hunger Games director, Francis Lawrence, and co-stars Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons, Joel Edgerton, Mary-Louise Parker, and Charlotte Rampling. Here's the synopsis:

Dominika Egorova is many things. 
A devoted daughter determined to protect her mother at all costs. 
A prima ballerina whose ferocity has pushed her body and mind to the absolute limit. 
A master of seductive and manipulative combat. 

When she suffers a career-ending injury, Dominika and her mother are facing a bleak and uncertain future. That is why she finds herself manipulated into becoming the newest recruit for Sparrow School, a secret intelligence service that trains exceptional young people like her to use their bodies and minds as weapons. After enduring the perverse and sadistic training process, she emerges as the most dangerous Sparrow the program has ever produced. Dominika must now reconcile the person she was with the power she now commands, with her own life and everyone she cares about at risk, including an American CIA agent who tries to convince her he is the only person she can trust.

Red Sparrow opens March 2nd.

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'Red Sparrow' Trailer: Jennifer Lawrence Is Russia's Deadliest Spy

In the new spy thriller Red Sparrow, Jennifer Lawrence plays a Russian woman who, after getting mixed up in what looks to be a KGB operation, finds herself forced to become a sparrow. Basically she's trained to become an elite agent whose skills in the art of seduction are as lethal as her killing ability. The whole thing kinda looks like an extended riff on Black Widow's backstory in the Avengers movies, only with a little less ballet.

The film reunites Lawrence with that other Lawrence, Francis, the one who directed her in three Hunger Games movies. It's based on the books by former CIA operative Jason Matthews, and if you've read his stuff then you know he gets down to the tiniest detail on the spy game. Matthias Schoenaerts, Charlotte Rampling, Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons, and Mary-Louise Parker make up one Hell of a supporting cast. Here's the official synopsis:

Dominika Egorova is many things.
A devoted daughter determined to protect her mother at all costs.
A prima ballerina whose ferocity has pushed her body and mind to the absolute limit.
A master of seductive and manipulative combat.

When she suffers a career-ending injury, Dominika and her mother are facing a bleak and uncertain future. That is why she finds herself manipulated into becoming the newest recruit for Sparrow School, a secret intelligence service that trains exceptional young people like her to use their bodies and minds as weapons. After enduring the perverse and sadistic training process, she emerges as the most dangerous Sparrow the program has ever produced. Dominika must now reconcile the person she was with the power she now commands, with her own life and everyone she cares about at risk, including an American CIA agent who tries to convince her he is the only person she can trust.

Red Sparrow hits theaters on March 2nd.

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Review: 'Justice League', DC's Biggest Guns Give Fans A Film They Can Be Proud To Enjoy

At times it feels like the jury is already out against any DC Comics movie long before it ever opens. If I heard once "Well, let's hope Justice League isn't too terrible" or "I just hope it isn't Batman v Superman", I heard it a thousand times. Skepticism is what these movies are met with, and strangely enough, Justice League is in an even worse position than it would be if the universally-beloved Wonder Woman hadn't existed, because now that is the standard it must live up to. It's an unfair one; the two films only share a single character between them and nothing else, but we expect it to carry the same hopeful ideals and vision.

Justice League has more in common with Wonder Woman than it doesn't. First of all, the aversion to telling jokes is, thankfully, no longer there. Warner Bros. stepped in it by trying to emulate Christopher Nolan's gloomy Dark Knight Trilogy, but with the less competent Zack Snyder, and it set them back. Snyder's here again and many of his usual directorial tics are firmly in place. But as anyone who has been following the production knows, he left in the middle of shooting to tend to a family tragedy, with Joss Whedon stepping in to handle reshoots and a partial script rewrite. The question has always been whether their two vastly different styles could merge into a seamless, enjoyable superhero movie. While you can see some of the stitching around the edges, and I bet you can pinpoint the moment where Snyder ends and Whedon begins, Justice League is DC's biggest guns in a movie fans can be proud of enjoying.

