Reviews: Child 44, A Little Chaos, The Salvation, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Amar Akbar And Tony, Glassland

Child 44

“Very Thin On Logic And Entertainment, Very Thick On Accents”

Director – Daniel Espinosa

Starring – Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Paddy Considine, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent Cassel, Fares Fares, Jason Clarke, Charles Dance

Screenplay – Richard Price

Cinematography – Philippe Rousselot

Score – Jon Ekstrand

 

Length – 137 minutes

Certificate – 15

Much like David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this is an American take on a bestseller set somewhere other than America, the first of a supposed trilogy in which people speak in funny accents.  The film takes place in the early 1950s in Soviet era Russia, a land where there is no such thing as murder, and a series of gruesome child murders are explained as ‘accidents’.  Former war hero turned disgraced Ministry of State Security agent Leo Demidov is confined to work away from Moscow as punishment for trying to protect his family, and so sets about singlehandedly trying to solve a countrywide mystery very few acknowledge exists.

Right from the outset I am happy to predict that, as is most likely the case with David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, we will not be seeing the two sequels on screen any time soon.  While Fincher’s film suffered not from any form of problems with the film itself, which I thought was actually very good, but from comparisons with the previously released Scandinavian originals, this one suffers from just being an awfully dull, incoherent muddle of a film.  The film sets out in an opening sequence that has very little to do with the overarching plot other than introduce the audience to a few of the key players, yet seeing recognisable star Jason Clarke in a seemingly minor role gives the impression that there will be added significance to this scene later on.  Spoiler alert, there won’t.  All this does is paint what I assume are fairly flawed characters on the page in black and white with no shades of grey allowed to seep in in the slightest.  Tom Hardy good, Joel Kinnaman bad.  Got it?

Admittedly the Tom Hardy character does have shades of grey emerging from the loveless marriage he shares with Raisa (Noomi Rapace), yet his questionable treatment of her is swept swiftly under the carpet because, hey, this is a war hero, he’s also the guy we are supposed to get behind in the story and we can’t have a flawed hero can we?  The film does do a very good job at bringing to life Soviet era Russia, the uniforms are all very good and everything feels very cold and dank but good production design at the cost of story does not a good film make.  The film just seems to be in a constant state of confusion as to what it is doing with either cast or story.  Take the marriage between Leo and Raisa for example, which is on again and off again more times over the course of a two hour fifteen minute film than most soap power couples manage in a decade.  The real issue I had with the film was that the story behind the film is essentially a Soviet set mystery thriller whereas the film ends up being a drama about how harsh life is in Soviet Russia with elements of detective procedural thrown in, making things very dull indeed, while that well worn cliché of getting into the mindset of the killer is not only ill advised but killed stone dead by the inadequacy of the performer for the role, something I never thought I’d find myself saying.

As far as the acting goes at least the film makes the decision that all the characters should speak in English to make things feel a bit more streamlined, but the multicultural nature of the cast leads to an almighty hotchpotch of accents and inflections.  Take Tom Hardy for example, this is his film unquestionably and he has indeed brought his trademark intensity to it, but bizarrely for someone who has offered note perfect accents in films like The Drop, Bronson and Locke, his Russian sounds like Aleksander from the Compare The Meerkat adverts and I found myself expecting his character to break from the trail to offer me cheaper car insurance.  The cast members coming out of this best are the Scandinavian troupe (Rapace, Kinnaman, Fares) who can deliver passable Russian accents, although Kinnaman’s sadistic agent character is played more like the overtly evil Nazi than anything else.  Gary Oldman sort of gets away with things, clearly taking inspiration from his work of the 1990s and Cassel is nearly there, with just a hint of French, but none of these are good performances.  Of course none are as bad as Paddy Considine’s lousy, lazy effort but the none too stellar work of Clarke and Charles Dance comes close.

Child 44 could well have been an engaging, compelling thriller.  The sequence in which Hardy and Rapace have to essentially break back into Moscow ought to be a moment of high dramatic tension yet is let down intolerably by the lack of anything to back it up.  The plot is slipshod in its expository nature and characters seemingly appear and disappear without explanation or a trace with great regularity.  I do not doubt that there is a good film to be made from the source material, yet I am certain that this is not it.

*

A Little Chaos

“Needed Some Chaos To Save It From Perennial Boredom”

Director – Alan Rickman

Starring – Kate Winslet, Mathias Schoenaerts, Alan Rickman, Helen McCrory, Stanley Tucci

Screenplay – Allison Deegan, Jeremy Brock & Alan Rickman

Cinematography – Ellen Kuras

Score – Peter Gregson

 

Length – 117 minutes

Certificate – 12A

I was unaware of Alan Rickman’s previous foray into the world of directing prior to the promotional tour for this, his sophomore effort and have yet to catch up with it, although on the strength of A Little Chaos I might just not bother.  If the idea of a romance set amidst the construction of the gardens at the great Palace of Versailles between a solitary female landscape gardener and the chief of construction sounds dull, that’s because it is really dull.  Kate Winslet stars as Sabine du Barra, a widowed landscape gardener tendering to construct Versailles’ fabled water gardens and thwarted at every turn by Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts), a gardener of some renown, before predictable an ill fated romance begins to kindle, while the presence of Alan Rickman’s King Louis XIV looms in the background.

When you look at the credits and see that this has three writers, none of whom have much pedigree or experience, nor a track record of working together, things start to make sense yet at the same time they make even less sense.  On the one hand I genuinely was left wondering if the trio had a bet as to who could get the most painfully overt flower/plant metaphors for sex and womanhood into proceedings, such is their propensity in the film.  On the other hand you really do have to ask if, between the three of them, this really was the best that they could manage.  As a rule of thumb for future reference; if your film’s most nail bitingly tense and exciting sequence sees the opening of a sluice gate threatening to ruin a half finished garden my advice is that your film is not anywhere near exciting enough and you ought to go back to the drawing board rather than put your audiences through two hours of this.  The film just never seems to get a hold as to where it wants to set its focus on so flits around the various character combinations and machinations and so feels totally unfocussed and uninvolving.

Despite all the flaws at script level a half decent director could probably have scrambled something vaguely watchable from it `yet Rickman spectacularly fails to do so.  Despite the lack of focus the film constantly returns to the character of Sabine, as insipid and unsympathetic a heroine as I have seen in a film of this ilk for quite some time.  Granted it is a dud role but the Kate Winslet of old would have been able to give her some fight and some vigour but the Kate Winslet of today seems to have truly lost her spark, picking terrible projects like this and Labor Day and then doing nothing to make them any more interesting.  The film really needs something much more exciting to make it worth a watch, think back to the similarly set The Draughtsman’s Contract and how wonderfully dark and subversive that is and how totally unlike this film.  Giving Sabine’s character a trite, tragic back story is not what is needed.  Instead everything appears to have been focussed upon the window dressing of the film, with a luxurious costume department and well decorated palaces standing in for anything of substance in either character or narrative.

As a film actor of twenty five years I would have given Alan Rickman at least half a chance of making a good fist of picking the right actors for the film but alas even that failed.  I really do like Matthias Schoenaerts but he is terribly miscast here.  Looking like a naff 1980s metal fan in a terrible wig he has next to no chemistry with Winslet and so is left to drift his way through the film in a similar way to his efforts in Suite Francaise, an infinitely better film.  I really hope he gives up period dramas as a bad job soon and heads to something more befitting his obvious talents.  While Stanley Tucci as an ostentatious courtier and Helen McCrory as le Notre’s scheming wife are not bad casting decisions neither are adventurous, out of the box ideas, rather performances recycled for the umpteenth time.  As for Rickman himself, I am not sure quite what he was aiming for, I would assume regal, however what we get is the kind of sinister performance he perfected with Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series with undertones of a creepiness totally unintended or indeed required by the film.

I would love to make up countless gardening puns to show my disdain for the awfulness that this film sinks to but, having had to sit through it for two hours, ponder how to tackle this review and then write this review I think I have wasted enough time on A Little Chaos.  It is ironic that one of the many things the film required was its title, as chaos is something the film defiantly lacks, maybe not even chaos, even just a little fracas would light things up somewhat.  As it is I only brought one thing out of seeing A Little Chaos.  Boredom.

*

The Salvation

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“A Brief Respite From Cheap Western Clichés Stops Short Of Salvation”

Director – Kristian Levring

Starring – Mads Mikkelsen, Mikael Persbrandt, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Eva Green, Jonathan Pryce, Douglas Henshall, Eric Cantona

Screenplay – Kristian Levring & Anders Thomas Jensen

Cinematography – Jens Schlosser

Score – Kasper Winding

 

Length – 92 minutes

Certificate – 15

The Western is the most American of film genres that even in their least romanticised moments (think Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, or Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman) they still possess enough endearing admiration for the genre to play as paeans to the West.  This Danish film comes from a brilliantly non-American angle, and is all the better for it.  Having emigrated to America following a wartime defeat to Germany, Danish settler Jon is finally ready for his family’s belated arrival to America.  However they are horrendously raped and murdered within hours of arriving in the notoriously brutal West.  Taking swift revenge, Jon incites the rage and the fury of a brutal gang leader with dramatic results.

This is a film that constantly defies expectations and feels all the better for it.  When you think of Westerns you traditionally think of dusty gold landscapes as far as the eye can see but here director Kristian Levering and cinematographer Jens Schlosser take the decision to play many of the most important sequences at night, removing from the film its key generic touchstone and marooning it somewhere very few people are going to be able to predict its next move.  Indeed having watched the opening movement, an exercise in nail biting tension of the highest order, in which you know something bad is coming, yet quite what that is you are not sure, I expected the film to be a full on revenge movie geared towards these perpetrators.  When justice is meted out mere moments later the film revels in its audience’s floundering to pick up a story and willingly charges around with numerous threads that may in the end be a few too many to result in a wholly satisfying final product.

It is interesting that, despite being something almost completely new to me for the first two thirds this feels closer to what I imagine the West was truly like.  Of course Eva Green’s character being scarred and left mute at the hands of Indians, and ostracised by her family as a result harks right back to The Searchers, but the film handles it a lot better than a John Wayne film ever would, and it is interesting to see Green’s performance, which is a lot more understated than we are used to from the queen of overacting and all the better for it.  The film quite cleverly understands that this period was still a time of high migration into America and so casts itself appropriately, with the English voice of Jonathan Pryce and the Scottish tones of Douglas Henshall as prominent as any American accent.  Of course the leads are both Danish, and in Mads Mikkelsen the film has at its disposal the leading proponent of quietly considered acting around, while still possessing a chillingly dangerous streak.  Mikkelsen is great, never overdoing things at all, but leaving that to his on screen brother, played in a ferocious turn by Mikael Persbrandt.

The film alas does not get everything right, and chief among those missteps if Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the film’s sole American cast member who totally misjudges the tone of the piece, hamming it up and going all out for the sneering villain that this film ought to have avoided, while the presence of philosophising footballer Eric Cantona as enforcer ‘The Corsican just proves to be a distraction.  My chief disappointment though was that the film did descend into all the generic conventions it had avoided throughout its first hour by closing with a shootout in a dusty, ramshackle Old West town, and by making everything about oil.  The closing sequence does stunningly show how the West evolved into the oil haven that history tells us it became, but here I would have been much happier with the film having the strength of its convictions to tell us something new, rather than feel the need to appease audiences by regaling them with well worn tales of old.

* * *

The Town That Dreaded Sundown

“A Possible Sundown On Soulless Seventies Horror Remakes”

Director – Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Starring – Addison Timlin, Spencer Treat Clark, Travis Tope, Ed Lautner, Gary Cole, Veronica Cartwright, Edward Herrmann, Anthony Anderson

Screenplay – Robert Aguirre-Sacasa

Cinematography – Michael Goi

Score – Ludwig Goransson

 

Length – 86 minutes

Certificate – 15

Falling somewhere between the endless churned out remakes of much better original horror films and the knowing post-modernism of films like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare or Scream this is a much more interesting film than I had given it credit for.  Playing as a metasequel as well as a remake of sorts the film takes place in present day Texarkana, in a world in which the original film exists as a film that had taken inspiration, as many great horror movies do, from real life events, where copycat killings start to take place.

It is no masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination but does what must be done in order to be a successful genre film, that being scare people.  I do have a great soft spot for some of the nasty 1970s and 1980s slasher films but that has unfortunately been tempered over the years by the soulless remakes (The Last House On The Left, Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to name a few).  This has done something to rekindle that love by embracing the scuzzy original, indeed parts of it show in a Halloween drive-in theatre, as part of the traditions of the world of the movie, and this embracing makes the film all the better as a result.  It also does a very good job at tapping into my love of old-fashioned Americana, a small town world of Drive-In cinema, Formica tabled diners and teens driving off to Lovers Lane in the dead of night.  Despite being modern day set this is a film very much in touch with its generic heritage.

The most important aspect of the film is that it does actually provide a few very good scares and shocks, while sticking rigidly to formula.  Addison Timlin may not be the best actress of all time but as a scream-queen she is perfectly adequate while she is All-American enough to pass as the Nancy Drew like detective teen that only exists in the world of these movies (see also Heather Langenkamp), as opposed to the supermodel esque leads these films add these days for added titillation.  The rest of the cast may be nothing special but all of them do their jobs perfectly well, and the film is seemingly knowing in its tapping into the previous horror pedigree of Veronica Cartwright (The Birds, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Alien) and Edward Herrmann (The Lost Boys).

The film’s closing act does maybe take the meta approach a bit too far and the film loses its own way and stumbles into being an entirely different film by the close of play, although a film not dissimilar to this one.  I did find that, despite some excruciating moments leading up to it the ending was very Scooby Doo and I did feel let down by the somewhat lacking way in which it wrapped proceedings up.  That said, compared to the tameness of so many horror films nowadays, the shonkiness of this was a real breath of fresh air and a reminder of times gone by.

* * *

Amar Akbar And Tony

“Culture Clash Comedy Has Charm Yet Lacks Break Out Quality”

Director – Atul Malhotra

Starring – Rez Kempton, Sam Vincenti, Martin Delaney, Karen David, Laura Aikman, Goldy Notay, Tanveer Ghani, Dev Sagoo, Nina Wadia, Meera Syal

Screenplay – Atul Malhotra

Cinematography – Jorge Luengas

Score – Rishi Rich

 

Length – 96 minutes

Certificate – 15

A loose remake of a film I confess to have no knowledge of aside from its title (Amar Akbar Anthony) this is a surprising British comedy drama that despite having race relations at its heart proves to be much more about the endurance of friendship through thick and thin than anything else, and what a pleasant message that is today.  Set in and around multicultural melting pot Hounslow the film takes its three characters, Amar, a Sikh lawyer to be, Akbar, a Muslim entrepreneur and ladies man and Tony, an Irish wastrel, and looks at a decade long portion of their lives and charts the ups and downs.

