Joel Courtney plays the main character Joe, who is phenomenal in this film. He has a lot of dramatic scenes all of which land. I think in some way, he is even better than Elle Fanning. Riley Griffiths as Charles Kaznyk is so good as a young director of a movie within the movie. Especially when he starts yelling swearwords at other kids. And I guess one of my favorite is Ryan Lee as Cary. A kid who likes to blow shit up and light everything on fire. And you might think that the movie has to teach him a lessor, right? No... His obsession with explosions actually comes as an aid to save the characters in a dangerous situation. I fucking love this movie. Oh and I should probably mention Gabriel Basso who plays the lead of the movie within the movie.
I was afraid of it. Since I reviewed Drive I did a marathon of Ryan Gosling's films and saw some very good cinema. I was afraid that a slow paced, depressive movie about God being a Thai policeman will not stand a change against things like Barbie. But damn, Nicola's Winding Refn's cock is tasty. To be honest, Ryan Gosling's cock is also tasty.
The premise is interesting. It's about a guy who lived all his life with one woman and now facing a divorce. And so Ryan Gosling is now teaching him to pick up girls at a bar. You can already imagine a million or so jokes that can come out of this setup alone. There is character growth, which is interesting. Everybody seems to have a proper arc. But to be honest, I don't like the ending too much. It is trying too hard to be this melodramatic speech type ending, where the cast is listening to a different person giving a heartwarming and tear-dropping essay about all of the lessons learned. They tried to make it interesting by subverting a few things. But ultimately it is a bit forced. Though what happens right after it is absolutely insane and I love it. Even though it breaks all logic, if you think too much about it. Jonah Bobo is the man!
The acting in the movie is very good. There is a believable sadness in Dan Aykroyd's character which is perfectly balanced by the complete joyfulness of Vada, the main character played by Anna Chlumsky. Macaulay Culkin is in it. And he shared with Chlumsky an award from MTV in 1991 for the best kiss scene for this movie. The second love interest of Vada is played by Griffin Dunne who you may know from An American Werewolf in London. And there is a surprisingly good performance by the legendary Jamie Lee Curtis considering that her character is basically there just to be a love interest to Aykroyd's character, which stirs some drama in the film.
The movie also has a surprising amount of good music. There are two insane dance sequences. But one is just so good it got stuck in my mind. I almost forgot that Ryan Gosling can sing. But he is so good. He needs to record more music. He has one album that he recorded before that. There should be more.
Writing-wise the movie suffers from the new trend of sincerity avoidance. You know how in the older films if a character is sad, we should also feel sad with the character. Michael Bay was consistent with his sincerity for the most part in his older movies and even in Ambulance. But since 6 Underground is starring Ryan Reynolds there is a lot of joking around people feeling things. Even though he still tries to get the core idea of the film to be sincere. Which is that people are more important than the mission. Ryan Reynolds's character was brilliantly cast to be the guy that challenges the idea of sincerity. Perhaps there is another layer of complexity to this movie that I didn't see because of the all of booms and butts.
I was fascinated at that point with the story about the making of Dunkirk, the 2017 Christopher Nolan movie about World War II. It was rated PG-13, while everything else about this subject matter was rated R and a lot of people got upset that Christopher Nolan was afraid to show guts. But Nolan himself explained that in preparation to the filming, he watched Saving Private Ryan ( a very violent Steven Spielberg film about that war ) and saw that other people tend to close their eyes in moment of absolute horror. So they don't actually see the movie. And they miss on tension, immersion and ultimately they are not scared in the end. So to scare the audience about the war, he needed to show death and suffering without the death and the suffering being unpleasant to look at on the screen. And for that kosher approach he got the PG-13 rating.
Look at The Post. A movie about an article in the newspaper. Like, how can you make this interesting? The movie has no action scenes. Oh wait... There are actions scenes! It's Steven Spielberg we are talking about. He cannot bloody live without action. The movie starts with a war scene in Vietnam. It's not as gruesome as the one he did in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, but it bloody damn good and has a very similar feeling to it.