If Wonder Woman reminded us of the power in what these superheroes can represent, Justice League hammers home that idea even further. Snyder's trademark music video opening, set to a version of Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows", shows us how humanity has been devastated by the loss of Superman. Without him, fear has begun to grow and spread, with Batman (Ben Affleck) fighting to keep the ensuing crime wave in check. I've often said that Superman's storyarc has been one of the best things they've done, and even in death that continues to be true here. If Man of Steel was Superman learning to be a hero, and Batman v Superman was him learning to be part of humanity, then Justice League is about Superman as a symbol of hope. The power vaccum left by his absence brings the insect-like parademons, emissaries of the powerful intergalactic villain Steppenwolf , a CGI monstrosity voiced by Ciaran Hinds.

Like Marvel, DC still has trouble nailing the bad guys.

Steppenwolf, who isn't nearly as rockin' as his rock band namesake, has arrived to find the three Mother Boxes, cubed McGuffins that will give him the power to destroy the planet or something. It doesn't really matter. He just needs to be stopped, and so Batman must put together a team, his Justice League, because it's too much for him to handle alone.  The plot isn't too dissimilar from practically every Marvel movie, in particular The Avengers; just replace Infinity Stones with Mother Boxes and wallah! And of course, that team isn't going to get along well at first, but thankfully they don't mimic Marvel with the same oil 'n water mixture of combustible personalities. For instance, Barry Allen aka the Flash (Ezra Miller) is a ball of lightning whose mouth runs almost as fast as his legs. He literally jumps at the chance to join the team, showing the rabid enthusiasm of a child high on Pop Rocks. Arthur Curry aka Aquaman (Jason Momoa), is the team's wildcard and  punk rock protector of the seas. Victor Stone aka Cyborg (Ray Fisher) is the strong, silent type who was literally born from the power of the Mother Box, making him arguably the most powerful and important member of the squad.

And then of course there's Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who isn't on the best of terms with Batman and initially wants no part of any team-building exercises. But this turns out to be as much her story is it is Batman's or Superman's. The Diana who saved the day in WWI hasn't been seen in decades, but this movie is about her quest to be that leader again. Snyder, try as he might, has never been able to get the female voice right (*cough*Sucker Punch *cough*), and while Wonder Woman kicks lots of ass she feels a little bit off at first. That changes later on and you can probably sense that's when Whedon started adding his two cents, moving her into the forefront and giving the film a feminist power boost it sorely needs.  The team is tiny but there's a Krypton-sized amount of testosterone going on.

While assembling the team is slow-going and the first hour a series of expository montages punctuated by splash pages, it pays off once Steppenwolf steps up his game. There's a blisteringly awesome sequence on the isle of Themyscira as the Amazons battle the villain and his flying army, reminding you why a movie following the female warriors is an absolute must. Snyder still hasn't added any new tricks to his visual palette; for the most part everything is choreographed with a "throw everything at the wall" strategy. Cram as much onto the screen as possible and hopefully the audience can sort it out. There at individual sequences that are dazzlingly brilliant, though, including one with the Flash that owes a lot to the Quicksilver scenes from the X-Men movies, only better because this character has more personality. Some will find Ezra Miller's performance too amped-up but that's exactly the point. He's a live wire, he's always "on" so to speak, and that he clashes awkwardly with everyone is why Flash is so much fun.

The rest of the cast fare pretty well, amd I think this is by far Affleck's best performance as Bruce Wayne/Batman. Finally able to shed the nihilism of the previous movie, Affleck's Caped Crusader is looser, funnier, but still has Batman's loner mentality. Gadot continues to be excellent as Wonder Woman, slipping back into the role as if she never stopped. Fisher finds a sliver of humanity within Cyborg's cold metal exterior, and Momoa is having more fun than anybody. Does he even know he's making a movie? Or was he just showing up to trade shots with Affleck? Aquaman, who like most of the team are due for solo movies in the near future, has the biggest laugh of the movie when he delivers an unusually emotional speech at an unusual time.

While I think the vitriol towards Batman v Superman, Man of Steel, and Suicide Squad are overblown (audiences liked them, but critics didn't), it's still a low bar to say that Justice League is simply better than those movies. It's substantially better; imperfect but another clear step towards the DC Universe taking its rightful place as Marvel's equal. There's still some way to go, but at least we have reason to hope.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Trav's Tip: Not that you need me to tell you, but stick around for both a mid-credits and post-credits scene, one that's basically fan wish fulfillment and another with sequel implications. 

