Unplanned
Produced and distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment
Directed and written by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon
Cold Pursuit
Produced by Studio Canal
Directed by Han Peter Moland
Screenplay by Frank Bladwin,
adapted from the Norwegian film Kraftidioten
Distributed by Summit Entertainment
The Mule
Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Screenplay by Sam Dolnick and Nick Schenk
Unplanned is a remarkable piece of cinematic propaganda that seeks to tell the truth about abortion and Planned Parenthood. It’s based on a memoir of the same title written by Abby Johnson, who is played in the film by Ashley Bratcher. Johnson had worked for Planned Parenthood for eight years, doing her job so well she was promoted to the rank of clinic director. She was convinced that she was helping women who had been abandoned in their hours of need. She had bought into Planned Parenthood’s self-description as an organization devoted to helping women by reducing the need for abortions.
In all that time, she had never seen what happens to the child in the womb during an abortion. Of course, she knew in an academic way, but apparently had never visualized it. She had seen the amputated arms and legs of aborted children but somehow managed to rationalize abortion’s murderous practice as a necessary evil.
While in college and later as a young wife, Johnson had two abortions herself. The first was because she had become pregnant by a thoughtless clod while behaving thoughtlessly herself at a booze-fueled party. The second abortion ended a pregnancy with her first husband. She had discovered he was cheating on her within a few days of their marriage, felt she had no other choice but to dissolve the union, and didn’t want the further complication of raising this lout’s child. Johnson had embraced abortion as the solution to unacceptable consequences of either her carelessness or having been betrayed by an unsuitable man.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The film doesn’t go into Johnson’s sexual history until much later in its running time. Instead, it opens with Johnson’s first encounter with what abortion entails. She’s at her job in a Planned Parenthood clinic when she’s asked to go to an operating room to help a staff surgeon who is in the process of aborting a baby. She arrives in time to see on an ultrasound screen the surgeon vacuuming a baby from a woman’s uterus. The fetus shrinks spasmodically from the invading tube. After a few seconds, the child is sucked into a plastic container, where it’s churned into a bloody liquid. Johnson is so appalled that she runs from the building across the street to the offices of a pro-life organization, 40 Days for Life. Shortly thereafter she joins them.
Johnson uses her experience to dramatize what happens to young women who have succumbed to the pro-choice propaganda. Why have a child, they’re counseled, if doing so is inconvenient? Abortion provides a way out that’s both safe and private. She found this to be a lie. Her abortions were neither easy nor painless. And both left her with deep regret.
While I agree with the film’s arguments against abortion, I think it could have made its case stronger had directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon examined the pro-choice stance more closely and investigated why so many have accepted its reasoning. After all, killing a baby is a self-evidently monstrous act. One wants to know how people have managed to persuade themselves that it’s an acceptable, even a moral deed. Further, many pro-choicers have become so astonishingly self-righteous they feel they’re duty bound to vilify those in the pro-life camp. This is the culture of death in action.
At the other end of the life cycle are two recent films featuring geezer heroes. It’s been a tradition in Hollywood to merchandise film stars well beyond their sell-by dates. Having invested in them heavily, the film industry is loathe to give up on their action heroes even as they age beyond plausibility. John Wayne, for instance, was still knocking out villains well into his 60’s. At 56, Cary Grant successfully fled from a menacing crop-duster in North by Northwest. Sean Connery was 63 when he was outrunning the 31-year-old Wesley Snipes in 1993’s Rising Sun. It’s the magic of movies.
In Cold Pursuit, the 65-year-old Liam Neeson plays Nels Coxman, a snowplow driver retained by a Colorado ski resort to keep the trails clear for its well-heeled patrons. We meet him on the evening he’s being honored for his work on the slopes. He’s an ordinary enough man but for his 6-foot-4-inch frame and his ability to throttle men to death when necessary. Other than that, he’s a sweetheart of a guy. When he finds out his son has been murdered by a drug gang, Coxman opts for revenge, killing the thugs one by one using his bare hands, his truck, or a sawed-off shotgun, usually one at a time.
