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Reviews of The Sky Crawlers, Valkyrie and Killshot

The Sky Crawlers
Sony
$28
Blu-ray: $35

Plot: A young fighter pilot is assigned to a remote base where he learns some disturbing truths behind his squadron’s missions…as well as his own identity.

Opinion: Along with Akira and the films of Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell has long been considered one of the entry points for viewers looking to learn more about Japanese anime. A trippy futuristic thriller about a cyborg cop hunting a criminal in Tokyo circa 2029, Ghost has style to burn, which makes up for its nearly impenetrable story.  The Sky Crawlers, on the other hand, isn’t as visually dazzling (save for the beautifully rendered aerial combat sequences), but it is a heck of a lot easier to make sense of.  If anything, the movie would actually benefit from more mystery.  It’s fairly easy for an attentive viewer to figure out the big secret at the heart of the story early on, but it takes almost two hours for the main character to put the pieces together.  Oshii deliberately keeps the narrative at a slow, almost lethargic pace, an approach that’s both fascinating and frustrating as it yields scenes of striking, lyrical beauty as well as moments of astonishing boredom.  The Sky Crawlers probably isn’t the best film for anime novices, but if you know and like Oshii’s work, it’s well worth seeing.

Bonus Features: Two making-of featurettes covering the research and production work that went into creating those impressive aerial dogfights.

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Valkyrie
MGM
$30
2-Disc: $35
Blu-ray: $40

Plot: Based on the real-life exploits of Nazi soldier Colonel von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), who helped organize and carry out a top-secret plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Opinion: A Hollywood-ized version of an important chapter of World War II, Valkyrie is useless as a historical lesson, but works quite well as a thriller.  The movie offers a tense minute-by-minute account of how close Stauffenberg’s mission came to succeeding.  Before you get to that point though, you have to slog through 30 minutes of dull exposition punctuated by shots of Cruise striking various movie star poses in a fruitless attempt to portray his character’s internal conflict.  But then the assassination plan goes into effect and Valkyrie finds its footing.  It helps that Cruise recedes into the background at that point, allowing the excellent supporting cast—which includes Wilkinson, Nighy, Eddie Izzard and Thomas Kretschmann—to take center stage.  In its best moments, Valkyrie actually makes you forget that you already know the ending to this drama—namely that Hitler survived and the insurrection was crushed.  Still, I have to agree with those critics who have pointed out that the film never explores the motivations of the men that organized this plot.  Director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie would like us to believe that they hatched the plan for patriotic reasons, but they never answer the million-dollar question: if these men really did put country first, why didn’t they stand up to Hitler sooner?

Bonus Features: A pair of commentary tracks—one with Cruise, Singer and McQuarrie and the other with McQuarrie and co-writer Nathan Alexander—and two short documentaries about the Valkyrie mission.  The Blu-ray disc comes with five additional featurettes, including a behind-the-scenes look at the movie’s opening battle sequence.

Verdict: Rent It

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Killshot
The Weinstein Company
$20

Plot: After their blackmail plot goes south, a Mafia hitman (Mickey Rourke) and a trigger-happy psycho (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) target the estranged married couple (Diane Lane and Thomas Jane) that robbed them of a big payday.

Opinion: Shot in late 2005, Killshot was kept in limbo for almost four years until The Weinstein Company finally dumped it into a handful of theaters in the Southwest in January.  Amazingly, the movie didn’t appear in a single major market–not New York, not LA…not even Chicago.  Considering the studio’s shabby treatment, one would think that Killshot has to be the worst movie ever made.  As it turns out though, this is a solid thriller enlivened by strong performances by the ensemble cast.  Rourke in particular proves that his more celebrated turns in Sin City (which he shot before this) and The Wrestler (which was made afterwards) weren’t flukes; he’s both scarily convincing and strangely sympathetic as the seemingly conflicted assassin at the story’s center.  Don’t be scared off by the movie’s bad rep–Killshot deserves to find an audience on DVD.

Bonus Features: Not a single extra—clearly the studio doesn’t have a lot of hope for the film’s DVD prospects either.

Verdict: Rent It

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Also on DVD

The indie drama Powder Blue (Image, $28) is notable for one reason: Jessica Biel takes her top off.  Unfortunately for the filmmakers—but fortunately for the rest of us—clips of that sequence have already hit the Interwebs, which means there’s no reason to rent or buy the actual movie.  Coming off of two director-for-hire studio assignments, Wayne Wang got back to his independent roots with the small-scale characters studies A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska (Magnolia, $20 each or $30 in a 2-disc edition).  The latter title caused a splash when it became one of the first movies to make its debut on YouTube rather than in theaters.  Finally, before the Will Ferrell version arrives in theaters next week, fans of cult TV can check out the trippy ’70s series Land of the Lost: The Complete Series (Universal, $70), which comes in a cool collectible tin lunch box.