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New 'Justice League' Clips: Steppenwolf Attacks, The World Needs Superman

Justice League is right around the corner, and depending on how you feel about these things there is either too much marketing or not enough. Clearly it's the latter for Warner Bros. who need this film to be a smash on the level of Wonder Woman, in order to keep the positive momentum going. And so they've dropped a bunch of new clips, and while I'm usually hesitant to post footage so close to release these don't seem to be too spoilery.

A whopping seven clips are available now, with most just extensions of scenes that have been in trailers and TV spots. A couple are different, though, like one in which Batman (Ben Affleck) tells Alfred (Jeremy Irons) just how badly the world needs Superman. Don't worry, Bruce, I think he's going to show up just when you need him.  And the fight scene with Steppenwolf gives us the best look at the missile-catching villain yet. Somewhere underneath all of that motion-capture armor is Ciaran Hinds, best known for roles in Munich and Game of Thrones.

Justice League opens November 17th, directed by Zack Snyder with Joss Whedon either on mop-up duty or a full-scale reshoot. Depends on who you ask on what day, honestly. Hopefully a way was found to gel their very distinct styles into something that makes sense. Fingers crossed.

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Comic-Con: "No Lanterns. No Kryptonian"- Watch The New 'Justice League' Trailer Now!

I say this every year, but I don't know how Marvel is going to top Warner Bros.' presentation here at Comic-Con. Simply awesome. And what put it over the top was the latest trailer for Justice League, which has some amazing new footage and reveals I wasn't expecting.

In it, we finally get a look at the villain Steppenwolf, who has the sheer audacity to set foot on the island of Thymiscira, the home of Wonder Woman and the Amazons.  But what's most interesting is what he, or presumably him, says..."No protectors. No Lanterns. No Kryptonian. This world will fall, just like the others."

It's basically our first legit reference to the existence of the Green Lantern Corps in the DCEU. I'm stoked. Are you? Watch the trailer and you will be. Call me crazy but I got hyped just seeing Jeremy Irons as Alfred again.

Justice League opens November 17th.

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Review: 'Their Finest' Starring Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, & Bill Nighy

After writing somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand reviews, it would be surprising if I didn't have some sort of thoughts about why movies are so fascinating a subject.  For me, it's because they're still the prime way that we tell each other stories, and stories are the foundation of culture.  Stories are how we tell ourselves who we are, and what we value.  A well-told story tells us something about -- as the late David Foster Wallace put it -- what it means to be "a fucking human being".  A poorly-told story sometimes tells us about nothing more than the cheap cynicism of the teller.

Lissa Evans understood this about movies when she wrote her novel Their Finest Hour and a Half, and Lone Scherfig carried it through her adaptation of the script for Their Finest.  In the depths of the London Blitz, the Ministry of Information makes a pivot from boring informational newsreels to making a feature film that they hope will shore up British morale.  And, with new scriptwriter Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) brought on board to punch up the "slop" -- women's dialogue -- they hope to convince Britain's distaff side that their husbands and sons aren't being put in harm's way for nothing.

To that effect they decide to make a movie about the Dunkirk evacuation.  Yes, the same one as in Christopher Nolan's project coming out this summer.  They find a human interest story about a pair of twins who stole their drunken father's tug and took it across the channel to help.  Who cares if it's wrong in nearly every single detail; "never confuse truth with facts, or either with a good story," senior scriptwriter Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin) advises her.

And so the twins get cut down from thirty to just past twenty; Rose chatty and Lily quiet.  The chatty one gets a love interest.  The father is left asleep in the hold to serve as comic relief before an honorable death.  Oh, and the Secretary of War (Jeremy Irons) decides he wants to use this to sell Americans on the idea of joining the battle, so they're saddled with Norwegian-American R.A.F. pilot Carl Lundbeck (Jake Lacey), who can't act his way out of a paper bag.  And so Rose's love interest becomes a love triangle, and so on and so on.

In fact, screenwriter Gaby Chiappe does such a good job with this aspect of her adapted script that it's hard not to see it echoed in Their Finest itself.  Of course there's going to be a romantic tension between Catrin and Tom, but we have to keep them apart from each other so she has a husband (Jack Huston) with an injury keeping him in London as an air-raid warden.  He's an artist, which is romantic, but also sets up the idea that he'll cheat on her while she's away shooting the film at the Devon coast (played by southwest Wales).  And we'll lighten the mood with a self-important aging movie star (Bill Nighy) who considers the drunken father role beneath him.