While I would call this neither a comedy that weaves dramatic moments into it or a drama with comedic flashes it is certainly a film that marries these two elements rather well, hitting with them more than it misses.  It does dare to delve into high drama for its story, and for that it should be applauded, particularly the moment fairly early on where the central trio come into contact with ‘Southall Sanj’ and his gang, an encounter that has life changing consequences for one of  the trio.  The film also does a good job at dealing with the issues that can surround Asian religions, such as the shaming of a woman or a man suffering through repressed homosexuality, and in these senses the film has more in common with the East Is East end of the British Asian film scale.

On the other hand the film does begin to sink further and further into out and out comedy as the film progresses and this proves very much to be of the culture clash variety, which given the setting often provides a reminder of Gurinder Chada’s Bend It Like Beckham.  Martin Delaney eschews any troubling doubts I had about an Irish character being played as the comedy buffoon by displaying a sense of timing I had not expected and stealing every scene he turned up in with his ‘Tim-Nice-But-Dim’ routine.  There is also sufficient grounds for comedy in Akbar’s courting of a traditional English girl, and even if a dinner party meeting between their families does unfortunately end up in very UKIP style discussions about Muslim terrorist activity there is still humour to be had within the awkwardness.

I found the film to be well played all round, although the cameo presence of more recognisable stars Meera Syal, Ace Bhatti and Nina Wadia was unnecessary and distracting, especially given how prominently their participations were poised in the marketing.  As you would expect from a film like this it finds a way to overcome more hurdles than the Grand National in order to deliver all its characters to happiness and a big wedding sequence by the close of play.  This is a film that is never going to set the world alight but will charm and delight throughout.

* * *

Glassland

“Toni Collette’s Presence Shattered Any Illusion Of Realism For Me”

Director – Gerard Barrett

Starring – Jack Reynor, Toni Collette, Will Poulter, Michael Smiley

Screenplay – Gerard Barrett

Cinematography – Piers McGrail

Score – N/A

 

Length – 93 minutes

Certificate – 15

I understand, commend and applaud the intentions Gerard Barrett clearly had when he made Glassland, but unfortunately the film he has made is unworthy of any applause or commendations.  Set in Dublin the film stars Jack Reynor (last seen fighting Decepticons with Mark Wahlberg) as John, a taxi driver living right on the edge of poverty alongside his mother (Collette), a chronic alcoholic with no real intentions of recovery.  Forced to the edge of both his means and his sanity by another near death experience John insists his mother check into rehab, and then begins to discover the consequences the cost of curing her addiction will have upon him.

The film clearly has good intentions but fails to deliver upon any of them.  Chief among these is the sheer lack of any narrative propulsion for much of the film.  Despite Collette’s character being rushed into hospital within the first ten minutes and warned that not stopping drinking will kill her, it takes nearly an hour for the film to put her into a rehab facility.  In the meantime the film is fleshed out with introspective looking shots of John trying to overcome his problems through thought, an unnecessary subplot with Will Poulter as John’s friend, suffering the effects of having a child on a one night stand while never getting to see the child, and a totally extraneous scene in which John and his mother reconnect over the song Tainted Love, as she tries to be a free spirit while recounting the sadness that has governed her life.

The above scene is endemic of the major problem I had with the film.  With only two camera angles through the entire ten minute scene, an extreme close up on Reynor and an extreme close up on Collette the scene brought home just how much the casting of Toni Collette really hindered the film and prevented belief in the characters.  While Reynor, Poulter and Michael Smiley all look like products of an underprivileged Dublin where addiction and poverty are rife, Toni Collette never looks anything other than a movie star, albeit a movie star who has left the house sans make up.  No matter how well she captures the depressingly poisonous nature of her character’s addiction, such as a scene where she wrecks the kitchen because her alcohol has been complicated, she is just not a believable product of this world. She has a Dublin accent perfected and in her big emotional scene her delivery appeared to me to be note perfect, yet I just did not find the scene to be emotionally moving in the slightest.

The film picks up when Michael Smiley appears as a counsellor at a rehab facility, and makes you wonder if the film would have been better with his presence throughout, but by then it is too late.  The film also blunders spectacularly with the inclusion of a brother for John, a sufferer of Down’s Syndrome who lives in a special facility and is all but denied his existence by Collette’s character.  This character’s interactions with John paint him as way more saintly  than is ever going to be believable, and although I understand his actions are supposed to be driven by desperation there is just too much of a leap to expect a paying audience to take in a film priding itself on realism.

Unfortunately the film, despite getting the despair and desolation of its central character fairly spot on fails to do anything interesting with said character until the finale, and then it is so poorly explained and handled that it had may as well not have bothered.  The big mistake this film makes is the same that many before it have done, that is be gritty for the sake of it.  With this little story it just makes the film a joyless slog to get to the end of, which is regrettable yet endemic of many films of this ilk nowadays.

*

Reviews: John Wick, Woman In Gold, Lost River, The Duff, Good Kill, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, Broken Horses

John Wick

“Doesn’t Burn The Candle At Either End”

Director – Chad Stahelski & David Leitch

Starring – Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Adrienne Palicki, Dean Winters, Willem Dafoe, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Lance Reddick

Screenplay – Derek Kolstad

Cinematography – Jonathan Sela

Score – Tyler Bates & Joel J. Richard

 

Length – 101 minutes

Certificate – 15

In some ways lumping this in with the slew of action films starring older, washed up film stars trying something new to reconnect with audiences (Liam Neeson, I’m looking at you) is slightly unfair as this does try to be something more.  In other ways the aforementioned lumping is totally justified as it proves to be as stupid and unwatchable as many of those films.  Keanu Reeves plays the titular character, a former prime assassin for the mob grieving the loss of his wife to cancer.  When some Russian gangsters break into his house, steal his car and kill his dog he breaks out of his sedate retirement and sets out on a quest for revenge.

There are flashes of inspiration in the concept of the film but in the execution they are killed stone dead in mere seconds, falling victim to what is a truly awful, dull, plodding and soulless piece of filmmaking.  I went into the film expecting a decent piece of trashy action cinema, seeing as it is coming from two directors who were former stuntmen and is taking its cues from the gun-fu cinema of Hong Kong, although that particular genre’s Hollywood translation outside John Woo’s English language work leaves a lot to be desired (Equilibrium).  Unfortunately what appeared so promising on paper just doesn’t work.  Watching the action sequences is headache inducing thanks to the ‘extreme Paul Greengrass’ style of camerawork that the film employs.  If you concentrate very hard you can tell that the stunt choreography is actually pretty neatly done, with some fantastic set-pieces, but ultimately these are spoilt by the unwatchable shaky-cam stylings of the whole thing, as well as the muted palette.

Coming out of this the only thing I found to be a genuinely good idea from the film, albeit something that slots into the film as a severe afterthought is the concept of a ‘hitman hotel’.  Overseen by Lance Reddick’s calm and collected receptionist and complete with a cocktail bar and a very particular set of house rules I would love to see a film set in and around the confines of this inspired piece of writing, yet here it leads to nothing but another disappointing fight scene, and seems to only serve the purpose of the film hiring expensive, respected actors (Reddick, Ian McShane, Willem Dafoe, Clarke Peters and Adrienne Palicki) and giving them little purpose for turning up other than to collect their pay-cheque.

I did find myself laughing at the utter levels of awfulness the film sinks to on occasion.  To say the dialogue is poor is one thing, but to say that the delivery of it is abysmal is to paint the full picture.  Michael Nyqvist plays the dangerous, villainous mobster as a fool who seemingly has no clue what to do while Alfie Allen’s performance as his son is on a whole new level of miscast awfulness.  He cannot do crazy renegade mobster’s son in the slightest, although his efforts at reaching that particular register do provide inspired moments of unintentional comedy, as do his mid line switches between cod-Russian and English public school accents.  And then there’s Keanu.  Though he has never been an actor blessed with the best of range at one point in his career he was able to pick his projects and tailor them to suit him but he fails completely at that here.  His inability to convey even the most basic of emotions renders his character’s motivations null and void from the outset, the film’s major issue.  The screenwriter has clearly tried to give the character a Neeson-esque iconic line and may well have, yet Keanu’s delivery of it negates that possibility.  With a crazier, more out there actor, a Jason Statham or a Nicolas Cage, the film might have worked on a certain level that Reeves prohibits it from doing.

I was really looking forward to this film.  It has many elements that I like and from the trailers the graphic novel visual stylings looked really quite interesting.  In the end it is just a sequence of ill conceived action sequences held together with uninvolved character development punctuated by a parade of stars paying off their respective mortgages.  A totally crushing disappointment.

*

Woman In Gold

“This Golden Opportunity Can Only Come Away With A Bronze Medal”

Director – Simon Curtis

Starring – Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Tatiana Maslanay, Max Irons, Daniel Bruhl, Katie Holmes, Justus von Dohnanyi, Charles Dance, Allan Corduner, Nina Kunzendorf, Antje Traue

Screenplay – Alexi Kaye Campbell

Cinematography – Ross Emery

Score – Martin Phipps & Hans Zimmer

 

Length – 109 minutes

Certificate – 12A

It is now seventy years since World War Two drew to a conclusion and in the seven decades since cinema has focussed on all manner of topics coming out of that war,, be they typical patriotic war films, doomed romances, Holocaust dramas or political stories about the conclusion of war.  Only last year however did anybody think to make a film about the Nazi art thefts throughout the war, the underwhelming The Monuments Men.  Now we have another, a mismatched buddy legal drama with flashbacks to Anschluss based around an Austrian woman’s bid to regain possession of Klimt’s Woman In Gold from the Austrian government, with the help of a failed American lawyer.  If that sounds like a bizarre proposition written down wait until you see it on screen.

The film is an uneasy one, something that never quite works as well as you hope it is going to, although it is never without merit.  The real problem with it is that there are two very good films in here but put together they fail to make one good film.  This results, particularly throughout the first half of the film, in a constant battle between the buddy comedy John Grisham legal drama and the understandably sorrowful, serious flashbacks to Austrian and German unification in 1938.  Throughout the troublesome first hour there seemed to be very little logic in the way that the film had been edited together, dropping one story without a second’s hesitation to head to the other one, no matter how key or inopportune moment it was at the time.  This I found had the lasting effect that even when the film started to be more rational with its cuts and jumps I just could not settle into it, and could never quite get fully into either story.

The standout section of the film is that starring Ryan Reynolds and Helen Mirren by some considerable distance.  They are one of the oddest on screen combinations I have had the pleasure to witness in quite some time and the film takes full advantage of that, bringing comedy from every moment they are on screen together.  Were the film all this part of the story I have no doubt I would have been more engaged with it and less troubled by the constantly jarring tonal switches that I found so problematic.  It is not as though the Tatiana Maslaney/Max Irons Anschluss scenes are badly done, in fact they are very well acted and shot, but it just doesn’t feel right sandwiching them with Helen Mirren fussing over Ryan Reynolds about the melting jam in his donut or getting exasperated at the speed of his driving.  Eventually, and perhaps expectedly, the film regrettably becomes the kind of uplifting courtroom triumph over adversity that is so beloved of afternoon TV movies on Channel 5 but should be so beneath a film starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.

Although Maslaney and Irons do great jobs in what are arguably the hardest roles to play it is Helen Mirren who steals the show with astonishing ease.  This is basically her reprising the role she played in last year’s The Hundred-Foot Journey, just with another accent, yet she proves once again that she is second to none in these sharp old lady roles.  She also delivers another master class in accents, delivering a very good interpretation of an Austrian accent, one that is most convincing in most scenes, save for those opposite the very good if underused Daniel Bruhl.  Ryan Reynolds astounded me earlier this year in The Voices, and here returns to his trademark blandness, although it is oddly fitting of a poor character, though his efforts to make his character angry fail quite astoundingly.  Aside from this a talented cast are somewhat underused in a far too crowded narrative.

Despite being a valiant effort at telling an interesting and difficult story I did expect much more given the talent assembled by the project.  As is so often the case Helen Mirren is the saviour of a project that really is undeserving of her presence.  Had they gone with the mismatched legal thriller for two hours I am certain I would have enjoyed it more, as sat here writing this review these are the moments that come back to me quickest.  The film is not a total disaster by any stretch but still left me severely underwhelmed nonetheless.

* *

Lost River

“Gosling’s Directorial Debut Ebbs And Flows But May Leave You Lost”

Director – Ryan Gosling

Starring – Christina Hendricks, Iain De Caestecker, Saoirse Ronan, Matt Smith, Ben Mendelsohn, Eva Mendes

Screenplay – Ryan Gosling

Cinematography – Benoit Debie

Score – Johnny Jewel

 

Length – 105 minutes

Certificate – 15

The recent acting work of Ryan Gosling may have handed him the mantle of the early 21st Century James Dean, able to exude iconic cool almost at will, but this directorial debut really is a brave effort to branch out into new plains.  Not only has he taken on the twin task of writing and directing but he has taken himself out of the equation to an extent, not involving himself in front of the camera and so removing the screaming fangirldom that can seem so ill at ease with much of his work, instead making a film for the purists and the purists alone to judge.

The film is a really bizarre marriage of simple narrative turned possibly too complicated by the presence of some fantastical and at times baffling twists and turns that David Lynch would be proud of.  Set in the decaying sprawl of Detroit, the most damning indictment of economic downturn in middle America the film follows the fortunes of Billy (Hendricks), a single mother with a bizarre determination to stay in her rotting neighbourhood, and coerced into performing in a bizarre fetish club by her bank manager Dave (Mendelsohn) to try to pay her mortgage.  At the same time her older son Bones (De Caestecker) falls afoul of local hoodlum Bully (Smith) in his travails stripping copper from derelict properties for scrap and begins to think of a curse around his town, and with the help of Saoirse Ronan’s Rat, plans to lift it.

Originally titled How To Catch A Monster and having undergone a severe edit after a critical mauling at Cannes, this bears all the hallmarks of a troubled production and although there are certainly many obvious flaws to the finished film there is certainly much to like about it.  There have been calls that the film takes a sneering attitude to the poor of Detroit but I will dispute that all day long, in fact I was wholly impressed with the capturing of the desolation and despair of a once great city for the second time this year, after the stunning It Follows.  The use of locals as extras and minor players is very good, never feels like a stunt and gives a sense of authenticity that I felt only made the weirdness and surrealism even more prominent.  Gosling and his cinematographer Benoit Debie certainly have great eyes for detail and how to concoct an arresting image, be it a ramshackle house burning to a black background or the neon hues present in the club sequences, they add to the weird horrors of the film, and are complimented fantastically by Johnny Jewel’s synth-heavy score.

Gosling has in essence just written a story about two people doing what they can to survive in the face of poverty and adversity, but his influences have clearly led him to take an increasingly roundabout way, and subsequently much more interesting way to get from A to B.  This doesn’t totally work and Christina Hendricks’ story arc really doesn’t catch fire quite as much as it ought to, getting too convoluted and drawn out, leading to the film suffering as a result.  That is no slight against Hendricks, an underrated performer who deserves more breaks in films, and who gives a typically tough performance here opposite a way too creepy Ben Mendelsohn and an uninspired Eva Mendes in a series of sequences clearly taking Mulholland Drive’s Silencio Club and the work of Gaspar Noe as huge influences.  Gosling appears to have taken his cues on handling random bursts of violence in otherwise none-too-violent movies from Nicholas Winding-Refn, and copes extremely well even with the ever-present gore of the fetish club and its particular interest.

