How do you follow up a film like Captain Marvel? Wedged between the Infinity War and Endgame behemoths, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Brie Larson vehicle was perfectly positioned to usher in the new masthead of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While it did hit the coveted billion-dollar mark upon its 2019 release, Captain Marvel didn’t quite put Boden and Fleck on the map in the same way Captain America: The Winter Soldier did for the Russo brothers, as an example.
Having spent some time directing episodes of Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air in the meantime, the directorial duo return with Freaky Tales, an 80s-set anthology film starring the likes of Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn, and Angus Cloud. Unfortunately, despite its ambition, it falls into the typical pitfalls of films in this genre: that when some segments are significantly weaker than others, it drags the whole experience down.
This is primarily the issue with the first two of Freaky Tales‘ four stories. Respectively, they follow a troupe of punks defending their club from a gang of violent neo-Nazis, and two rappers performing at a high-profile show. Neither of them are necessarily bad, just fairly flat in terms of their storytelling and characters. It doesn’t help that they’re also about half the length of the latter two segments, giving us barely any time to form any kind of connection with the characters.
These two, titled Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back and Don’t Fight the Feeling, just never feel like they get out of first gear. They both plod along pretty much as you’d expect, with a simple setup-conflict-resolution loop that doesn’t engage you in any meaningful way. There are some sparks of directorial flair here – blood spraying outside of the 4:3 aspect ratio’s borders is undeniable fun – but by the time you reach the third segment starring Pedro Pascal, there’s an awful lot riding on it.
Fortunately, the latter half of Freaky Tales‘ eponymous tales is much stronger. The aforementioned Pascal stars as a former gangster trying to leave his past behind in Born to Mack, which also has an eclectic cameo from Tom Hanks as an overbearing video store owner. This is also the section where Ben Mendelsohn’s police chief character really comes to the fore, establishing himself as the best performance in the movie. It’s to this point the only one with enough substance to sustain itself as a feature, with some interesting dissection of themes like guilt and the consequences of the past.
However, Freaky Tales saves its best segment for the very end, with a pulpy, Kill Bill-inspired revenge short called The Legend of Sleepy Floyd. Starring Jay Ellis as the former Golden State Warriors point guard, it takes clear visual and thematic clues from 1970s exploitation and kung-fu flicks to really significant effect. It’s an incredibly kinetic segment with cool framing of shots, animated sequences, and finally, some gory action to tie things up. It’s the only one that really feels like there’s a director (or two) behind it, and is worth waiting for despite the weakness of its opening 40 minutes.
That said, Freaky Tales doesn’t do the best job of tying together its disparate narratives into one. There’s a running motif of a mindfulness course endorsed by Sleepy Floyd, seemingly linked to a mysterious green shock of lightning that precedes each section’s major event, but it feels a bit tacked on aside from that. In the style of Pulp Fiction it also finds a way to weave the chronology of each short together, with characters from one section appearing in diegesis in another in an admirable way.
In total, though, Freaky Tales is an anthology film weighed down by the relative poorness of its opening sequences compared to the panache and genuine vibrancy of its last. If you’re happy to sit through 40 minutes of passable but rote storytelling, you’re rewarded with a remainder that is at times pretty watchable, and at its best quite intoxicating. The route to those highs, however, is a rocky one.
★★½
Freaky Tales is in select cinemas from 18 April and on digital platforms from 28 April.
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