Oh but the bumps along the way to getting the story on the silver screen, while enjoyable to watch, aren't really that momentous.  The early death of the movie star's agent (Eddie Marsan) gives the idea of stakes, but doesn't really carry through the rest of the movie.  What can we do to add pathos? and once that complication is in place, let's go back and add a secondary love story between the star and the agent's bereaved sister (Helen McCrory).

Their Finest wears its artifice on its sleeve as nakedly as it exposes the movie Catrin helps write.  And yet, like the story of two young women and their drunk of a father bravely rescuing a boatload of British soldiers -- and a swaggering American journalist whose lines are mostly narration that can be recorded in voiceover -- it still manages to charm.  Arterton meshes well with both Claflin and Huston, as needs be.  But, for my money, Nighy and Lacy provide the most entertainment, each delivering a character perfectly suited to their not inconsiderable talents.

But then we have to ask, what exactly is Their Finest trying to tell us?  The inner movie may be a hacked-together crowd-pleaser, but it's wrapped around a core of British resilience in the face of adversity, which message the public sorely needed at that point.  So what's the idea that makes the movie we watch more than a charming little pleasure cruise?

Well, there are some feints towards wartime feminism.  Catrin chafes at the description of women's dialogue as unimportant "slop", though she doesn't quite bat an eye at "of course we can't pay you as much as we would a man".  But she keeps her dignity and thrives despite the adversity.  There's also Phyl Moore (Rachael Stirling), who is all but explicitly declared a lesbian, and who gets the line about men's unease at the increased role women play on the homefront during the war.  But little of this really goes anywhere.

As enjoyable a distraction as it is, there's not much more to Their Finest than that.  It feels good, and is excellently put together, but it's not exactly built to last.

Rating: 3 out of 5

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Review: 'Assassin's Creed' Starring Michael Fassbender And Marion Cotillard

It's not fair to blame Assassin's Creed for the failures of pretty much every other video game movie. Comic book movies were pretty awful for years until suddenly they weren't. All it takes is one to turn the tide. Sadly, Assassin's Creed, which is based on the long-running stealth action game franchise, is bad totally independent from the genre. It is, in all of the worst ways, like the Hitman adaptations which were unnecessarily dense and pretentious. If you're a fan you'll flip for seeing the games' awesome action moves on the big screen, pulled off by a top notch actor like Michael Fassbender, no less. But you'll also be left wondering why they couldn't have tried to make the movie as enjoyable to watch as it is to play.

For the record, I've played my share of Assassin's Creed games, so I know what it's all about. And even I sat there wondering what was going on. There's simply no excuse for such a deadly serious, over-plotted Assassin's Creed movie. The premise, which finds Death Row inmate Callum Lynch (Fassbender) saved from execution by a mysterious organization so he can relive the experiences of a 15th-century assassin ancestor, is ludicrous. So why not embrace its most ridiculous features, which are wrapped up in a lot of pseudo-science and historical mumbo jumbo about the Knights Templar, and have some fun? Blame director Justin Kurzel, who has made three straight movies with each gloomier than the last. He worked with Fassbender and co-star Marion Cotillard on the darkest, most dire adaptation of Macbeth ever and he has no inclination to brighten things up here.

This is a brand new story not associated with any particular game, but the story is a familiar one. Fassbender, an apparent fan of the series, enthusiastically leaps into the role of Lynch, who is strapped into a metal contraption that is part home aerobics machine/part virtual reality time travel doohickey. Lynch is no nice guy. Obviously the whole murder rap thing is a giveaway, but he's also haunted by memories of his dead mother, murdered by his father's blade. Turns out everything is tied to Spanish ancestor Aguilar de Nerha, who in 1492 (Yes, that year is significant and yes, you know who is connected in the cheesiest way imaginable) is part of an elite order of assassins charged with keeping the magical Macguffin known as the Apple of Eden from out of the Templars' grasp. The Apple controls human free will or something like that. Leave it to those uber-Catholics to want to suppress it, while the Assassins want to bring about world peace through copious amounts of bloodshed.