The film is much better in the scenes featuring Bones, Rat and Bully.  Even if these scenes are not as likely to get audiences talking and murmuring in the auditorium they are for me the heart of the film and what prevent the whole thing from unravelling.  Matt Smith steals the film with a totally unexpected performance that captures his inherent strangeness but while making him one of the most unnervingly threatening characters of recent years, even from an old armchair strapped to the back of a Cadillac.  The film’s best scene sees Rat and Bones hiding from Bully and his minions in a convenience store and the tension created by this could easily be cut by a knife.  Ronan we know is an exceptional actress but De Caestecker is a less proven force, yet both are excellent, sharing a great chemistry and really selling the bizarre closing act (even by this film’s standards) to the audience.

This closure did come about rather too quickly and, for the amount of set up and selling it to the audience Gosling does beforehand he makes surprisingly little of it in the finished film.  Whether this was a result of the re-edit or otherwise I am unsure but it did deflate the overall effect of the picture somewhat.  My assessment of Gosling’s forays into new parts of the filmmaking are mixed.  There is certainly something there to suggest that he could have a future as a writer/director but he would have to rein it in, as I feel that the people he surrounded himself with on this project saved him from crashing and burning.  Lost River certainly has its flaws, but despite them there is too much good stuff in it to discount it, and is certainly one to see, even as just a curio.

* * *

The Duff

“Not A Duff But You Might Still Forget About It”

Director – Ari Sandel

Starring – Mae Whitman, Robbie Amell, Bella Thorne, Bianca A. Santos, Skyler Samuels, Allison Janney, Ken Jeong, Romany Malco, Nick Eversman

Screenplay – Josh A. Cagan

Cinematography – David Hennings

Score – Dominic Lewis

 

Length – 101 minutes

Certificate – 15

The heritage of the high school teen comedy is a great one, one that is still rooted firmly in the 1980s work of John Hughes and one that very few modern pretenders are able to live up to.  Has there ever been a better high school film than The Breakfast Club, or a better depiction of the sheer joys of being a teenager than Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? My inclination is to say no and, although there have been some good teen comedies of recent years, most centre on adapting a literary work for a new purpose, and none ever reach the heights of the halcyon days when Molly Ringwald was queen.

Despite being a loose adaptation of a novel of the same name The Duff offers a new concept to cover up the same old stories of love and self awareness that have been told for over thirty years now.  Essentially a DUFF is a ‘plain Jane’ (the term stands for Dumb. Ugly. Fat. Friend), the one average girl in the group whose shortcomings are used to highlight the attractiveness of others in her group.  When loveable weirdo Bianca is told that she is a Duff (she’s never heard of the term) she enlists the help of her stereotypical jock next door neighbour to overcome her Duff-ness in return for science tuition so she might be able to snare a date with the hot musician.

There are some very funny moments that work amazingly well while at the same there are some that fall on their face terribly.  All in all this is an above-average teen comedy but no scene is ever average, it is either brilliantly funny or induces the sound of tumbleweeds blowing through the auditorium where laughter ought to be.  Although it never ever threatens to react the levels that Easy A or Mean Girls ever managed, and does borrow quite a lot from their formula, it succeeds in feeling like a more genuine depiction of high school than either of those films ever did.  There are moments, not least the catwalk-esque shopping spree and subsequent viral video and dinner with the boy Bianca desires that for me capture very well the levels of sheer embarrassment that I am sure everybody experienced at some time in their teenage years.  While the idea to use social media to fuel the character’s arc (something done much better by Easy A) is very pertinent I did find that the film really went overboard with the use of onscreen computer graphics to show texts or Facebook comments or Tweets, a filmmaking trend that I am quickly tiring of.

For me the key reason that the film gets away with being as clunky as it is is that Mae Whitman remains a constant throughout and not only does she give a good performance but she actually looks like someone who this story could happen to, rather than us have another film in which a size zero supermodel actress is supposed to be Little Miss Average.  Whitman has graduated from TV comedy Arrested Development, where she developed a fine talent for self deprecating, sharp responses perfect for the character here, which makes her more convincing.  Despite looking ten years too old for the part Robbie Amell captures the jock extremely effectively, having an immaturish teenage sense of inattentiveness akin to the dog from Pixar’s Up.  Bella Thorne quite possibly overplays the cruel queen bee role and tries a bit too hard to be Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls but the film has some nice supporting performances from Romany Malco, Ken Jeong and the always wonderful Allison Janney to keep the laughter rate up.

The Duff is little more than a diverting watch but I can imagine a legion of teenage girls who will at some point be able to quote the lines.  It never pretends to be as smart or indeed as harsh a portrayal of teenage life as Mean Girls or Easy A, the best two recent touchstones, but then it doesn’t need to be.  This is a film that works best when it’s on its own terms rather than trying to live up to somebody else’s.  There are a couple of fairly clever references to The Breakfast Club that make this film’s existence worthwhile in an instant, as it will hopefully introduce this classic to a whole new generation of fans/devotees.

* * *

Good Kill

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“A Great Example Of What A Modern War Film Should Do” 

Director – Andrew Niccol

Starring – Ethan Hawke, Zoe Kravitz, January Jones, Bruce Greenwood, Jake Abel

Screenplay – Andrew Niccol

Cinematography – Amir Mokri

Score – Christophe Beck

 

Length – 100 minutes

Certificate – 15

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog and my reviews will possibly remember back in January how American Sniper so quickly managed to get my hackles up.  Not only did I find it overlong and dull, but the overt pro-Republican look at the War on Terror it took infuriated me, a glorification of a questionable figure and an ethically dubious conflict that paid dividends at the box office.  Good Kill meanwhile makes barely a ripple at the box office and yet is the best American film to look at the War on Terror since The Hurt Locker, coming at the subject from a whole new angle and casting a far more balanced eye over proceedings.

Ethan Hawke stars as Major Thomas Egan, a veteran pilot of numerous tours of duty grounded by a new facet of war; drone warfare.  From a Porta-Cabin on an air base in the Nevada  desert he is able to launch missile strikes on enemy targets halfway around the world, before being able to head home to have dinner with his family.  Many of his colleagues see this as an idyllic lifestyle but for Egan it is not, he questions the morality of it, struggles to separate himself from his job at home, develops a serious alcohol problem and comes into conflict with the new directives given to his squadron by the CIA, all the while yearning to go back on active duty.

It is astonishing when comparing this to American Sniper and seeing just how compelling viewing this makes as opposed to that, despite the fact that that film was based in the thick of the action in Iraq while this is as far removed from it as possible, with the Middle East only ever viewed through a long distance camera on a computer monitor.  The film is never anything other than a tension filled anti-thriller, never plays along with any filmic conventions and really is a piece of work aside from anything else I have seen.  There is no real viable villain in the film, save for an abusive rapist whose actions thousands of miles away are relayed daily to the characters of this film via video-link during an ongoing routine surveillance mission.  This helps the film to maintain an air of faceless warfare, especially key when given the way that this film is looking at war.  Although I am no expert on US Foreign Policy and warfare strategy it would not surprise me if there was an element of truth to the attitude taken by the CIA to this new style of fighter pilot.  Eschewing the proper procedures of ensuring targets were correct, and that there would be no collateral damage from air strikes, in favour of getting the target at all costs, no matter about the excess casualties.  The footage is shocking, and although it allows its characters to emotionally respond to these events, it needs to in order to maintain veracity.  I did find the inclusion of two characters who seem to be out of the American Sniper school of thought to be the film’s only real, albeit minor, misstep, but if this is my only quibble the film is clearly doing something right.

Having finally shown a wider audience just how sublime an actor he can be in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood last year Ethan Hawke once again knocks it out of the park in the central role here.  Niccol’s script cleverly positions him as someone seemingly without a moral compass, as the archetypal professional soldier who gets on with following orders no matter how much it affects him, a stance the film utilises to great effect in the film’s stunning closing moments.  Elsewhere Hawke perfectly captures the ‘hollow man’ aspect of his character, brilliantly depicting the facade of someone who feels duty bound to be at home despite yearning to be elsewhere, while just about keeping a handle on his addictions and violence.  This is what a character sculpted by war ought to be like, a flawed, damaged individual.  I hate to keep going back to it but despite its ideological flaws, had American Sniper depicted Chris Kyle’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder anything like this it would be an immensely improved film.  Elsewhere January Jones is great as Egan’s long suffering wife, rapidly discovering that the dream of having her husband home from war is more of a nightmare while Zoe Kravitz is the rookie showing a more logical stance on events.  The ever reliable Bruce Greenwood gives what could be his best performance as Egan’s superior, a man whose experience and pragmatism allow him to reconcile somewhat with what he is doing.  The scenes in which he is eulogising war as it used to be to a bunch of new recruits chosen for their proficiency in console games is the film’s best scene, and the one where Andrew Niccol’s message about the changing nature of war is best defined.

I wish more films were brave enough to do something like this.  I wish more films were as exciting as watching things happen on television screens in this film.  I wish more writers were able to give characters the depth that Niccol has given his protagonist here, while surrounding him with equally engaging characters.  I wish American cinema was willing to take more risks when assessing its contribution to war.  In some respects the War on Terror has had as little success as Vietnam, a campaign that provoked such vitriol from filmmakers for over a decade.  Stop treating war as something to be proud of, and show it for the most depraved act that humanity can engage in that it is.  Then we get more masterpieces of thoughtful cinema like this one.

* * * *

Hot Tub Time Machine 2

“Goes To The Future Firing Gags At 88 MPH”

Director – Steve Pink

Starring – Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke, Adam Scott

Screenplay – Josh Heald

Cinematography – Declan Quinn

Score – Christophe Beck

 

Length – 93 minutes

Certificate – 15

The first Hot Tub Time Machine was an awkward film, a comedy based around four performances that can only be described as varying degrees of bitterness, which is a hard sell for the mainstream.  Taking these four characters back to a moment in their youth, trying to reinvigorate their various loser mindsets just didn’t quite work, instead it awkwardly shuffled along on the back of cheap Back To The Future references and an unbelievably disinterested John Cusack.  The sequel sees the franchise having quite understandably parted ways with Cusack, and much like it’s hero Back To The Future taking a leap forwards this time, with mixed results.

From the outset it felt as though my worst fears about this being a totally unfunny retread of a not entirely funny film were founded.  There is some relief that Cusack elected not to return as there is no need to put audiences through a previously great actor lowering himself in such an obviously ‘in it for the money’ way, while the filmmakers feel it necessary to give their big name the most exposure.  He genuinely is not missed, and does give the three returnees room to breathe, yet the film is so quick to get to the idea of time travel in order to save Lou from certain death thanks to an assassination attempt that it forgets to be funny in order to untangle the horrifically convoluted web it creates itself by simply not thinking things through.  So now we have three bitter characters in the future, only now one’s a washed up rock star, one’s a washed up R&B mogul and one’s a millionaire with a super hot girlfriend.

The film offers nothing in terms of originality with regards to its depiction of the future, sticking safely with houses with voice activated systems, driverless cars that bear grudges and a virtual reality game show.  It is around the moment that the game show occurred that the film began to find its feel.  Hosted in an inspired casting moment by Christian Slater the whole sequence takes on the same strangely queasy yet oddly hilarious outlook on homosexuality as the recent Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart film Get Hard, and from this moment on it revels in being utterly shameless in the lowest common denominator form of comedy it aims for.

It is from this moment that instead of trying to sort the plot out the writers seem to have given up caring, instead going for out and out laughter to distract audiences from the nonsensicality of the whole thing.  And it works, for the first time in a film and a half Robinson, Duke and Peters actually appear to be on the same page and a dynamic actually forms.  Duke is still something of an odd one out and struggles to provide as much humour as the proven comedians do but he suffices, while the other two returnees do create some laugh out loud moments.  The film also improves when Adam Scott appears, as a tangential link and a replacement for John Cusack’s character, only with an actor who actually wants to be there and doesn’t show utter disdain for the project with every expression and who is willing to be subjected to ridiculous scenes in which he is on the world’s worst drug trip.

Of course the problems created by the muddled opening of the film were bound to return when it came to wrapping things up and the finale does herald a noticeable drop off in laughs and a return to incoherence.  That said this was a film that could have been totally terrible, yet through some minor miracle the comedically talented cast are given a real chance to shine and do so more often than expected.  The closing credits take their lead from those that were so brilliant in 22 Jump Street and although these are nowhere near as clever, this is a film that is nowhere near as clever.  I am still dubious about the intelligence of making this film, and would wholly warn against making a third one, yet as far as strangely funny goes, this just about scrapes through.

* *

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2

“Has A Shelf Life Of About Three Seconds”

Director – Andy Fickman

Starring – Kevin James, Raini Rodriguez, Neal McDonough, David Henrie, Daniella Alonso, Eduardo Verastegui, Gary Valentine, Nicholas Turturro, Loni Love

Screenplay – Kevin James & Nick Bakay

Cinematography – Dean Semler

Score – Rupert Gregson-Williams

 

Length – 93 minutes

Certificate – PG

I quite often find myself questioning why certain films get made, particularly comedy sequels, yet this one utterly takes the biscuit in that respect.  In the six years since the original precisely nobody has been clamouring for a return to Kevin James’ abysmal security guard character, yet we get that return, and to make things worse, this return occurs in a security convention in Las Vegas.

Blart is a truly terrible, annoying, obnoxious and most importantly truly unfunny character.  I was glad that at the start his wife had walked out on him after mere weeks of marriage, I was glad that his mother had been run over by a milk float and I was glad that his equally irritating daughter was preparing to leave him to go and study at UCLA.  This is perfectly set up for him to head off to his convention in a Las Vegas hotel where a team of criminals is preparing an audacious art heist that Paul Blart is definitely unable to stop, yet he’ll clearly stop it anyway.

To say the film is unfunny is quite possibly the leading contender for understatement of the year.  Some examples of the humour are endless jokes about Kevin James’ rotund figure, rounded off with a vibrating fork to stop him eating too quickly.  The film carries on its predecessor’s obsession at promoting Segways with a scene that shows off Blart’s talent on said machine, before cockiness takes over. Inexplicably the film’s highlight, if you can call it that, sees Blart getting attacked by an emu that has no reason to be there for any reason other than to take part in that set piece.  The cast is filled with second rate performers giving abysmally unfunny performances in terrible stereotypes as a variety of horribly poorly written characters.  These are topped off by Kevin James, who once again proves he neither has the charm nor the talent to be a viable comedy star in Hollywood, although his box office results horrifyingly prove otherwise.  That he was also involved in the writing of this dreck is an equally damning indictment of his ‘talents’.

It is truly cringeworthy as to how protracted and unfunny each scene is, with the desperation to eke out a laugh telling, while the heist story is extremely ill thought through and executed.  More importantly the first half existential look at the perils of getting old alone has no place in a children’s film, yet when this gives way to a protracted piece of slapstick starring an overweight man running around shooting people it has no place in any film.  James astonishingly makes his character irresistible to an extremely attractive female character which is both incredibly self congratulatory and incredibly stupid at the same time.  There have been many bad films this year, yet few as woefully unwatchable as this one.