In Cold Pursuit, Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland has remade his own 2014 film Kraftidioten (with an English title of In Order of Disappearance), barely changing a shot. The only significant change is the location; Kraftidioten took place in Norway, and Cold Pursuit in Colorado. Both films are revenge dramas in which fathers attempt to pay their sons’ killers in kind. With each murder, Coxman wraps his victim in chicken wire and tosses him into a mountain stream, where he’s confident the fish will eat the corpse. That’s foolproof enough, but for a complication. The drug gang had been doing business with a local Indian tribe, which had been supplying them with cocaine. When the gang notices their colleagues have gone missing, they assume the Native Americans are winnowing their number. And so things become bloodier as bodies mount up.
This would make for a compelling story if it were at all credible—but it’s not. When the criminals begin rushing about firing on one another in a trucking facility, you wonder why no one calls the police. You would assume that a ski resort town would maintain a suitable law enforcement presence, but none are in sight. As a consequence, the killing continues apace untroubled by any sign of official displeasure. Meanwhile, Coxman walks through the carnage, dazed by what he’s provoked. Despite his very noticeable height, bullets from neither the Indians nor the gang members ever come close to hitting him.
It was comforting, however, to see the big Irishman forge an alliance with the tribal chief. Yes, the chief is a murderous criminal himself, but it’s reassuring that they don’t let that get in the way of their multicultural bona fides—especially since Neeson’s had come into serious question during an interview promoting the film. He tried to make the case that the thirst for revenge is a not an untypical human reaction to violence visited upon one’s family and friends. He recalled that when a friend of his had been raped by a black fellow many years ago in Dublin, he went looking for the culprit and when he couldn’t find him, contemplated provoking a fight with any black he met on the street. His point was that his response had been tribal and vicious.
This, you’ll recall, touched off a firestorm of reproach. Neeson found himself denounced on the internet as a racist worthy of being strung up from the nearest lamppost. The virtue signalers who haunt social media didn’t care to notice that Neeson had used his experience to illustrate how people, including himself, can get carried away by their violent emotions. His point was that civilization requires that we manage ourselves rationally no matter how provoking our circumstances. However, the bien-pensants preferred to wallow in their own moral dudgeon in order to preen themselves in a shower of virtue.
Clint Eastwood’s The Mule is a dramatization of the real-life adventures of a 90-year-old drug courier named Leo Sharp. Sharp, a World War II veteran, ran a nationally renowned nursery that grew prize-winning flowers. But in his 80’s, he could no longer manage his business effectively. When he found out he was about to go bankrupt, he became desperate. One of his Mexican workers suggested he could make the money he needed to save his business if he were willing to drive cocaine across country. Sharp agreed and was soon making as much as a million a year for his efforts. The drug dealers were very happy with him. His work ethic and reliability were peerless. And, because of his age and spotless driving record, he never drew any suspicion on himself. Then the Drug Enforcement Agency arrested one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s accountants, who revealed the names of the personnel behind their drug-dealing operation. This led to Sharp’s arrest and conviction at age 87. He only spent a year in prison, however, as he was freed after being diagnosed with dementia and terminal illness. He died at 92.
Eastwood hasn’t made Sharp into a folk hero, although he seems to have sanded away some of his rougher spots. What he leaves out is that Sharp became friends with some of the Sinaloa people and even vacationed in Hawaii with one of them. Maybe it was this trip that gave him the notion that he might avoid jail time by offering to grow Hawaiian papayas in the United States. They’re “so sweet and delicious . . . the people on the mainland will love it,” he explained to his trial judge. Whether or not the judge liked papayas himself, he wasn’t swayed by Sharp’s offer.
This film is a low-key affair that reminds us that the money to be made in drug trafficking makes interdiction nearly impossible. We lost the drug war many years ago, as we did the alcohol battles in the 1920s. It seems to me wiser to decriminalize these substances while mounting smart public relations and educational campaigns to dissuade would-be users from ingesting narcotics. This would be a far better and cheaper alternative to what we have in place now.
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