It's perfectly silly stuff, so you'd think it should be pretty wild. Nope, it's all doom, gloom, tons of posturing and stagnant speeches about warrior codes of honor and none of it matters. We're given little reason to care about what any of this means, and the screenplay is murky as Kurzel's visuals. Without clarity the film becomes just a series of random battles, separated by long, boring stretches of scientists babbling about the past. Not even Cotillard, one of the best actresses working today, can make heads or tails of this stuff. Others of equal caliber (Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson) try and fail to find purpose in characters we would furiously try to skip past if they were in an actual game. Fassbender's clearly getting his kicks pulling off some amazing stunts, but the actual performance offers him little to do. Lynch is a nothing character we have little reason to care about.

While no movie can be the interactive experience video games provide, Assassin's Creed at least tries to bring audiences the fighting sequences. The art of parkour, or wall-jumping, is as crucial to the movie as it is in the game. And there is some cool use of a first-person vantage point, which gamers will appreciate. But the film is of so little substance that it has an impact on every aspect. We just don't care who lives and dies. It doesn't help that the choreography quickly grows repetitive, although I think they tried to hide it by veiling everything in fog and shadow. How many times do we have to see the same knife to the gut shot? Assassin's Creed has all of the tools to be the first great video game movie, except for the one thing it needed most: to be fun.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Jeremy Irons And Matthias Schoenearts Join 'Red Sparrow', Tony Revolori Gets 'Exchanged'

Jeremy Irons and Matthias Schoenaerts are joining Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton in Red Sparrow. The spy thriller will reunite Lawrence with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire director, Francis Lawrence. Based on the Jason Matthews novel, the film stars Lawrence as a Russian intelligence officer forced against her will to become trained as a "Sparrow", a seductress who must operate against a young CIA agent with vital information. [THR]

Dope and Spider-Man: Homecoming's Tony Revolori will star in the indie thriller, Exchanged, from writer/director Geoff Haley. Revolori plays an autistic American student who goes to Germany on an exchange program, only to learn that members of his host family are terrorists. He joins them out of fear for his family. Haley was a camera operator on Furious 7 and the upcoming films Baywatch and Avengers: Infinity War. [THR]

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Jeremy Irons Says 'Batman V Superman' Deserved Harsh Reviews

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice continues to get kicked while it's down, only this time it's coming from the inside. While the film has been killed by critics, the box office has been underwhelming, and Warner Bros. has shuffled the creative staff as a result, the cast has mostly spoken out in defense of the film. Well, Jeremy Irons isn't having any of that. He keeps it real in his conversation with DailyMail by saying the film was deserving of a good "kicking"....

"‘Deservedly so. I mean it took £800 million [he means $800M], so the kicking didn’t matter but it was sort of overstuffed…It was very muddled. I think the next one [Justice League] will be simpler. The script is certainly a lot smaller, it’s more linear."

Irons is expected to reprise his role as Alfred Pennyworth in Zack Snyder's Justice League, a film that has come under much tighter scrutiny at Warner Bros. After that, Irons will be seen in Ben Affleck's standalone Batman film.

But Justice League really needs to be a hit, so it's good to hear Irons say it will be a more straight-forward story than 'Batman v Superman' was. And part of that "linear" story could be the return of Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor. Just a few weeks ago he seemed unsure about reprising the villain role, but recent comments at the MCM London Comic-Con [via DigitalSpy] are a little more certain. 

“I’m kind of in wait. They just started filming ‘Justice League,’ so I’m kind of like waiting for my crack at it.I don’t know what I’m allowed to say, because I feel like there’s probably some drone following me from DC, and if I say anything wrong I get, you know, picked off.  But yeah I think so, and I love it, and I love everybody who's in it. You know, it's a really talented group of people."

Clearly he didn't want to say too much, so we can't take this as an official confirmation just yet. But it sounds like we haven't seen the last of Luthor. Let's just hope he has something to do this time. Luthor should be THE bad guy, not just one of many.  We'll see what schemes he's planning when Justice League opens November 17th 2017. 