*

Broken Horses

“Really Engaging Thoroughbred Drama Is Worth Your Backing”

Director – Vidhu Vinod Chopra

Starring – Anton Yelchin, Chris Marquette, Vincent D’Onofrio, Maria Valverde, Sean Patrick Flanery, Wes Chatham, Thomas Jane

Screenplay – Vidhu Vinod Chopra & Abhijat Joshi

Cinematography – Tom Stern

Score – John Debney

 

Length – 101 minutes

Certificate – 15

Broken Horses is a fantastic drama, set in a location that is familiar in films set in yesteryear but less so modern day cinema.  Beginning with an eerie scene in which a small town sheriff is gunned down by a sniper while at a makeshift shooting range with his son.  There is something odd about the son, that you cannot quite put your finger on until he is coerced by a shady character in the local diner to accept his offer of a revolver and the address of his father’s supposed killer.  All this happens in the first ten minutes, and is set fifteen years prior to the rest of the film, but as a scene setting exercise this is second to none.

Fifteen years later the younger brother of the assassin (Yelchin) is living in New York in a spacious apartment with a glamorous fiancée and a successful burgeoning career as a violinist.  Compelled to return to his hometown for the first time in many years he finds himself sinking into a strange world of gangsters, assassins and ghosts of the past.  What follows is a fairly straightforward idea of the younger brother sinking further and further into this alien world in order to protect and extricate his vulnerable brother from the clutches of Julius Hench (Vincent D’Onofrio).

Despite being directed by Bollywood director Vidhu Vinod Chopra there are very few scenes that give away his heritage.  A few of the action sequences do have that strangely slow motion style of Bollywood but for the most part this is a film that is more drama orientated than action, and subsequently the film really feels in the traditions of the typical old American western than anything else.  The subject matter certainly brings comparisons with the Billy Bob Thornton misnomer Sling Blade but the thing I saw with the film were almost direct comparisons to David Lynch’s masterpiece Blue Velvet.  From the meek protagonist returning to his hometown and sinking into a depraved world previously unknown to him, ruled by a dangerous yet compelling villain, with plenty of strange locations and odd supporting characters on the way the works of Lynch almost certainly played on the director’s mind when creating the film.

As far as atmosphere goes the film works very well, utilising the desolate desert setting very well.  One scene sees characters in an isolated graveyard overlooking the mountains and valleys of the landscape, and this is the scene that brings it back to you quite how dangerous a world these characters are living in.  The cinematography is superb and the whole thing captures the darkness of the best of the westerns, particularly films like The Searchers.  Despite the story keeping you truly involved in the near horror of the narrative for a good hour or so of the film the film does fall down somewhat in the last moments, conjuring up a conclusion that is truly unworthy of what has gone before.  Despite Anton Yelchin giving a very good performance and capturing the meekness of the character I did feel that opposite D’Onofrio he lacked a presence to really feel like part of the scene.  While Chris Marquette does a very good job playing the ‘slow’, easily malleable brother there is too much of a leap from the ambiguity of the character’s younger iteration of the prologue and this very pronounced version of the character that didn’t quite gel.  The film does belong to Vincent D’Onofrio who once again proves, on the back of his turn in Netflix’ Daredevil, that very few do complex yet chilling villains quite like he does.  Not only does he use his on screen hulking presence to incite fear yet he acts in such a mannered and chilling way that he acts like a magnet, you simply cannot take your eyes off him.  He mixes sincere, caring father figure with genuinely disturbing gangster tropes with ease in the same scene to remove any form of obviousness from his performance.

I did not find everything worked about the film.  The film tries its very best to be as strange as possible and some of this really doesn’t pay off, such as the double amputee former music teacher or the cinema headquarters of D’Onofrio’s character that are supposed to bring about creepiness and a sinister edge yet end up becoming silly.  The bouts of over the top violence similarly do not fit in as well as they ought to but do not detract from the compelling nature of the film.  The film is certainly weird, and very ambitious in its combination of influences.  I doubt it would be as good without D’Onofrio, and it does fall down terribly towards the end yet I fully recommend anybody track down this hidden gem.

* * *

Reviews: Fast & Furious 7, The Water Diviner, While We’re Young, The Dark Horse

Fast & Furious 7

“Despite Being Pedal To The Metal This Never Quite Hits Top Gear”

Director – James Wan

Starring – Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, Tyrese Gibson, Djimon Hounsou, Kurt Russell, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel, Tony Jaa, Elsa Pataky

Screenplay – Chris Morgan

Cinematography – Marc Spicer & Stephen F. Windon

Score – Brian Tyler

 

Length – 139 minutes

Certificate – 12A

Fifteen years ago upon the genesis of this franchise who would have imagined that by 2015 this would have morphed incredibly from a high octane film series about the surprisingly dull world of LA drag racing into an action franchise capable of drawing genuine Hollywood A-Listers to the table while as good as guaranteeing billion dollar returns.  That this change happened right when the franchise looked at its most dull and lifeless makes this even more astonishing.  Now on its seventh entry the film takes up the story right from where Fast & Furious 6 left off, with the heroes running from their newly idyllic life back in America to escape the threat of Statham’s Deckard Shaw, brother of the Luke Evans played antagonist of the previous film, who is out for revenge.

It is wonderful to see a film series as confident as this one to attempt to build upon its most recent success and create something with great scale and daring rather than fall into the trap of making the same film again just in different locations.  Unfortunately things just do not quite hang together as well as they should and while this is certainly not a disappointment and because of everything going on is never boring, it just does not have the slick, polished feel of the previous two films, by far my favourite entries to the series.  It would have been great and indeed rather novel to have a film that focussed solely on the leading players trying to outwit Statham’s ex-Special Forces man out for vengeance, who is a much better adversary on paper than he ends up on screen thanks to his diluted screen time.  The film could really have done without the additional plot of the leads being recruited by Kurt Russell’s mysterious Mr Nobody to protect a hacker with a potentially world changing computer program from the world’s most inept terrorist, played by Djimon Hounsou.  This of course means that the script is required to allocate its heroic resources accordingly, meaning that the joy of seeing everybody work together is essentially gone from the final act.

While I have embraced the evolution of the franchise from a series about street racers into an action series featuring a cast of street racers this time it felt as though it had gone a bit too far.  Although some sequences, such as the mountainside ambush following the parachuting of incredibly expensive supercars embraces both the very lifeblood of the franchise as well as its new direction there are just too many that don’t.  That is not to say that that there are not great driving stunts, or the fights between Statham, Diesel and Johnson are not hugely enjoyable to watch, but with the Abu Dhabi sequence especially the driving stunts now feel too reliant upon CGI and therefore are less  thrilling as a result.  The great achievement of CGI that this film has made is the re-engineering of the film to hang together despite the death of star Paul Walker half-way through filming.  While Walker has never been a great actor he was his character in this series and his presence will be greatly missed.  The achievement made in the use of body doubles and digitally superimposing his face and voice onto others makes the film work better than I had ever expected, while it must be said that the truly moving tribute to him through his character in the film’s closing moments is very tastefully done.

As far as the rest of the cast goes Diesel, Johnson and Statham give everything you expect them to.  Diesel especially consistently surprises me with how good he is in this franchise given his limitations elsewhere and the power in his performances show how much the characters and films mean to him.  Statham is truly becoming a modern action movie icon with his self-knowing performances and wonderful fighting style, and one can only wonder what this film would have been like with more of him, while the sight of Dwayne Johnson performing a flying head butt and breaking a plaster cast by flexing his muscles are the kind of things I go into his films wanting to see.  The rest of the film sees the other returnees giving the same performances they always do, although Tyrese Gibson gets funnier every time, while wasting action stars Ronda Rousey and Tony Jaa on pointless fight scenes.  Kurt Russell is enjoyably crazy as Mr Nobody while Djimon Hounsou gets little to do other than shout from a helicopter but it must be said he shouts from a helicopter very well.

At the time of writing this Fast & Furious 8 has been announced and will find the franchise in rude financial health, although how it will cope with the tragic loss of Walker is still to be seen.  I had been intrigued with the choice of horror maestro James Wan to take proceedings forward and for me it was a somewhat inspired choice that didn’t quite work.  He certainly put his own slant upon the action proceedings but it was not quite right for what the film needed in my opinion.  This is not a major criticism of a film I very much enjoyed as a popcorn blockbuster but moving on it would be great for them to return the franchise to Justin Lin going forward.  Although never threatening to scale the heights of Fast & Furious 6 this film still packed enough action and laughs in to leave me well and truly satisfied, while topping off a most admirable career very well.

* * *

The Water Diviner

“Poor Melodrama Thirsting For A Good Story”

Director – Russell Crowe

Starring – Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Yilmaz Erdogan, Cem Yilmaz, Dylan Georgiades, Jai Courtenay, Steve Bastoni, Ryan Corr

Screenplay – Andrew Anastasios & Andrew Knight

Cinematography – Andrew Lesnie

Score – David Hirschfelder

 

Length – 111 minutes

Certificate – 15

Actors turned director has become something much more prevalent today than it ever has been before.  People like Jon Favreau are now thought of more prominently as directors than actors, while the likes of George Clooney and Ben Affleck are able to slip seamlessly between the two mediums.  Unfortunately there are cases when the megastar involved takes on a project full of worthiness and then has no particular directorial traits to make it stand out (Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken for example).  It seems that Russell Crowe falls into that category with The Water Diviner, a well timed piece tackling the ghosts of Gallipoli for Australians 100 years on, that rather than be a sensitive, haunting movie about the effects of war plays like a showcase for Mr Crowe’s oversized ego.

Joshua Connor (Crowe) is a farmer in rural Australia, surviving in the harsh conditions through his strange knack of finding elusive water supplies, though bearing the terrible burden of having encouraged his three sons to go off and fight in World War One, where they all died.  After his wife commits suicide unable to cope with her grief he sets off on an impossible quest to retrieve the bodies of his sons from the war torn wilderness of Gallipoli and bring them home to be buried alongside her.

This does set up the prospect of an extremely emotive film about the lingering effects of war, a more tortured take on the idea of Saving Private Ryan but major issues with the source material and some seriously flawed decisions from the director lessen the effect of this.  The film begins by showing the ANZAC retreat from Gallipoli from the oncoming Turkish forces, and Crowe and his late cinematographer Andrew Lesnie somehow manage to make it look like the closing credits sequence to popular British wartime set sitcom Dad’s Army, which immediately got my guard up about the film.  Then the film introduces its lead character, played incidentally by its director, in a sequence that directly apes the phenomenal opening movement of There Will Be Blood, and if there’s one thing this film will tell you, Russell Crowe is no Daniel Day Lewis.  There are of course some positive moments when Crowe finally reaches Gallipoli, but these are few and far between.  The main issue I had with these sequences was that the presence of Australian and Turkish characters in one location created some notable and quite necessary tensions, but in this film disagreements are resolved and forgotten about in the very next scene.

For me the film’s real problems lie in the fact that Crowe leaves Gallipoli searching for one possibly not dead son at about the halfway point of a somewhat too long film.  What had up to that point been nothing more than a badly executed drama set in the aftermath of Gallipoli became something less forgivable; silly.  I can let Crowe and his team off for making a few mistakes in their debut feature because it’s all about learning from those mistakes but surely Russell Crowe has seen enough scripts now as an actor to know that the closing act of this film is incredibly stupid and preposterous.  On the one hand it has Crowe getting involved in the family politics of the people who run his Istanbul hotel while on the other hand we find him joining the Turkish Resistance and setting off across Turkey in a section that at times plays out like an Indiana Jones movie, just without any of the wit or excitement.

Say what you will about Russell Crowe, but onscreen he always seems to me to give very committed performances even if they are not in the finest of movies, and this is no exception.  He does that sorrowful middle aged brooding better than most and as a result for at least the first half of the film the character of Joshua comes across as I suppose the film expected him to.  Unfortunately the script forces him to have a budding romance with the probably widowed, Westernised Istanbul hotelier, which drags the film not only into trite melodrama but sheer levels of utter disbelief.  Would you think that Russell Crowe might have had the foresight to think that a craggy fifty year old such as himself would not be attractive to a glamorous young woman like Olga Kurylenko?  Their friendship I can just about cope with, despite Kurylenko’s am-dram performance, but anything more is just taking things too far.  The one positive I will give Crowe is that he does not grandstand and gives the lesser known Turkish actors Yilmaz Erdogan and Cem Yilmaz  their chances to shine, and they do regularly outshine him.

The film suffers for a number of reasons but for me the biggest one is this; Russell Crowe is not a great director.  Yes, cinematographer Lesnie did catch Istanbul in a particularly great light but elsewhere there was no evidence of directorial flair that something as staid as this so desperately needed, while the storytelling was flat, and the film was unable to jump scenes without having a padding inset in between them.  There were moments, particularly around Gallipoli, where its passage through a particularly interesting time in history piqued my interest, but they dissipated just as quickly as they materialised.

* *

While We’re Young

“Don’t Go And Watch This While Young Because You’ll Come Out Old”

Director – Noah Baumbach

Starring – Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin

Screenplay – Noah Baumbach

Cinematography – Sam Levy

Score – James Murphy

 

Length – 97 minutes

Certificate – 15

While We’re Young may well be nowhere near the worst made film I will see this year, but will almost certainly be one of the films that most left me fuming as I made my way from the darkened auditorium and back into the light of a fair, joyous and most importantly not sneeringly pretentious world.  This takes its cues from the very worst of Woody Allen’s oeuvre, focussing on a middle aged couple, both heavily involved in the art of documentary filmmaking.  In an attempt to escape mid-life stagnation they become friends with a young, hipster couple and teach the audience all new levels of self-entitled in the process, before it seems that maybe their new young counterparts may have ulterior motives for their friendship.

Noah Baumbach is not a filmmaker I have found it particularly easy to warm to, his arch hipsterness is just a gateway I do not easily pass through.  However with his last film Frances Ha I thought he imbued his work with a hitherto unseen charm that alleviated the issues I already faced.  Maybe it was because I was so eagerly anticipating a smart American comedian rescuing us from the anodyne slew of Seth Rogen based comedy or maybe it was because this film boasts such a great cast that I had such high hoped here, but to say they were summarily crushed with every frame, every syllable even would be an understatement.  What this is in essence is Baumbach capitalising on the great work it has now become clear that star Greta Gerwig did with Frances Ha to attract an all star quartet to his latest project, only to fall back into inaccessibly self-congratulatory mode about how great and noble his craft is.  This is essentially a paean to the New York hipster generation in the form of a Woody Allen film that has such a blinkered view on class it is repulsive.  Despite being young and seemingly unemployed Josh and Darby are able to afford a huge, wonderful looking apartment filled with all sorts of retro kitsch that is apparently in nowadays.  Even the main characters are living in the lap of luxury despite that old chestnut of ‘director’s block’ having held a film up for six years now.  Anyone living an apparently normal working life with children and a recognisable daily routine is lined up on screen to be sneered at, re-emphasising the message that being kooky and hipster is the only way to get along in this life.

