Mr. Movie: Take a trip through time with ‘Tenet’

Many critics — me included — often scratch their heads and wonder why they’re still doing a gig like this after years of movie drudgery. It’s been 30 for me. The wondering why is especially true when sitting at a computer trying to pound out at least a couple of hundred words about a movie you care little or nothing about.

Movies can be a grind. Before COVID some weeks had four or five movies. A few years ago I did nine in one week. Most weeks I see at least two films. It’s quite taxing and even more so when three of the four movies in a four movie week totally suck. That’s when you sit in front of a computer screen with a brain as blank as the page in front of you.

And then along comes COVID and shuts it all down. It’s been seven months since I’ve been in a theater. Seven months of having to endure the brain death of TV. Okay, not total brain death. I did binge watch “Game of Thrones” and that was quite entertaining.

What I couldn’t do is force myself to find another long series like “Game of Thrones” to fill my time.

My point is that theaters can’t reopen fast enough. Forget the complaints about too many movies in a week, and trying to write intelligent sentences about a film on a blank screen. I have really, really, really missed movies in a theater.

Until this week.

Earlier this week I saw one in a theater. After seven months of no movies I bounced into Kennewick’s Fairchild Cinemas like a five-year old kid getting to see Santa Claus in person for the first time.

I could have watched a blank screen and it would have been wonderful.

Tenet

Movies involving time are messy. The backward and forward going ons of time travel are hard for a screenwriter to convey. What works in a writer’s head and what ends up on paper are often quite different. Executing that vision is even harder. Most of the time, it’s impossible.

In the terrific sci-fi flick, “Looper” Bruce Willis very clearly explained why you shouldn’t bother questioning how it all works. He said he could produce charts and graphs and go into a convoluted explanation. It would take hours to do and then you’d still not really understand. His conclusion is based on reality. And that reality is the fact that he and who he was as a young man were sitting together in a restaurant.

All that worked in “Looper” but it doesn’t in “Tenet.”

John David Washington plays a character called Protagonist. He’s been enlisted by a top-secret U.S. agency to stop an arms dealer who can reverse time. He has access to some sort of algorithm that can destroy the whole world and is — apparently — willing to do just that.

Protagonist gets help with his mission from the man’s wife and from a secret agent colleague. Their quest to stop the man is almost as complex as the explanation writer/director Christopher Nolan gives us for the time dilemma.

Washington’s co-stars of note are Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh. An action hero is a big step away from the kind of characters he did in “BlacKkKlansman” and “The Old Man and the Gun.” It might not be the best step. Washington is adequate in the role but it’s hard to buy him as a guy who can flat out flatten three seriously buff bad guys in a fight.

He also doesn’t strike me as cold-hearted enough to just blow someone away.

One of the film’s highlights is Washington’s chemistry with Pattinson who has done a very good job of distancing himself from “Twilight’s” teen idol vampire, Edward Cullen. He’s actually a pretty good actor who shined in last year’s very dark “The Lighthouse” and in an action-thriller titled “Good Time.”

Pattinson is also the new Batman and is now filming the latest Batman movie. Do we need another Batman flick? Hasn’t there already been enough of them? Sorry, that’s a question for another day.

That said, Pattinson is very good as the Protagonist’s right-hand man.

Debicki (“Widows,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”) is also quite good as the villain’s miserable bride, Kat. All she wants to do is take their child and get away from him. At 6’3,” the lady is gorgeous and stands out visually but isn’t a standout actress.

That’s not her fault. Nolan’s screenplay has Kat as more of a cardboard cutout than a full-blown character. Part of that is deliberate. The other part is poor writing and character conception.

That leads us to Branagh. He starred in Nolan’s last movie, “Dunkirk.” While Branagh didn’t get much traction there, he does here. If there’s any reason to see “Tenet,” it is Branagh’s villainy.

He’s flat out rotten and chilling to the core.

Branagh is a great actor whose forte is Shakespeare. He plucks some characteristics of some of the Bard’s best baddies and inserts them into his character. It works and works very, very well. Most of Branagh’s work is in the film’s second half. Nolan should have used him more.

That leads us to Nolan’s film.

The movies I’ve reviewed since mid-March have been links sent to me by studios and I’ve watched the online on a computer or on a TV in my living room. An invite to see “Tenet” was a godsend.

A movie about time troubles and the warping of time, and that lasts 2:30 plus trailers and the usual commercial stuff that comes before the film begins needs a good explanation. First of all, the one provided by Nolan comes too late in “Tenet.” Second, when it arrives it’s the usual, hard to follow, time travel gobbledygook.

So why do I both love and not love “Tenet.” It’s trippy in places and has decent effects. Plus, the backward stuff is a blast and though sometimes it’s hard to understand what’s going on, “Tenet” works.

The negative is that Nolan’s film will blast you out of your seat when action sequences are in progress, yet the dialogue is often mumbled while characters wear hazmat masks or other masks that impede sound.

I’m not a critic who falls all over himself because a movie is a Christopher Nolan project. Some do. In fact, I’m one of the critics who received the death threats that caused the website Rotten Tomatoes to stop letting readers leave comments about a movie.

One of the films I received death threats about was Nolan’s “Inception.” It’s about corporate espionage in dreams. The movie is inventive and original but got so convoluted that it made me want to go to sleep and dream a different movie.

His other films are like that. Wonderful to watch but not all that good.

But here I am loving “Tenet.” Is it because I got to see a movie in a movie theater or because it’s really good? After a few days of pondering, it’s a question I just can’t answer and one that you — once you see “Tenet” — won’t be able to answer either.

▪ Rated PG-13 for mature themes and some violence. It’s playing at the Fairchild Cinemas Southgate 10 and Queensgate 12, the AMC Kennewick Classic 12 and at the Cinemark Grand Cinemas in Walla Walla.

▪ Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5

This story was originally published October 22, 2020 at 4:50 PM with the headline "Mr. Movie: Take a trip through time with ‘Tenet’."