HINDSIGHT IS 20/21: ANTITRUST

There were no significant movies released on this weekend 20 years ago – the widest release, best I can tell, was the Sean Penn-directed, Jack Nicholson-starring detective mystery The Pledge, which is probably most notable for Jack’s moustache – so for this instalment of Hindsight is 20/21, I decided to revisit the techno-thriller Antitrust, starring Ryan Philippe and Tim Robbins. As I mentioned last week, Antitrust was released the same weekend in 2001 as Save the Last Dance and ultimately disappointed at the box office, grossing only $18m worldwide against an estimated $30m budget. The film was part of a cycle of technology-based thrillers that emerged in the wake of both lingering Y2K anxieties and The Matrix‘s pop phenomenon (also including future Hindsight candidates Swordfish and Spy Game), and even doubled-down on the comparison by counting The Matrix‘s score composer and film editor among its crew. It also received largely negative reviews, and has seemingly faded from the public consciousness – except in our household, where my girlfriend has owned the DVD for nearly two decades and still insists on its virtues as a great bad movie.

OUTSIDE THE WIRE

(Mikael Håfström, 2021, USA)

War has gone robotic in the latest Netflix original film, set only 15 years from now yet somehow featuring fully automated mechanical soldiers (nicknamed Gumps, for some reason that is never made clear) and an experimental android cosplaying as a military officer (and played by Anthony Mackie) involved in a terrifyingly plausible Ukrainian civil war. Drone pilot Harp (Damson Idris) is sent to this futuristic conflict, as punishment for a friendly-fire incident that killed two American soldiers; reassigned to Mackie’s Captain Leo, Harp experiences on-the-ground combat for the first time in an ostensible mission to deliver vaccines to a refugee camp beyond enemy lines (hence the film’s unimaginative title). Of course, there’s a little more to it than that, but the plot seems little more than an excuse to showcase Mackie’s super-soldier performing superhuman stunts, with only a few heady sci-fi notions thrown in, as a treat.

LOCKED DOWN

(Doug Liman, 2021, UK)

The first big movie of this unusual cinematic year, released directly to streaming (where else?), is ostensibly a pandemic-set heist flick, about a quarantined-together yet emotionally-separated couple (Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor) who team up to steal a £3 million diamond from famed London department store Harrods. Really, though, the film is just another in the emerging sub-genre of COVID-inflected dramedies, with the diamond heist narrative almost added as an afterthought when screenwriter Steven Knight realized he needed to have an actual plot to justify his wordy script. With its heavy reliance on video calls and news broadcasts to establish its contemporary credentials, not to mention its handheld camerawork and writerly dialogue, the film really resembles most strongly one of the many online reunion specials we’ve seen over the last year, with the cast essentially filming themselves in their own million dollar homes (Hathaway and Ejiofor’s characters share an affluent home on Portland Road in West London, likely owned by someone in the cast or crew). In that sense it further stretches and challenges the definition of what cinema really is in the streaming age.

HINDSIGHT IS 20/21: SAVE THE LAST DANCE

Covid has made us all do crazy or unusual things to deal with the lockdown – in my case, that means revisiting films from 20 years ago, to see how well they’ve held up (or not). And since we’re probably going to be in this situation for a good portion of this year as well, why not document my adventure through the cinema of 2001? It’s as good a year to start with as any: many will say it represents the calendrical start of the 21st century, and historically it might as well, due to the obviously significant events that occurred. On a personal level, it’s the year when I really started getting into movies by tracking what I’d seen and how much I liked it. So I’ll use this quarantime to look back two decades, revisiting old favourites and confronting ones that I missed or avoided. Hopefully it’ll prove informative and enjoyable.

The first film I’m looking back on is Save the Last Dance, the teen dance drama released this week in 2001. It’s maybe safe to say that the studio, Paramount Pictures, didn’t expect a lot: the film only cost $13m and was released in 2200 theatres, 200 less than the Ryan Philippe techno thriller Antitrust opened in the same weekend. But when the dust settled, Save the Last Dance had more than quintupled the box office opening weekend of Antitrust, grossing $27.5m over the 4-day MLK holiday and becoming the first bonafide hit of the year. It ended up with $91m domestically and $131m worldwide, good enough for the top 25 financially. But its cultural footprint is what I’m more interested in.