It is hard to recall a film in which four usually likeable and engaging screen presences have been so royally sold a doozy and have come across as so actively hateful on screen as this film.  I loathed every single one of the main characters and even in the one ill judged sequence where Baumbach feels the need to send them to an Ayahuasca Ceremony leading to gross out projectile vomiting aplenty I felt no sympathy for this unfortunate quartet stuck in the headlights like rabbits.  Ben Stiller is the only one to come away with a modicum of dignity intact, permanently caught between giving ‘The Ben Stiller Comedy Performance’ or ‘The Ben Stiller Slightly More Serious Film Performance’ but at least he actually looks sincere at a time.  On the other hand Adam Driver gives a performance so false and insincere (a fault of the script) which made my skin crawl so much that I found myself often on the verge of leaving the film.  Seyfried and Watts prove themselves as utterly unnatural comediennes while Charles Grodin’s role is essentially that in which Baumbach sees himself, bringing utter levels of revulsion from his character’s smug self-righteousness.

It is odd that Baumbach’s sometime collaborator Wes Anderson became ever more accessible with critical and commercial acclaim while Baumbach appears to have gone the totally opposite way.  While We’re Young has neither the charm nor the wit to work on the same level that the best of Woody Allen’s scabrous Manhattan comedies ever did and at 97 minutes is an awfully long time not to work on your primary goal, leading to a viewing experience switching between loathsome and tedious, but maintaining an unfulfilling level throughout.

*

The Dark Horse

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“Astonishing True Life Drama That Never Quite Reaches A Gallop”

Director – James Napier Robertson

Starring – Cliff Curtis, James Rolleston, Kirk Torrence, Miriama McDowell, Wayne Hapi, Barry Te Hira, Niwa Whaturia, James Napier Robertson

Screenplay – James Napier Robertson

Cinematography – Denson Baker

Score – Dana Lund

 

Length – 124 minutes

Certificate – 15

Set in Gisborne, New Zealand, this film tells the story of Genesis, a mentally ill man released back into the community in the care of his brother.  However his brother is part of an incredibly brutal and violent biker gang into which he is preparing his son for induction.  Despite sleeping rough, and still showing signs of mental problems Genesis begins to find his place back in society by using his past as a chess champion to mentor a group of under-privileged Maori children to a national competition, while trying to save his nephew from the horrors that gang life entail.

I had no idea what The Dark Horse was about going into it, and found it to be a truly interesting, if overstuffed drama that was a little too far-fetched for my particular dramatic tastes.  That I then found out later that it is a true story based upon the lives of real individuals really startled me, as it did not seem possible.  Since that discovery I have come to look at the film differently and although I still find there to be too much going on to make it truly work, I look upon it with a greater sense of approval and praise than was initially the case.

The film does have about twice as many plot lines than it can easily handle and so certain things do get given short shrift, and for my money anything not directly involving Genesis could easily be discarded with little effect on the overall story.  The one through line of the film that constantly caught my attention was the way the film portrayed Maori characters.  They are always shown here to be clinging on to the edges of society.  Take the gang for example, all of whom look like they would have been ferocious rugby players some twenty years previous.  They are intimidating, dangerous and savage, which may well be the truth of the tale but is portraying the indigenous as savages not a little bit last century?  Similarly the chess club is made up of under-privileged, troubled children, including one who is on it as part of a community order.  This does not become as clear until they eventually pitch up at a chess competition in a more metropolitan city where their scruffy, unkempt appearances are in stark contrast to the Ivy League-esque white characters.  As I say I do not discount the veracity of the tale but maybe question whether the disparity was as wide as it is here.

While the myriad of plot strands may not quite knit together perfectly and you often find yourself having to remember which plot strand you are picking up the film certainly has its moments.  It is a lot funnier than the outset led me to believe, and it is the moments of humour and the character of Genesis that really made me warm to it as much as I did.  Conversely I found the gang stuff to be too dark and sadistic to sit comfortably alongside the more comedic aspects, and so when these worlds meet the film really doesn’t work.  There are some great sequences, not least the chess tournament, a great interpretation of the ‘cinematic sporting montage’ trait, while one shot of Genesis and his nephew Manu sat on a memorial high above a night-time cityscape, with a silhouetted chessboard right in the foreground is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful shots I have seen for a long time.

The film would be nothing without the phenomenal presence of Cliff Curtis as Genesis, who really is the glue holding the film together.  Right from the opening scene, one that lacks any prior explanation of his character, his presence on the screen made me sit up and take notice.  I will confess that my only prior knowledge of him was through Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which did not prepare me for a performance that is one of the finest depictions of mental illness on screen I have seen.  He oscillates seamlessly between being a manic ball of energy chasing around the screen infecting every molecule of my being with his childlike enthusiasm to being a rabbit caught in the headlights, overcome by discomfort and doubt.  The transitions are so effortless and believable that they left me spellbound.  He is supported very well by the young cast, and although the other adult cast have very little of consequence to do they do it perfectly well.

The Dark Horse is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but it really is a film that will leave you thinking about it long after.  As a portrayal of a character it is second to none this year for my money, but its dramatic telling somewhat lets the side down, although a few more films as thought provoking as this each year surely cannot be a bad thing.

* * *

Must See Movies For May

Well it has been known for ages that this really is setting up to be a bumper blockbuster summer and May is almost the onset of it.  With the exception of thee recently released  Avengers: Age Of Ultron the rest of the recognisable big-hitting properties are being saved for the traditional summer blockbuster season, with the less certain hitters bridging the gap to the summer.  Amidst these are the traditional quirky little movies, safe hit comedies and period dramas seen as safe counter-programming.

 

Big Game

released 7th May

This looks like many of the ridiculous action films that pretty much defined the early to mid 1990s, with an outlandish plot and questionably stupid casting decisions.  Samuel L. Jackson as the President of the United States is not believable, yet if nothing else Jackson is always good value, and the thought of his stricken leader being chased around the Finnish wilderness with only a thirteen year old local to help him, with a similarly bizarrely cast Jim Broadbent as a Pentagon official, I fully expect to leave my brain at the door and have a jolly good time here.

Mad Max: Fury Road

released 15th May

Having recently been introduced to the original films I am genuinely intrigued to see where this goes.  The trailers undoubtedly look stunning with rich colours, full throttle driving stunts and that same anarchic hell look that so defined the original saga.  My only concern is Tom Hardy, so often great in actors fare like Bronson and Locke, yet I am still unsure that his presence in a big blockbuster movie can match up to the requirements.  Still, if Nicholas Hoult is as full on crazy as brief snippets in the trailer suggest that will surely be compensation enough.

 

Pitch Perfect 2

released 15th May

Three years after the original took audiences, critics and the box office totally unaware comes a comedy sequel I am actually looking forward to.  Set in the hithero unknown world of college a capella competition the first film had just the right amount of cheesiness to see it through, but does have the displeasure of unleashing Rebel Wilson on the world.  All the primary cast are here again, and it looks to be pretty much the same, which can only be a good thing.  The likeable Anna Kendrick headlines, and this does look pretty acamazing!!!!

Tomorrowland: A World Beyond

released 22nd May

This is the one original property big budget movie of the summer.  A clever marketing campaign has made this look really sublime and yet I still feel as though I know very little about the film, which is a refreshing change.  Although much of the film’s success will ride on the shoulders of newcomer Britt Robertson the presence of George Clooney and Hugh Laurie is most welcome.  Brad Bird created two of the best animations of the last twenty years in The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, as well as the most spectacular Mission Impossible film, so the marrying of these elements looks brilliant.

 

Danny Collins

released 29th May

Let’s be honest, Al Pacino has been incredibly ropey for some considerable time now and has taken to over-acting even more than usual.  Why am I looking forward to a seemingly syrupy, sentimental rom-com starring the great man then?  Because it looks like the role his later career is made for, a man trying to regain some long lost artistic integrity, while reconnecting with his daughter.  Co-starring Annette Bening, Jennifer Garner, Christopher Plummer and Bobby Cannavale this has all the makings of a real crowd pleaser.

Reviews: Cinderella, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water, Get Hard, Seventh Son, The Face Of An Angel, Robot Overlords, The Signal

Cinderella

“Go See Cinderella And You Shall Have A Ball”

Director – Kenneth Branagh

Starring – Lily James, Richard Madden, Cate Blanchett, Holliday Grainger, Sophie McShera, Stellan Skarsgard, Helena Bonham Carter, Nonso Anozie, Derek Jacobi, Rob Brydon, Ben Chaplin, Hayley Atwell

Screenplay – Chris Weitz

Cinematography – Haris Zambarloukos

Score – Patrick Doyle

 

Length – 113 minutes

Certificate – U

One of cinema’s current and most bizarre trends is the remaking of classic Disney animations into cartoons.  While the fairytales may be reasonably ripe for modern cinematic adaptation upcoming sanctioned live action updates of properties such as Dumbo, Winnie The Pooh and The Jungle Book seem less intelligent ideas.  Rather than play up the darkness inherent to the source material in a way that films such as Snow White & The Huntsman and Maleficent have recently this Kenneth Branagh film is almost a straight translation of the animated version, albeit without music, and about 20 minutes longer.

I was mightily impressed with the job that has been done with Cinderella, in the same way that other films of this ilk have left me distinctly underwhelmed of late.  The way I see it there are two ways to go with films like this, either take the approach that Branagh has taken here and make a U rated fairytale for the whole family to enjoy or do something like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters or Into The Woods and subvert the strange darkness of the original tales with a 15 Certificate movie.  As Maleficent showed last year a PG rated film trying to appeal to the widest audience while at the same time shoehorning in some of that aforementioned darkness may attract huge takings but as a film in itself simply doesn’t add up.  Between them Branagh and script writer Chris Weitz have made the first of these modern incarnations of classic fairytales that actually feels made for family viewing, and as such is a better movie because of it.

After the honourable misfire of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Branagh is back on strangely familiar ground here as he shows how bizarrely at ease he is with huge fantasy worlds.  It is bizarre that this once most traditional of Shakespearian actors and directors finds himself helming huge fantasy movies such as this and Thor and doing so very well.  He is not afraid to embrace the original film with Cinderella’s friendship with the family of mice, or the grandiose transformation sequences, both things directors of lesser confidence or more pretentious aspirations may have eschewed.  Of course much of the credit must go to the production design and costume and hair and makeup departments for contributing to what is simply one of the best looking films I have seen in quite some time.  Indeed Dante Ferretti’s work on the Great Hall for the ballroom sequence, the film’s undeniably grandiose centrepiece is simply stunning, with camerawork from Haris Zambarloukos and effortless choreography to turn it into a truly show-stopping moment.

At the heart of the movie is Lily James, who although maybe not the most talented young actress out there makes the leap from Downton Abbey to big budget fantasy cinema fairly effortlessly.  Her performance clearly helps the film overcome much of the silliness of the narrative, not least how can such a headstrong young woman be so downtrodden while at the same time cultivating a forbidden love with a man she barely knows.  Even in her subjugation she finds a way to express herself as a character of great resourcefulness and indeed dignity.  This is a performance that the film’s clear target audience can look up to and aspire to as one of great power in womanhood, no matter what the obstacle is, and one that should still be incredibly pertinent today.  Her sparky on screen presence is a joy to watch and helps a lot cultivate great chemistry with Game Of Thrones’ Richard Madden, playing the headstrong Prince in a fashion better than I had expected.  This is more than a two dimensional hunky prince performance and makes the situation of two people instantly falling in love despite having little or no knowledge of one another strangely believable.

The film is however stolen from the leads by a series of scenery chewing performances from much starrier actors.  Chief amongst these is Cate Blanchett, for once throwing off her serious acting mantle and taking on the role of the Wicked Stepmother, dominating the entire film in the process.  Thanks to her strength as an actress she is able to bring some credence and much needed humanity to the intolerable cruelty her character doles out to the heroine, while still being icy sinister in the process.  Her performance is alleviated by the presence of Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera as her daughters, both as superficial and dim-witted as the other, bringing about withering looks from Blanchett that raised the film’s biggest laughs.  Elsewhere Branagh populates his film with the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Stellan Skarsgard and Derek Jacobi bringing great gravitas to otherwise minor roles.

Despite for the most part being a romance or indeed a tragedy as a story, both Branagh and Weitz have understood the necessity of humour for the film to transcend and avoid coming off as po-faced.  This is done constantly, not just through Blanchett or Bonham Carter but all around, even within the big transformation set-pieces.  Although without the wonderment brought about by the astonishing design work done I doubt that I would have found the film as memorable, it is still very much worthy of everybody’s time and I would not be surprised to find it being enjoyed by all for years to come.

* * *

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water

“This Sponge Must Have Soaked Up Nothing But Acid And Candyfloss”

Director – Paul Tibbitt & Mike Mitchell

Starring – Tom Kenny, Bill Fagerbakke, Rodger Bumpass, Clancy Brown, Carolyn Lawrence, Douglas Lawrence, Antonio Banderas, Matt Berry

Screenplay – Glenn Berger & Jonathan Aibel

Cinematography – Phil Meheux

Score – John Debney

 

Length – 92 minutes

Certificate – U

Quite predictably this has one of the most joyously berserk plots of the year.  As far as I could surmise from watching it the Krusty Krab’s Krabby Patty formula is stolen by Plankton, causing a breakdown in all social order in Bikini Bottom owing to the lack of junk food.  Having gone on a time travelling expedition to try to rescue the formula SpongeBob and his friends somehow end up on the surface, on a California beach front no less doing battle with Antonio Banderas pirate/fast food vendor as souped up superhero style characters.

As a cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants has always seemed more to me to work on an adult level than as a children’s programme and this film really does go along with that assertion, given that it begins with Antonio Banderas’ pirate character doing what is clearly an homage to the opening of Raiders Of The Lost Ark and moving to ever crazier levels from there on in.  Although the whole film clearly plays towards children for my money it will be a certain section of the adult audience that reacts better to things.  That said I did begin to get very irritated at a certain point of the film, when the ongoing saga in Bikini Bottom just began to get far too tedious and the rapid fire gag count began to miss its target more than it hit, although the rendering of a S&M dressed post-apocalyptic future really did make me laugh.

The film for me went to its best level with a time travelling sequence that really can induce a migraine with the extremity of the violently luminous colour scheme used.  I don’t think its recommended that anyone even try to make sense of what is exactly happening here because as far as I could tell that would be an impossible task.  This is where the film works best, in placating the young audience who could possibly get restless with such incomprehensible zaniness with visuals that could possibly have taken their inspiration from a cotton candy machine.  This sequence is also the introduction to Bubbles the Dolphin, voiced by British comedian Matt Berry, who without a doubt has one of the best voices in the film industry.  Clearly attempting to become the new Brian Blessed with his over the top interpretation of the Guardian of the Universe, he steals every scene in which he appears and makes up for the voicings of the main characters which, although initially endearing, do begin to grate quite a lot by the halfway mark.

