Let’s start with a noir genre exercise that actually shared Opening Night of this year’s fest back on Thursday. While Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt were walking the red carpet for “The Magnificent Seven,” the talented cast of “Message From the King” were on stage across town at the Elgin Screening Room. Fabrice Du Welz (“Alleluia”) directs this story of a man coming to Los Angeles from Cape Town, South Africa, looking for his sister. I’m often fascinated by foreign directors tackling places as symbolic of America as L.A., and this particular riff on “The Limey” stars the great Chadwick Boseman, an actor whom I keep wanting to see get the right part to take him to the next level. This isn’t it.
Boseman stars as Jacob King (yes, that’s his last name, and he literally says the title after beating someone nearly to death, which is indicative of the film’s overall lack of subtlety). Jacob arrives in L.A. looking for his sister, quickly finding her battered body in the morgue. She was tortured before she was killed, and Jacob soon learns she had fallen deep into the underbelly of the City of Angels, getting involved in heavy drug use and pornography. As Jacob gets closer to figuring out who killed his sister, he gets deeper into the grotesque world of Los Angeles, starting with petty drug dealers and moving up to politicians and power players. Teresa Palmer co-stars as a woman who lives with her daughter in the same hotel in which King is staying (and who becomes his only friend), while Luke Evans and Alfred Molina play the sleaziest of the sleaze.
And I do mean sleaze. “Message From the King” eventually gets so grimy that you want to wash it off. I don’t have a problem with movies that explore dark territory, but said exploration demands something in exchange. It could be clever dialogue, interesting characters, thematic depth—whatever it may be, we need a reason to venture into Dante’s Inferno, and “Message from the King” doesn’t really provide one.
A much better film but still a slight disappointment thanks largely to sky-high expectations set by my colleague Glenn Kenny is Ana Lily Amirpour’s “The Bad Batch,” although it’s a film that I certainly want to see again and could use some more time away from festival madness to unpack and analyze. Something similar happened with Amirpour’s “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” a film I didn’t immediately take to at Sundance like some of my colleagues, but that grew in memory and on repeat viewing. You should seek it out if you haven’t seen it. “The Bad Batch” is an even more ambitious venture, and it shows off Amirpour’s incredible sense of framing and overall confidence. There aren’t many directors willing to start their sophomore film with fifteen dialogue-free minutes, but that’s the kind of filmmaker this is—one willing to take risks.
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