Image Credit: Universal International Pictures
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, where I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, a pool has terror in its depths and a family confronts its criminal legacy in entertaining fashion. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite and Threads/Instagram: @jammerwhite
Welcome to 2024! Here’s hoping it will be a happy one for you.
January has always tended to be somewhat of a barren wasteland when it came to releases. There are the awards bait films still lingering around (and in the UK, it’s when some of them open a couple of months or longer after their Stateside debuts).
Yet horror, especially that produced by the Blumhouse team, has managed to carve out a niche here, the reliable genre still attracting eyeballs even when most people are waiting for the summer season to begin and the blockbusters to roll out. But it’s a weird year –– the bigger films will be scarcer this year, because of the knock-on effect of last year’s strikes –– and Blumhouse still thinks a scary movie can work, especially after last year’s buzzy M3GAN.
Night Swim, though, is certainly not in the killer doll’s league. Co-writer/director Bryce McGuire adapted his short film about a swimming pool with danger lurking in its depths into this story of the Waller family and their own weird water.
Wyatt Russell is Ray Waller, a baseball player whose health has taken a turn after he’s diagnosed with MS. Looking for somewhere he, wife Eve (Kerry Condon) and their two kids can put down roots –– and he can focus on recovery –– they buy a fixer-upper family home in a charming suburban community. Ray is taken by the backyard pool that, though it’s seemingly been left to dry out, offers the promise of water therapy. But as the family restores it and starts to use the pool, they discover it has some positives (Ray starts to recover) and serious negatives (dark forces lurk within). Can they figure out what’s really going on before it swallows them all?
Neither the question nor the answer will surprise anyone who has seen a horror movie, but Night Swim does at least offer up a little something more than the borrowed jump scares that littered the trailer. The cast must contend with characters that largely go through the motions (but when called upon, Russell and Condon both put in solid work) and the story has a couple of surprises, but for the most part, Night Swim is treading water.
Night Swim is in UK and US cinemas now.
Image Credit: Netflix
I spent my teenage years going to the Scala Cinema in London on Sundays once a month to see marathons of Jackie Chan movies and work by other Hong Kong cinema legends. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for stories that can combine action and comedy effectively in the style of Project A or Wheels On Meals. Netflix’s The Brothers Sun is the latest to make the attempt, and it is mostly successful in that.
The Brothers Sun, originally birthed from a pitch by Byron Wu and developed by Wu alongside Brad Falchuk (who runs the show), kicks off when the head of a powerful Taiwanese triad is shot by a mysterious assassin, his eldest son, legendary killer Charles “Chairleg” Sun (Justin Chien) heads to Los Angeles to protect his mother, Eileen (Michelle Yeoh), and his naive younger brother, Bruce (Sam Song Li) — who’s been completely sheltered from the truth of his family until now.
But as Taipei’s deadliest societies and a new rising faction go head-to-head for dominance — Charles, Bruce and their mother must heal the wounds caused by their separation and figure out what brotherhood and family truly mean before one of their countless enemies kills them all.
It doesn’t sound like there’s much room for laughs, but there are, primarily driven by Sam Song Li as the epitome of Southern California Chinese kids. He’s caught between culture and dreams of making it in entertainment (in his case, as an improv performer). But Wu and Falchuk’s show manages to find the funny in other characters too. And while casting Michelle Yeoh –– sorry, nearly forgot to use her full name, Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh –– as the matriarch with hidden depths feels like a first-base concept, there’s a reason you hire Yeoh: she always delivers.
The fight scenes are fun (one or two are a little more brutal), and the family dynamic is an entertaining one. It might not fill the void of, say, the recently cancelled Warrior, but it has its own charms.
The Brothers Sun is on Netflix now. I’ve seen the whole season.