Having been heavily exposed to the trailers for the film in the lead up to its release I had been worried about the much publicised live action sequences and 3D renderings of the much beloved characters.  Fortunately this is not as major part of the film as the trailer makes it out to be and the 3D workings of the characters, at least initially, do not jar anywhere near the levels I expected, with Sandy’s live action rendering one of the laugh out loud moments.  While I will not even attempt to outline quite how they are then souped up to have superpowers and engage in an Avengers style battle on a seafront boardwalk, which is a reasonably satisfying conclusion to the film, even more so thanks to Antonio Banderas.  It is great to see such a respected actor genuinely willing to go all out behind his false beard and truly embrace the sheer madness of the film.  Be it attacking CGI SpongeBob with catering utensils or arguing with a flock of singing seagulls he really is a credit to his professionalism and enhances the film tenfold.

I can’t deny that I was somewhat disappointed by this movie, having gone in with high expectations of something subversively weird akin to what Phil Lord and Christopher Miller did with The Lego Movie.  That is not to say that there are not flashes  of utter brilliance but the lack of a coherent tone throughout and moments where things just do not work going on for far too long lessened the effectiveness of it.  That said however, with reservations, I would wholeheartedly recommend showing it to children as an antidote to the sterilised animations major studios such as Dreamworks churn out time and again.

* * *

Get Hard

“Hard To Get With The Message Yet Also Hard Not To Laugh”

Director – Etan Cohen

Starring – Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Alison Brie, Edwina Findley, Craig T. Nelson, T.I.

Screenplay – Jay Martel, Ian Roberts & Etan Cohen

Cinematography – Tim Suhrstedt

Score – Christophe Beck

 

Length – 100 minutes

Certificate – 15

Hollywood comedy is a real bête-noir of mine, very rarely getting things right and doing what it really should be doing and making me laugh.  The messages going in to this film were very mixed.  On the one hand Will Ferrell is the one member of the long disbanded Frat Pack who I still find funny in his middle aged iteration, but on the other hand there is Kevin Hart, at whom I have not laughed once yet.  The premise of this is suitably ridiculous, Ferrell playing an investment banker wrongly jailed for embezzlement and hiring Hart’s car valet to help him survive in prison on the mistaken assumption that, being black, he has been to prison.

The premise of the film is awfully offensive, so much so that it has quite possibly put the new, liberal thinking Hollywood attitudes back a good two decades.  It is quite difficult to work out whether this is more offensive to black people or homosexuals.  The entire premise is based around mistaken assumptions by Ferrell’s character that a) all black men have been to prison and b) going to prison always results in sodomy.  The material aimed at black people didn’t hit me as hard as the homosexual material simply because Kevin Hart’s character is portrayed as a decent family man, trying to do the best by his family, which counteracts against the gangsters and drug dealers put on screen.  The homosexual stuff really is a bit too far, culminating in an excruciating scene where Hart’s character takes Ferrell’s to a gay bar to overcome his fear of homosexuality, a scene so misjudged I was squirming in my seat.

Of course no matter how funny a film like this can be the level of offensive material can make it increasingly awkward to laugh at any jokes on screen but fortunately here, that is something I overcame.  It may not be the greatest comedy of all time, and the set-up takes a lot of labouring before the scenario finally spells itself out fully, but there is still a lot of good material to take stock of here.  The mismatched buddy comedy stylings of the film work surprisingly with the central pair being a well suited coupling that populates numerous hilarious sequences, not least the simulation of a prison riot in Ferrell’s character’s mansion.  There are some scenes that do not quite work, not least the infiltration of a White Power gang that could have been cut altogether but overall I was pleasantly surprised at the frequency I was laughing.

The key to the film’s success in light of all the negativity in the material are Hart and Ferrell and they both come out of what could have been a poor career move in rude health.  Ferrell is better here than he has been in quite some time as the clueless, buffoonish, out of touch investment banker.  It is quite obviously a role he could do in his sleep but from the moment he does calisthenics naked by a window in full view of his Hispanic gardeners you know exactly where you are with him.  Although the scenes with him being a gangster work about as well as the scenes of him as a pimp in The Other Guys did that doesn’t take away from a performance that works despite him having to stand around crying a lot, or indeed spouting the offensive script material.  Hart surprisingly plays a very good foil here, managing to be much more likeable than his normal irritating self.  It is helpful that Ferrell’s performance is so dominant that Hart cannot take control as he usually does, though his use of a popular film in his pretence of being an ex-con is comedy gold, and this may be the way forward for Hart’s career, but only time will tell.

The film does suffer from a poor ratio of plot to running time, and by the time it has finished getting through the main portion of the ‘preparing for prison’ plot it seems unprepared to segue off in another direction to resolve the mystery of the film, becoming yet another dull action comedy in the process.  This is not helped by a series of terribly under-developed supporting characters whose lack of impact lessen the finale, but overall this was a train wreck waiting to happen that has somehow managed to get into the station relatively unscathed.

* * *

Seventh Son

“A Fun Romp That Won’t Quite Leave You In Seventh Heaven”

Director – Sergei Bodrov

Starring – Ben Barnes, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Antje Traue, Djimon Hounsou, Olivia Williams, Kit Harington

Screenplay – Matt Greenberg, Charles Leavitt & Aaron Guzikowski

Cinematography – Newton Thomas Sigel

Score – Marco Beltrami

 

Length – 102 minutes

Certificate – 12A

Arriving on a wave of negative publicity, having been totally slated in America, losing a lot of money in the process after having been completed over three years ago, I cannot for the life of me see what everyone has a problem with in what is essentially a fun fantasy romp.  Heavily indebted to Lord Of The Rings and Game Of Thrones (Kit Harington receives prominent billing despite only having a minor role, another clue as to how old this film is) the film follows a witch hunter (Bridges) take on an apprentice (Barnes) while trying to counteract a threat posed by his chief adversary Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore).

The film sets its primary register to utterly ridiculous as a bare minimum but then goes along with that throughout, never getting serious or po-faced at any point, but doing everything while knowingly winking at the camera at how ridiculous it all is.  Let me define the villains for you.  Julianne Moore is a cackling witch with extremely long fingernails and a strange tail, oh and she can turn into a  dragon at will, cue much swooping action for the 3D print I didn’t bother with.  She is joined by her sister, who has the same power and an assortment of freak shows and transfigurers, who turn into animals like cheetahs and bears.  This is not to mention Djimon Hounsou turning up, not for the first or last time of late, in a role that seems way too stupid for someone of his talents, as a master of a group of assassins who has axes for hands.  Yes you did read that right.  All this plays out on a totally different trajectory to that of the heroes, because if you put all this scenery chewing in the same shot Jeff Bridges then there would be no scenery left at all.

Jeff Bridges proves again here that he is quite possibly the most underrated comedian in Hollywood, and that he is nearly incapable of choosing a script that is worthy of his talents.  The film would not work without Bridges, simply because Ben Barnes is simply not charismatic enough to take the lead of a film as ridiculous as this.  If it were being made now Kit Harington would not be relegated to a perfunctory pre-credits role but would be taking the lead, having proved with last year’s Pompeii that he has the charisma and presence that Barnes so sorely lacks to handle such a ridiculous film.  Without Bridges the film would just leave you waiting for Julianne Moore to come back for another good cackle, but Bridges makes his scenes the film’s unlikely highlights.  Seemingly combining his performance as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit with elements of Gandalf and a voice that can only be described as Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, he has great comic timing in belittling his young charge while having some fantastic one way banter with a monster companion called Tusk.

Despite being no great artistic work there is a little more intelligence than most have given it credit for.  There was no need for a romantic interest in the story, yet I assume the book had one, so the film relegates the romance to being nothing more than a plot device, although in the process it does waste the talent of Alicia Vikander, as well as Olivia Williams.  There are some very well choreographed action sequences and while the effects are not top notch they are at least functional, even if they would undoubtedly not work in 3D.  Even Marco Beltrami’s score harks back to Lord Of the Rings, but then taking cues from one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time is not something to be ashamed of in my opinion.

I was surprised just how much fun I had watching Seventh Son, such was the level of vitriol that accompanied it.  Having seen the film I can only imagine that people were prepared for something more akin to a Peter Jackson fantasy epic than an hour and a half’s popcorn fun featuring dragons.  It is astonishing to see such A-List talent in something so bonkers but great to see them going along with it quite as much as they are.  Not to cast illusions of greatness onto proceedings, but this is well worth checking out.

* * *

The Face Of An Angel

“The Film That Had Neither Right Nor Need To Be Made”

Director – Michael Winterbottom

Starring – Daniel Bruhl, Kate Beckinsale, Cara Delevigne, Valerio Mastandrea

Screenplay – Paul Viragh

Cinematography – Hubert Taczanowski

Score – Harry Escott

 

Length – 101 minutes

Certificate – 15

There is certainly a case to be made that making a film of something real-life that is still a pertinent issue while making the film is not a good idea.  Look at Bill Condon’s ill-fated biopic of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, bizarrely also starring Daniel Bruhl, and how not really having all the facts led to the film really being unable to get to the heart of its subject matter.  The same can very easily be said of this, in all but name a retelling of the tragic case of Meredith Kercher, released on the same day her supposed killer was acquitted on appeal of her murder by Italian courts.  The real thing is just far too pressing a matter to be fictionalised and dramatised at this particular juncture.

The film suffers to adapt to a myriad of problems inherent with Paul Viragh’s script that cannot be resolved to make a film that is anything more than naval gazing and exploitative of a very human tragedy.  Michael Winterbottom is something of an oddity in my eyes, a director who is lauded much more than I would deem appropriate.  When you retrospectively look back throughout his career you will see what I would deem a string of incredibly honourable failures, films that display interesting bravery in his attempts to pull them off, but for my money he doesn’t quite have the talent to attempt such tricky projects.  The fact is that most of this film came across not as a sensitive retelling of a horrific event but a self congratulatory piece of loathsome self congratulation on the creative team’s part.  There is a strange reflexivity to making the main character a director, overburdened with personal issues, commissioned to make a film of tragic events such as these, constantly coming to blows with the writing process and unable to find an in to the film, while relegating the true story of the horrific unsolved murder of a girl to a series of increasingly few flashback sequences.  At about the halfway mark I realised that rather than an Adaptation like mockery of the Hollywood creative process this was the writer and director simply feeling sorry for how hard their jobs are and trying to elicit sympathy from an audience who in fairness are the ones deserving of sympathy for having to unsuspectingly sit through such awful claptrap.

Things are not helped by the way characters are written, making things nigh-on impossible for the cast to save things.  The director at the heart of the film, Thomas, is characterised by writer’s block and family issues, hardly the bastion of a hard hitting drama.  The film makes the truly terrible step about halfway through to suddenly thrust upon him a cocaine addiction that has him seeing visions of huge serpentine creatures in the Siena backstreets while conducting the least convincing investigation cinema has ever seen.  It is impossible not to feel sorry for Daniel Bruhl, a great actor who has made an incredibly poor choice in taking this part, although he must be commended for appearing even slightly credible as an unconvincing cocaine addict while having to deal with the awful attempts at sinister from Valerio Mastandrea, whose  presence makes you think for a while that the filmmakers are trying to turn this into a Zodiac like tale.  What is infinitely worse however is the portrayal of the Associated Press and particularly Simone, Thomas’ contact and one of the least characterised characters in a drama in quite some time, something not aided by a portrayal by Kate Beckinsale that is ineffectual to say the least.  The one bright spark is Cara Delevigne, making the leap from model to actress rather well as Melanie, a vivacious young student who she imbues with charm, youthful wit and a screen presence the rest of the film sorely lacks.  It is just unfortunate that the director sees the need to exploit her model status by having her unnecessarily jump into the sea clad only in her underwear at the end of the film, relegating a thoughtful performance to eye candy in an instant.

There is very little else to say about The Face Of An Angel.  If I were the family of Meredith Kercher I would be most upset by the disturbing way that this film trivialises her life in order to make an audience feel sorry for screenwriters and directors.  In fairness most of the actors do their best with incredibly limited and toxic resources, and any attempt to add thrills to the film falls instantly flat, but to be perfectly honest I was just glad to escape the sheer noxiousness of this film as soon as possible.

*

Robot Overlords

“Lords It Over So Much Of Today’s Science Fiction Cinema”

Director – Jon Wright

Starring – Callan McAuliffe, Ella Hunt, James Tarpey, Milo Parker, Gillian Anderson, Ben Kingsley, Tamar Hussain, Geraldine James, Steven Mackintosh, Craig Garner

Screenplay – Mark Stay & Jon Wright

Cinematography – Fraser Taggart

Score – Christian Henson

 

Length – 90 minutes

Certificate – 12A

This film is a refreshing change to a lot of the crash-bang-wallop science fiction cinema seen today, a film aimed squarely at a younger audience yet successfully crediting them with enough intelligence to watch something with interesting ideas behind it.  Michael Bay take note.  Shot on a limited budget this takes place in the wholly unfamiliar setting of a British seaside town, some years after robots took over Earth, quarantined humans and began experimenting on them.  After a chance discovery sees them free of curfew, four teenagers begin an unlikely resistance against their hostile conquerors.

This is a film that certainly loves its science fiction, written by people who have a key knowledge of the genre, and as a result it does play like a CBBC version of Independence Day meets Edge Of Tomorrow.  Some will see the overtly childish tone and cheap and cheerful style as stumbling blocks but I would urge viewers to embrace this film for what it is, that is something daring enough to spend money to try to integrate a younger audience into a genre that they are not brilliantly catered for.  Of course at the heart of all good sci-fi is allegory and this one does have a whole Nazi Occupation thing going on, reinforced by Ben Kingsley’s character, a go-between between humans and robots being sneeringly referred to as a collaborator.

The odd setting does give it a quirky tone that runs throughout, this is genuinely something the like of which I haven’t seen on a cinema screen before, with the provincial ideas behind it something wholly new for British audiences used to seeing New York or Tokyo destroyed by huge monsters.  It maintains its charming nature throughout, while making the most of an obviously limited CGI budget to make a convincing if flawed crack at depicting an invasion.  There are the obvious problems, like streets not being overgrown despite being abandoned for numbers of years, and the robot presence equating to something seen reasonably frequently on Doctor Who, but the way it sets its stall out from the beginning counteracts this.  Seemingly blowing its budget early on on shots of a giant alien cube ship and a jumbo jet downed in an estuary the film definitely marks itself as striking there, drawing you into the rest of the film very well where a certain degree of canniness is employed to get around budgetary constraints, while the realisation of the A.I. Mediator is genuinely quite creepy.

Despite being a film for children, headlined by child actors, it is the adult stars who bring some much needed gravitas to proceedings.  Without their presence the film could have become too twee focussing only on the narrative of the central quartet of teenagers.  The film’s Crown Jewel is undoubtedly Ben Kingsley, an actor who can do smiling yet sinister in a way no other can.  His utter politeness on screen clues you in to his true, nefarious intentions and it is testament to his professionalism that, despite being an Oscar winner, he doesn’t phone in a performance for lesser fare such as this.  Likewise Gillian Anderson, who displays a great deal of charm and emphasises the fact that she is not seen on screen anywhere near enough.  Although they are written as all manner of clichés the four actors playing the young leads deal with the material surprisingly well, so much so that you really do buy into what the film is trying to do.