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Jeremy Irons And Jack Huston Join 'An Actor Prepares', Lucas Till Leads 'Spectrum' Cast

Jeremy Irons and Jack Huston are teaming up for father/son roadtrip comedy, An Actor Prepares. Directed by Steve Clark from a script he co-wrote with Thomas Moffet, the story centers on "Atticus Smith (Irons) who is a highly celebrated actor whose spectacular career is matched only by his rugged good looks and devilish charm. His estranged son (Huston), a devoted husband and professor, couldn’t be more different from his father. But when a medical condition forces Atticus to hitch a ride from Los Angeles to New York to be at his daughter’s wedding, his son becomes his only option and the duo ensue on a madcap road adventure together." Irons can be seen right now in Ben Wheatley's High-Rise, while Huston has the Ben-Hur remake coming up. [Variety]

Lucas Till, who will be reprising his role as Havok in X-Men: Apocalypse, has just scored the headlining role in Spectrum, an original sci-fi film directed by Into the Storm writer Joe Swetnam. Till plays Connor, the son of a renowned scientist whose final experiment on a human subject goes terribly wrong. Years later when Connor and his friends find his father's secret laboratory, they unexpectedly encounter a vengeful force like no other. [THR]

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Review: Ben Wheatley's 'High-Rise' Starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans, And Sienna Miller

It's taken four decades for J.G. Ballard's chaos-fueled novel High-Rise to hit the big screen, and in theory Ben Wheatley would be the perfect director to make it a reality. They both subscribe to a certain brand of anarchy in their work, and that turns out to be the problem. There's so much disarray between the source material and Wheatley's direction that nothing ever comes together to form a cohesive story, and while that may have been acceptable on Ballard's page it makes for a movie that is mostly incomprehensible.

There are a ton of fan-favorite actors filling up the screen and watching them interact in increasingly ghoulish ways is enjoyable in a way.  Set in an altered vision of 1970s London, the story takes place entirely inside the titular luxury high-rise apartment where the floors are broken down by class system. Imagine Snowpiercer set inside of a building rather than a running train and you'll get the drift. Poor people live on the bottom floor, middle class a few floors up, and the elite, you guessed it, rest comfortably at the top. Tom Hiddleston is Robert Laing, a doctor living in one of those middle floors, and his neutral position is perfect for his rather tranquil temperament. He couldn't be more different from the wild-haired, unpredictable Richard Wilder (a kinetic, mutton chopped Luke Evans), whose lower class family (which includes Elisabeth Moss as his pregnant wife) is constantly impeded on by the rich. And then at the top of the food chain there's The Architect (Jeremy Irons), who designed the building to be a "crucible for change", although his reasons why remain a mystery.

Much of the film remains a mystery, though, including why an outbreak of violence destroys the fragile peace within the building. It isn't long before any idea of rational civilization begins to crumble. The trash begins to pile up, the electricity stops working, and soon people are being butchered in the hallways, pets killed over swimming pool violations, all types of weirdness. Meanwhile, Laing watches all of this with a calm that is disturbing in itself. Although he does find time for the occasional dalliance with the enigmatic Charlotte (Sienna Miller), who has her own shady past.

But none of this matters because we are kept at an infuriating distance from every single character. Detachment from the gory proceedings may be part of the plan and to a degree that makes sense, however it doesn't make for a very compelling narrative. Add to it that Wheatley never makes much of a commentary on class disparity in itself. He's too content to bask in the pandemonium to make any kind of statement, which is unfortunate considering Ballard's story is timelier than ever. 

The level of disorder prevents the film from gaining any perceptible momentum, and the result is one of Wheatley's most tedious efforts. It also holds back the actors, who are uniformly great in just about everything else, from leaving much of an impression. None of them truly matter and probably could have been replaced by just about anybody without it making a difference. Disappointing from the floor up, it's hard not to look at High-Rise as anything but a missed opportunity.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: 'The Man Who Knew Infinity', Starring Dev Patel And Jeremy Irons

In a former life, I was a mathematician.  I used to maintain a weblog called The Unapologetic Mathematician — a winking allusion to G.H. Hardy's much more famous A Mathematician's Apology.  And yes, I know that Hardy meant his title more in the sense of an explanation or defense, as in theology.

Point being, where most kids grow up hearing stories about — I don't know, sportsball players or something — I grew up with John Nash, Alan Turing, and Srinivasa Ramanujan.  And Ramanujan was always the most alien to my sense of what mathematics was.  Not because he was from India, but because he produced thousands of mostly number-theoretic and analytic identities, seemingly from thin air.

In some sense, each of these identities just gives two different calculations and says that they both give the same answer.  Like when we say multiplication is commutative: given two whole numbers like three and four we can lay out a rectangular grid of stones and count them up.  Whether we group them as three rows of four stones, or as four columns of three stones, we get the same number either way, and so on for any other numbers we might have picked.  Ramanujan, teaching himself mathematics from second-hand textbooks, came up with fantastically complicated identities I won't even try to write down here.

