Stephen Heiden

This is how it’s done. This is how a wisecracking time travel shootemup paradox-puncturing tear-jerking action film is done. Bonus points for casting a younger protagonist eerily perfect in looks and wits to future self Reynolds. Every role’s a perfect casting fit, the script arrow flies true, the gags land, the baddies suck, Oedipal boxes get ticked and FX shreds at warp speed. Smile and hit ’Play.’ This is how it’s done.

Ryan Gosling’s deadpan macho flirts with masochism in this rude boy rogue spy thrill ride double-ticking every genre box and laying waste to half of Eastern Europe. Good cast, furious pace and gratifying one-dimensional lunatic extremes—listen for unhinged nemesis Chris Evan’s taunting Gosling as a “Ken Doll,” kid you not.

I first remind myself I’d quit streaming this after first eight minutes and returned to it a week later almost accidentally. Now it's stuck in my hippocampus like a deranged pop tune. Immediately upon hitting Netflix "resume,” its syrupy eyeroll intro morphed into something ELSE. Does it have a genre or tone problem?—I dunno, probably–I hit pause for a week, remember? All I know is the rest of it riveted me as it ran riot from laugh-scary to whip-smart endearing to thrill-crime harrowing. Though not a big CGI fan, those THINGS –or more pointedly what they represented– reanimated teenage horror subtexts nobody wants reminding of. Its meanwhile completely earnest tongue-in-cheek swooning teenage romantic angle never quit, nor did pulling for our hero despite patches of incongruity and oh-come-on ickiness. Strikes me its premature cinematic death fits some deep, dark metaphysical quirk.

The ubiquitous tendency to Google if Michael Clayton is based on a true story stems from its authenticism and perhaps some wishful thinking more could be known about its Serpico-ish hero after the credit roll. Nothing extraneous, cliched or gratuitous impedes a clinically precise trip into corporate bowels where legally parsed business necessities keep the taps of filthy lucre flowing, nor is there a pause of pressure to Clayton’s every nerve, fiber and fissure as the impeccable cast compels his murky journey toward the light. Films riven with such lived authenticity and aspiring inevitability come along only once every few decades.

The initially interesting (though not especially unique) premise of an engineered utopia with a character narrating premonitions and doubts, then being rewarded for it by graduating to a sort of high priest trainee soon springs all kinds of logic and credibility gushers even as Bridges and Streep lend their most earnest gravitas trying to keep the yarn afloat. The final half hour thrashes and grasps at any nearby slapdash contrivance attempting to land its happy groaner of an ending.

Impossibly pure and unblinking tour of earth and its inhabitants as if by an enchanted other-worldly guide, absent judgments or restrictions. Liken to a dream or parallel world in its grace, music and editing with countless scenes glimpsing mythic films unto themselves.

Coders can screenwrite, too!—will tug heartstrings of those kindly ticking the I am not a bot box.

Gilliam pours on the razzle, a surfeit of star turns supply the dazzle and there’s not a lick of sense anywhere in this faux Faustian fire drill.