There is a growing sense throughout that the film is somewhat winging it a bit, and doesn’t have enough material for feature film length.  Eventually it does begin to outstay its welcome but fortunately has the sense to come to an end before this caused any damage to the film.  Despite being aimed at a totally different target audience I did enjoy Robot Overlords immensely, and in the screening I was in the younger members of the audience seemed engaged with it, which is surely the benchmark to look upon when judging films like this.

* * *

The Signal

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“This Could Be The Signal Of A New Science Fiction Talent”

Director – William Eubank

Starring – Brenton Thwaites, Olivia Cooke, Beau Knapp, Laurence Fishburne

Screenplay – Carlyle Eubank, David Frigero & William Eubank

Cinematography – David Lanzenberg

Score – Nima Fakhrara

 

Length – 97 minutes

Certificate – 15

The Signal is something that is thankfully becoming more of a feature of cinema after a period in the doldrums, that is science fiction heavily reliant upon ideas and character development with a sparseness of effects to distract from the meat of the story.  While maybe not being the most original of things out there today it is certainly evocative and creepy and thought provoking in all the right ways.

The film plays out in three very distinctive acts, followed by a jaw dropping coda, in a way that not only displays great bravery from the filmmakers to take such a bold step but also marks them out as a creative team that know their genre cinema.  Setting off with three teenagers taking a long road trip to drop one of them off at college, while engaged in a battle with a mysterious hacker, Nomad.  Setting out to tackle him the audience immediately gets jittery about their fate, this section being depicted as the opening act of countless horror movies, developing characters while taking them to a location where untold evil will unfold upon them.  After something particularly shocking and unexpected does happen the action moves to what appears to be a bio-containment facility where everything goes very John Carpenter, and Nima Fakhrara’s score really comes into its synthy, creepy own, before the film once more changes tact, this time to a sequence that must have been inspired by Spielberg’s early film Duel.  Rather than jarring awkwardly these jumps all feel totally natural, never feel out of place with the story and create a truly chilling, atmospheric sci-fi horror.

It is very difficult  to talk about this film because knowing as little as possible about it is key to getting as much out of it as possible.  The pacing is quite steady, with the writers unwilling to appease the audience with unnecessary shocks or adrenaline rushes ahead of time.  Looking back it seems as though they are silently playing a game of chess with the unwitting audience, setting things up for the astonishing finale without ever making the viewer suspect anything.  There are some scenes that do disappoint, most notably the flashbacks, a device totally unnecessary in 99.9% of the films they are used in, and a sequence in a deserted cabin that clearly pays homage to The Blair Witch Project not only in its out and out creepiness but also in its disappointingly unnecessary switch to the found footage trope that never works, somewhat spoiling what could have been a much greater, scarier scene.  That aside the cinematography of David Lanzenberg is very good, capturing the great production design work while at the same time adapting very well to the direction the writing is taking things, while given the limited budget the effects work really is top notch.

What really showed me how great an emerging talent that director William Eubank is was the performance he managed to coax from lead Brenton Thwaites.  Those who regularly read my reviews will be aware that I am not a fan of this upcoming actor, having seen nothing in his previous four films that remotely resembled personality or charisma.  Here he handles a very difficult role very well, perfectly capturing the confused terror that a character in his situation would display while more than holding his own against his much more illustrious, charismatic co-star.  The film never really lets the other young actors Olivia Cooke or Beau Knapp to do anything but it has a wonderful role for Laurence Fishburne, for too long now relegated to minor parts.  Spending the entire film in a bio-suit, he is as chilling as they come, a total mystery to the audience and characters of the film alike, while using his astonishing presence to creepy effect.  You can never tell quite whether he is good or evil, but either way you don’t want to get on the wrong side of him, the mark of a great character and performance.

I have said much about the finale being the highlight of an excellent film but without spoiling it I cannot say too much more.  There are revelations that although are subconsciously expected were still big shocks when they were made, and the final reveal is just as jaw dropping as that of The Usual Suspects.  This is the kind of film I love cinema for, it doesn’t spoon feed its audience rather plies them with titbits to help them get the most out of the experience.

* * * *

Reviews: Insurgent, Home, The Voices, The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya, The Gunman, Wild Card

Insurgent

“More Insipid Than Insurgent”

Director – Robert Schwentke

Starring – Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Kate Winslet, Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Naomi Watts, Jai Courtney, Mekhi Pfifer, Zoe Kravitz, Maggie Q, Octavia Spencer, Daniel Dae Kim, Ray Stevenson, Keiynan Lonsdale, Ashley Judd, Janet McTeer

Screenplay – Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman & Mark Bomback

Cinematography – Florian Ballhaus

Score – Joseph Trapanese

 

Length – 119 minutes

Certificate – 12A

Young Adult series adaptations are the real trend of Hollywood at the moment, with more attempts at starting a franchise to rival The Hunger Games being made in the last two or three films than I can remember.  Of these efforts, setting itself apart from films like The Giver and The Host, both of which died on their feet was Divergent, a film that married a fairly interesting narrative by the genre’s standards with the genuine star power of Shailene Woodley.  Now comes the difficult second instalment which exemplifies how difficult it can be to maintain interest throughout the adaptation of a trilogy.

Picking up almost immediately after the events of Divergent the film sees the Dauntless faction scattered after the attack on Abnegation, with Tris, Four, Caleb and Peter seeking shelter in Amity.  Very quickly in this film the faction system causes a major problem in that all the terms that are really necessary to the franchise sound inherently silly when said out loud on screen, something that becomes clearly apparent when The Factionless appear on screen.  The film progresses to see Tris trying to protect her allies while proving her innocence of the massacre that killed her parents while emerging as part of an ancient prophecy that Kate Winslet’s Janine.  All this culminates in a sequence of tasks to unlock her potential that oddly seem perfectly suited to the narrative yet ill fitting to the film.

The film does make a valiant effort at making such an unsuitable narrative work but ultimately is nowhere near up to the task.  The first film felt like a standalone narrative despite the knowledge that it was part of something else whereas this film cannot get to grips with telling its own story, often feeling the need to look backwards or hint forwards almost apologetic at the lack of a narrative it is providing.  It is possible to overcome these hurdles.  Look at The Empire Strikes Back, a film that begins in the midst of an intergalactic struggle and ends with the heroes scattered and in various degrees of peril, yet it works as a standalone film in a way this one can only dream of.  Maybe in two years time and viewed in the context of a quadrilogy this may appear to be a better piece of work than it does now but that is a big maybe.

One thing that this cannot be faulted for is its ambition to flesh out a world that in the first film seemed very silly in the eyes of non-book fans.  The set up of the whole thing is incredibly simplistic, never quite catching hold of the dystopian hook that The Hunger Games franchise has so perfectly grappled with.  This film makes sure that, no matter how whistle-stop it is, the audience gets a tour of Amity and Candour, the as yet to be visited factions and their various leaders and figures.  While this does help to gain a little more understanding of the world in which the story is taking place it points out quite how silly and simplistic the division of labour so to speak is in this world.  It is becoming clear that audiences are beginning to tire of the whole dystopian future idea and I believe that this and The Maze Runner may well become the death knells of this fad, because pointedly the idea of Factionless, those who do not fit in, falls surprisingly flat when it should be the hard hitting centre of the film.

The third act simulation sequence in which Tris is manipulated to achieve the potential of her character is both the film’s highlight and a surprisingly disappointing part of the film.  If it had been done right this could have been a Hunger Games style central action set piece, taking up much of the film’s latter narrative as a real showstopper.  Unfortunately the rest of the narrative is littered with the scattershot alternation between character and story development and audience pleasing action sequences (sequences that, incidentally, are abysmal in 3D) and so what should really be the franchise’s chance to showboat falls flat on its face.  That is not to say that it is not technically rendered well, because it really is, especially the extended sequence of a burning house flying over a ruined city, but it just isn’t exposed enough to stay with you.

Shailene Woodley doesn’t help these big set piece moments because she just doesn’t have the skills to appear at ease as an action heroine in the way that a Jennifer Lawrence does, and so in those scenes she does appear a bit awkward.  She more than makes up for it in the less kinetic moments with an emotionally tortured performance that is probably a lot better than the material deserves, and one gets the feeling that the film series is clinging on to the coattails of her acting abilities in order to survive.  Conversely as romantic interest Four Theo James displays all the characteristics of being a reasonable action hero yet he cannot act the emotional scenes one jot and so these come off as incredibly one sided.  Despite being an increasingly weird fit for the part Kate Winslet is bizarrely compelling as the authoritarian ice queen Janine.  She benefits from her character’s exposure in the first film and so is able to make an impact here that the other big name stars like Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer could only dream of.  The real scene stealers are Miles Teller, Jai Courtney and Ansel Elgort who make the most of very limited screen time by being utterly memorable every time they appear.

The film’s pacing is all over the shop, taking so long to get going that at two hours it feels like a real slog, no doubt hindered by the lack of any real show stopping action closing sequence.  This is a very disappointing sequel that feels too preoccupied in setting things up than being its own film.  In that sense it is very similar to The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I and although I have higher hopes for the closure of that series than I do this one, it hasn’t lost me yet.  It feels as though several peripheral characters are being set up to go in some very interesting directions in the closing two chapters, and the end of the film really made me sit up and take notice, so despite the disappointment here there is certainly optimism to be taken from this.

* *

Home

“A Bright And Fun Yet Somewhat Lacking Kids Film”

Director – Tim Johnson

Starring – Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Steve Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Matt Jones

Screenplay – Tim J. Astle & Matt Ember

Cinematography – N/A

Score – Lorne Balfe

 

Length – 91 minutes

Certificate – U

Much has been made recently in certain corners of the cinema press about the ongoing struggles of the once mighty Dreamworks Animation Studios.  Though having never been a studio with the levels of originality and daringness of Pixar they have been able to bring through franchises like Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda.  Now though, with several of its tent pole properties becoming stale the onus is being put upon original properties, and with in my opinion poor movies like Turbo and Mr Peabody & Sherman underperforming the current climate of closures, cancellations and redundancies becomes more and more explainable.

Home is its only release this year, and it is an odd little film.  When an alien race known as The Boov display their supposed knack for running away from their enemies they settle on Earth, recolonising humanity into a series of horrible plastic looking communities in the Australian Outback, with it must be said Nazi like calculated efficiency.  With this really quite odd tone set the film swiftly becomes a mismatched buddy movie between Oh, the Jar Jar Binks of the Boov, ostracised because of his mistakes and clumsiness and Tip, a human mistakenly left behind.  They must go on a quest to return Tip to her mother’s side while at the same time cancelling an invitation Oh has accidentally emailed to the ruthless destroyers of worlds the Boov believe are their enemy.

The film’s story is already weird but is made even weirder by the central dynamic at the heart of the film.  If you think back to the animated classics of days gone by, right back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, animation often follows a pattern where more normal characters play a central role while the quirkier, more offbeat characters are there to serve as comic relief.  Look indeed to Frozen, the most successful animated movie of all time, where the key story was dealt with rather well by Elsa and Anna, yet much of the comedy came from Josh Gad’s great performance as Olaf The Snowman.  This film has a relatively small number of core characters for a children’s animated film, and subsequently Oh, who would traditionally be the secondary comic relief is thrust centre stage, however his function to induce laughter is not lessened, and so the constant stream of comic quirkiness very quickly becomes tiresome.  That is not to say that he is not well voiced by The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons, who brings his very leftfield  charm to Oh, while dealing expertly with the rather well written odd syntax pattern the Boov employ.  Meanwhile he forges a surprisingly strong relationship with Rihanna, whose voice is bizarrely well suited to the role of Tip, even if the music she provides the film with is ghastly.

Unfortunately this is where the positives end and the flurry of negatives begin to weigh the film down.  Aside from these two there are only another three major(ish) characters in the film, none of whom are given any real screen time and none of whom are utilised well when they are on screen.  Although Breaking Bad’s Matt Jones gets some funny lines Steve Martin is awful as Captain Smekday, leader of The Boov while Jennifer Lopez gives one of the most insipidly free of personality vocal performances in some time, making absolutely no impact at all on proceedings.  The animation is very bright and colourful, and will appeal greatly to the young audience to which this film appeals (note: slightly older children may be left a bit nonplussed by this film) and they will love the flying car powered by a seemingly nuclear slushy machine but to me it came off as tacky, cheap and nasty.  It looked almost as bad as the animation of The Lorax, and that level of fakeness was to my mind intended with that particular film.

Ultimately there is simply not enough story in the original source to sufficiently fill ninety minutes of entertaining animation.  By what seemed to be the end, as the quest’s goal was reached the film was starting to drag, but the sense of relief was short-lived as I realised that this had only taken an hour, and the film then took a meander down an utterly superfluous route seemingly only to cram its young audience full of life lessons before finally finishing.  I felt totally uninvolved by this extended coda masquerading as the third act and pretty much gave up on the film, although there were a few nice sci-fi references for the adults of that particular persuasion to appreciate.  Unfortunately I found that the film did not serve its young audience well at all, because despite how appealing Oh, Pig the cat and a flying car may be at the time, there is nothing here that will last long in their memories in the way that Aladdin, The Lion King and Toy Story have lasted in mine right from childhood which, after all is said and done, is surely the point of these films.

* *

The Voices

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“Really Speaks The Language Of Bold, Individual Cinema”

Director – Marjane Satrapi

Starring – Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick, Gemma Arterton, Jacki Weaver, Ella Smith

Screenplay – Michael R. Perry

Cinematography – Maxime Alexandre

Score – Olivier Bernet

 

Length – 104 minutes

Certificate – 15

Ryan Reynolds playing a schizophrenic factory worker in a dull small town whose aversion to his medication leads him to hear voices, most notably from his dog and cat, and who sees his squalid life as some kind of 1950s utopia enlivened further by the severed heads of the women he has killed talking to him from his fridge sounded bizarre in description to me.  What it actually is though is one of the smartest and funniest films of the year, and subsequently one of the best.

This feels to me like the kind of film that the Daniel Radcliffe starring Horns so desperately wanted to be towards the end of last year, capturing that fine line between out and out horror and very dark comedy.  The director who throughout his career found an ability to do this more than most, and yet never really got the credit for doing so was David Lynch, and this film clearly relies upon his influence as far as tone is concerned.  The setting in the small factory town amidst the towering pine forests all around it is hauntingly similar to Twin Peaks, and in Reynolds’ Jerry the film has a character who would be strange and off kilter enough to pass for an inhabitant of that particular town.  The way Lynch’s films have a strange preoccupation with being timeless, feeling of the age they were made in while constantly harking back to the 1950s is another thing that this film picks up on, as Jerry’s squalid apartment above a disused bowling alley becomes the poster feature for an Ideal Home feature circa 1955 in his drug free state.