They were so unexpected that when Hardy (the same one from the Apology) received them in the mail, he was dumbfounded.  Some of them looked at least plausible, but some Hardy couldn't even guess why they might be true.  And yet they were too weirdly specific to be the sort of thing someone would just make up.  Two other Cambridge mathematicians had already returned the packet of loose-leaf notes as the work of a crank — trust me, you get plenty even when you're a lowly instructor — but Hardy started a correspondence that eventually brought Ramanujan to work with him and J.E. Littlewood.

The Man Who Knew Infinity gets at least the facts of his mathematical life correct.  Ramanujan (Dev Patel) starts out in 1913, struggling to find a clerkship in Madras.  It's left unsaid, though, that the reason he lacks a degree is mostly his own inattention to any subject other than mathematics, rather than some sort of discrimination against him.  He was, after all, a Brahmin, at the top of the caste system that still existed under the British Raj.  That's also why, after Hardy (Jeremy Irons) invites him to study at Cambridge, his mother objects: going abroad is low-class, and forbidden to a Brahmin.

Upon his arrival, Ramanujan is given a wake-up call by Hardy and Littlewood (Toby Jones).  Simply plucking his identities out of thin air and writing them down won't fly here.  Academic mathematics is organized around the notion of proofs, which at the time were thought of as formal, rigorous methods of establishing truth.  Intuition could serve to generate targets — whether it came from Hardy's broad contextual background in academic mathematics or Ramanujan's dreams of his local deity of Namagiri — but it must be backed up with step-by-step proof.

I don't really expect that any movie could delve into the weeds of mathematical epistemology, sussing out the distinctions between an intuition-driven mathematics and and a proof-based one, much less the complicated ways they interact with the then-ongoing philosophical battle between Platonism and Formalism.  The former holds, as Ramanujan puts it, that a meaningful mathematical statement expresses "a thought of God", while the latter sees mathematics as a game that cranks out new results as long as you follow the rules carefully.  Most in the audience won't care, and to get any sort of resolution would require decades more of the story.

Instead, it settles on the simpler, more romantic conflict between Ramanujan's faith and Hardy's atheism which, though palatable to a wide Western audience, has the small drawback of being wrong.  Ramanujan was clearly informed by the culture he grew up in, and was a conscientious practitioner to the extent it didn't get in the way of his mathematical studies.  So conscientious, in fact, that his strict vegetarianism likely led to malnutrition that led to a recurrence of the amoebiasis endemic to Madras that was misdiagnosed in England — and in the script — as tuberculosis.  But he also said that all religions seemed about equally true, and there was hardly an obstacle to his work with Hardy over the issue.

That the movie oversimplifies the mathematical ideas Ramanujan explored is understandable, even when it leads to getting things flat-out wrong for the sake of dramatic exposition.  He never claimed an exact calculation of the prime-number-counting function; only refinements of estimates that Hardy was certainly well-acquainted with and would hardly have been shocked to see.  His work on partition-counting, though fascinating, was not a foundational as presented.  But it does set up the right interactions with other Cambridge faculty to illustrate how Ramanujan was received.

But rounding off these corners to widen the audience leads to replacing the less-accessible drama of mathematics with the cheaper melodrama of a conflict between his wife (Devika Bhise) and his mother (Arundathi Nag), who hides his wife's letters so they won't distract him from his work.  Work which, per the movie, she didn't want him to leave for in the first place.  The casting also rounds off the uncomfortable fact that Ramanujan's wife was 13 or 14 when he left, and she joined him in Madras at the start of the movie not because he'd finally obtained a job, but because she'd finally started her adolescence.

In its outlines, The Man Who Knew Infinity does a good job of giving the facts of Ramanujan's life even as it massages them into an audience-friendly form.  The best writing, though, goes to Hardy, or maybe it's Irons' deft performance.  It would have been easy to let him become the standard Good White Guy who comes to the story without racism, but Irons lets him be sympathetic without being perfect.  This version of Ramanujan, on the other hand, is the same excitable, socially awkward, borderline-autistic character Patel goes back to again and again.  I can walk away from the movie with a good thumbnail sketch of his life, but I hardly feel like I understand the man himself.

Rating: 3 out of 5

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