The film works in every genre it plays about with, however briefly, and that is a lot, but it the depths of darkness in which it is willing to plunge that really took me by surprise.  It plays schizophrenia induced murders for laughs, as well as constantly making Jerry the subject of anxiety inducing social panic.  It is as gory as anything I have seen all year, yet the film plays with your mind as if it were Jerry’s, so you are never quite sure if what you are seeing is reality or psychosis induced fantasy.  I would struggle to properly classify it as it is not a comedy/horror in the way of Shaun Of The Dead but then neither is it a horror film that causes a few uneasy chuckles.  This is a film that creeps you out and makes your sides ache in equally plentiful measure.  The pinnacle of the film’s extremely high comic standard was the way that Jerry’s pets are written.  After a few minutes it becomes clear that they represent the twin moral arguments surrounding Jerry, characters that in cartoons would be represented by an angel and a devil on a character’s shoulders.  Reynolds voices both of these animals, as well as briefly a deer and a sock puppet, with Bosco, the St Bernard representation of ‘right’ sounding something like a hick town sheriff while Mr Whiskas, the vaguely satanic ginger tomcat has an angry Scottish voice and a genuinely sinister presence.  I don’t quite know where the inspiration came from for this but it really was a stroke of utter genius.

The film rests upon the shoulders of its central performance and, though I thought of Reynolds as an utterly wrong choice for the role his performance is nothing short of perfect.  A career spent making utterly naff romcoms and wholly unconvincing fantasy action blockbusters have hidden where his real talent lies, namely in being extremely creepy.  He may look like a high school jock with unnaturally good features which makes you expect charm, but look a little closer, as this film forces you to, and he has oddly dead eyed features that befit a serial killer.  Twinning this with a performance of stuttering nervousness in a role that has his character do utterly horrific things while still maintaining more than a degree of sympathy from this audience member points out the direction that this actor’s career should possibly go, as thus far it has been unremarkable to say the least.  He is ably supported by Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick doing their very best to live up to their stuck up Brit and apple-pie sweet girl next door personas while Jacki Weaver is the mistress of bringing a freaky quality to even the smallest of roles (look at Stoker).

It would have been very easy for a film like this to cop out and just play it conventional, which I was afraid it would do when it started delving into Jerry’s back-story.  Fortunately it realised the error of its ways and swiftly reverted back onto track, with everything unravelling and going wrong for the antihero in the final act in the time honoured way of the best farces.  What we are left with is one of the bravest films I have seen in some time and one of the most successful, with the closing credits scene a testament to just how weird this was willing to go.  It is very rare I see a film as willing to be as dark, silly and horrific as this, but every time I do, I only wish that more felt the same.

* * * *

The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya

“This Traditional Tale Is Told With Studio Ghibli’s Traditional Brilliance”

Director – Isao Takahata

Starring – (Japanese version/English dub) Aki Asakura/Chloe Grace Moretz, Takeo Chii/James Caan, Nobuko Miyamoto/Mary Steenburgen, Kengo Kora/Darren Criss, Atsuko Takahata/Lucy Liu

Screenplay – Isao Takahata & Riko Sakaguchi

Art Direction – Kazuo Oga

Score – Joe Hisaishi

 

Length – 137 minutes

Certificate – U

There are very few things you can utterly rely upon in cinema, Michael Bay to make utterly repellent movies and Terry Gilliam to make utterly baffling ones are two of them.  A third is that Studio Ghibli will time and time again bring about joy, sadness, elation and despair all in the time it takes for their latest piece of animated delight to play out on the screen.  That is certainly the case with The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya, Isao Takahata’s long in the making adaptation of ancient Japanese folktale The Tale Of The Bamboo Cutter.

I must confess that despite being genuinely excited in a way that I am for very few films I did have my doubts over this one.  The strange, very Japan-centric subject matter, the long gestation period and the departure from the traditional Ghibli style of animation left me a little concerned that I may be left cold, but all those fears were quickly allayed by an enthralling, enchanting piece that is one of the most wonderful looking things that I have had the pleasure to see on screen.  The story is indeed odd, seeing  a poor, elderly bamboo cutter find a tiny princess in a bamboo shoot.  Taking her home, he and his wife raise her to be a princess, aided by the gold and robes he also finds in bamboo.  Things become more difficult when his courtship of the high ranking officials as her perspective suitor clashes with her love of her childhood filled with nature, and her headstrong opposition to any match that he tries to make.

Of course the thing that has truly set this apart for me as one of the great Studio Ghibli films is not the subject matter but the look of the picture.  This is a very sparse style of animation that often leaves vast swathes of the screen blank which, rather than making it look like a rush job really concentrates the viewer’s attention on the main story.  It is not as bright or vibrant as most animations today are, instead it looks more like a watercolour painting, emphasising the hand crafted nature of the thing while still looking like one of the most gorgeous things around.  It is so hand crafted that you can even see the pencil marks amidst the animation, while the scenes where Kaguya runs are among the most phenomenally individualistic that I have come across.  All this leads it to feel evocative and timeless, and it does seem as though you are flicking through the pages of an old fairytale book, bringing this most bizarre memory of ancient Japan to life.

The strength of the film is the decision to put the focus on Kaguya rather than the Bamboo Cutter, as the original tale does.  Kaguya is a wonderfully headstrong character who continues a long line of very strong female characters from Studio Ghibli that sadly are still somewhat lacking in Western animation.  I still contend that showing a young girl films like Spirited Away and this will help them a lot in the long run.  Her character does bring about most of the little humour that the film offers with her handling of the five suitors and their ridiculous attempts to court her.  I must warn though that at this point the film, being an adaptation of a fairytale by someone other than Disney, does visit some quite dark places and this, coupled with the long and somewhat complicated nature of the story may make this a more adult film than one to show children, despite the U Certificate.  The lack of focus on the Bamboo Cutter is necessary as he is a rather ridiculous and at times extremely selfish and unsympathetic character who would not be a good access point to the film.

The Japanese cast does a great job to give the film a sense of timeless authenticity that rather bizarrely given their track record on such matters, the English dub version simply does not manage.  Despite my preference for the original subtitled version I do not usually have a problem with the dub versions, indeed I was astounded by the English language cast for The Wind Rises, yet this one seems oddly out of sync with the tone of the film.  Chloe Grace Moretz never quite fitted the titular character while Mary Steenburgen was a really bad choice as narrator.  Having seen the English version first I was disappointed but seeing the Japanese version showed to me how hard it is to translate such a traditional Japanese tale to Western ears.

Of course no Studio Ghibli review would be complete without effusively praising the score of Joe Hisaishi, the man who won my award last year for best score for The Wind Rises and who is, in my opinion the greatest film composer working today bar none.  This score is not as prominent as some have been but is wonderful just the same, perfectly complimenting the adoration of nature and the past that this film is so clearly promoting, while Kaguya’s playing of the koto seems to hark back to his great score for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.  It seems as though this could well be Takahata’s final film, just as The Wind Rises was Miyazaki’s.  It seems fitting that having both come to prominence with the double bill of My Neighbour Totoro, Miyazaki’s sweet, innocent ode to nature and Grave Of The Fireflies, Takahata’s heart-wrenching tale of war, things have come full circle with Miyazaki ending his career with the tragedy of war The Wind Rises while Takahata’s swansong is nothing short of an innocent look at a long forgotten Japan.  If this is his final film, it may not have the impact of the truly top tier Ghibli works (Grave Of The Fireflies, Spirited Away, The Wind Rises) but it is still one hell of a high note to bow out on.

* * * *

The Gunman

“All This Gunman Manages To Fire Is Blanks”

Director – Pierre Morel

Starring – Sean Penn, Jasmine Trinca, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance, Idris Elba

Screenplay – Don MacPherson & Pete Travis

Cinematography – Flavio Martinez Labiano

Score – Marco Beltrami

 

Length – 115 minutes

Certificate – 15

The Liam Neeson revival of fortunes following his conversion to action cinema has clearly been noted as it seems other critically acclaimed actors whose fortunes are waning are taking a similar route in search of Box Office gold.  The Gunman is Sean Penn’s effort to cash in on some of those riches as a former mercenary whose actions many years ago in war-torn Africa come back to haunt him as he is the target of an unsuccessful hit while his previous colleagues seem either in mortal danger or sinisterly plotting against him.

The problem with The Gunman is that it never seems to be able to settle on an idea of what it wants to be, whether it is aiming to be a serious piece of cinema detailing the nature and results of actions in conflict or whether it wants to be a silly all chasing and shooting action film.  The opening prologue set eight years prior to the main action has a Blood Diamond feel to it, examining the nature of the Civil War ridden African nation in which it is set with a very moralistic eye.  Even as the film zips forward into the present day it still feels like a film with higher than expected aspirations, a good cornerstone for reference would be Anton Corbijn’s existential thriller The American, starring George Clooney.  While I would have much preferred a film along these lines to the one that appeared on screen, it is as though the writers suddenly realised half way through that Penn wanted an all action comeback film and set about writing one.

As far as action films go this one is very silly and even more boring.  To give him his much deserved dues Sean Penn does look incredible for his age, better so that Neeson does in most of his films.  His craggy, tanned face gives the impression of a man that has seen and been through a hell of a lot in his life, and he wears a world-weary expression throughout proceedings, while he must have put some serious hours in at the gym to look quite the part of an ex-military man, such is the extent to which he is built.  Unfortunately the film does not reward this effort with adrenaline fuelled action set-pieces to make the most of.  The film’s main three sequences take place in a remote villa in the Spanish countryside (predominantly the wine cellar), the backstage area of an aquarium and the backstage area of a bull-ring.  Each and every one of these goes on for longer and longer than the last and, thanks to the restrictive nature of the various locations chosen, none of them feels at all kinetic so the idea of the action part of the film falls flat.  That is not to say that there weren’t some well choreographed fight sequences because there were but I did feel bored throughout.

A major complaint I have with many of the films of this ilk is that the star surrounds them self with lesser known acting talents to stand out but what happens is that there is no investment and quite often, they are acted off the screen by the lead.  Aside from Jasmine Trinca, as the wholly unnecessary and even less believable love interest (coincidentally when will they realise that these fifty something actors will not be attractive to women half their age on such a regular basis, it feels like the later Roger Moore Bond films have returned) the film is filled with A-List heavyweights.  Sean Penn’s intensity and humourlessness is one thing, but the utter misjudgements made by the array of talent on show here is astounding.  On the one hand Ray Winstone plays effectively the same role he has done for several years now, and his presence is comforting when you see Idris Elba swagger onto the screen for three inconsequential scenes, or when you see Mark Rylance reduced to a hysterical screaming mess or even worse, Oscar winner Javier Bardem searching and failing to find his chilling performance in Skyfall and so coming off as unintended comic relief.

The film sees Sean Penn’s character suffering from repetitive head trauma induced migraines, which I thought was a very brave thing to introduce to a film like this when it was.  However it becomes clear that the writers are willing to totally forget this innovation until it is needed as a plot device, cheapening the one bold move this film was willing to make.  This is  undoubtedly a generic action movie yet it is one that fails to bring any flair whatsoever, when the material had plenty of scope for it.  As the film failed to ever truly engage me and left me teetering permanently on the edge of boredom I would consider this a missed opportunity of the highest order.

* *

Wild Card

“Not Quite The Ace In The Pack”

Director – Simon West

Starring – Jason Statham, Michael Angarano, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Anne Heche, Milo Ventimiglia, Jason Alexander, Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci

Screenplay – William Goldman

Cinematography – Shelly Johnson

Score – Dario Marianelli

 

Length – 92 minutes

Certificate – 15

Wild Card purports to simply do what it says it does in the advertisements.  The question of whether it is a remake of the 1986 Burt Reynolds film Heat or a reinterpretation of the William Goldman source novel is up for debate, although since Goldman is credited as screenwriter on both versions it could be both.  This painstakingly modern updating of the story sees Jason Statham playing Nick Wild, a mysterious security contractor who knows the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas better than anyone, subsequently causing his hatred of the city.

The film sees him for lack of a better word babysitting a self made millionaire on a tourist trip around the Vegas casinos, while getting involved with a former friend’s dangerous quest to get even with the mobster who raped and beat her up.  All this plays out against his struggles with an over fondness of Blackjack and his determination to get out of Vegas for good.  This equates to more of a sequence of scenarios, some much better than others, rather than a fully formed narrative piece of cinema.

The better of these scenarios are when the film explores the dark and dangerous world of the mob, the first confrontation in a hotel suite culminating in a wince-inducing scene of torture that may have just taken the limits of decency too far, the second of which is an interrogation scene that chooses to utilise tension rather than unnecessary violence and works far better for that decision.  Unfortunately there are too many misses amongst these hits, with the unnecessary, unconnected opening moments used purely to introduce Nick to the audience  instead of introducing the plot a real low point.  At its worst I found the casino based gambling scenes to have the same flaws as this year’s The Gambler, in that they are all about displaying the style and flair of cinematographer Shelly Johnson instead of advancing the story.  The film has far too little action to see it through as a Jason Statham vehicle, although what scenes there are, however brief, are expertly choreographed and thrilling to watch.

The career of Jason Statham and its continued success story is a peculiar one.  On a technical level Statham is an excellent on screen fighter and stuntman, but his acting abilities, though charismatic, are profoundly limited.  He has proved himself time and again to be an extremely astute decision maker though, as more often than not he finds the perfect vehicle to suit his style.  This unfortunately is one of his poorer moments.  He does have moments when he shows flashes of the abilities that have made him such a cult figure but these are far too often tempered by the script.  His efforts to flash humour into the equation fail to work because there is nobody there to work with, as the comic sidekick played by Michael Angarano just doesn’t register at all, and the premise of the film is not ridiculous enough to see him through.  He is not helped by an average supporting cast headed by Milo Ventimiglia’s sneering gangster and Anne Heche’s waitress/croupier, who could well have been a decent character if given development.  At least the film has Stanley Tucci to give a typically brilliant single scene cameo as a mob affiliated hotel owner.

Wild Card was an extreme disappointment to me.  I went in expecting the kind of big, dumb fun Jason Statham often manages to being to the screen with ease, even in ropier titles such as Blitz or Homefront.  Whereas the more serious nature of a film like Run All Night suits someone like Liam Neeson’s particular skill set, Statham thrives on the ridiculously unbelievable action fare he has made his name with.  I still hold him in the highest regard and with Fast & Furious 7 and Spy on the not too distant horizon I’m sure my fix of The Stath will not be a long time coming.

* *

Must See Movies For April

The anticipation is ramped up to fever pitch now for this year’s much awaited blockbuster season.  April sees two of the biggest hitting franchises of the moment unleash their latest instalments upon a hopeful audience.  Aside from these twin behemoths bookending the month there are releases for several notable indie films, comedy sequels and period dramas to entice other demographics into the cinema, as well as a Keanu Reeves led action thriller.  Enjoy!

Fast And Furious 7

released 3rd April

The Fast And Furious franchise really is the Lazarus of modern film franchises.  After an enjoyable debut film right back in 2001 the series then segued into less than interesting directions, shedding characters on the way.  Reuniting the main cast in Fast 4, and then introducing Dwayne Johnson in Fast 5, retooling the franchise as high octane action pictures in the process has raised it to new levels of popularity.  Although the release of this is overshadowed by the death of Paul Walker and natural interest as to how filming got around that, more of the same seems on hand, with the introduction of Jason Statham offering another figure who attracts great fandom to the franchise.

While We’re Young

released 3rd April

Despite having never gotten along with the severe indie sensibilities of director Noah Baumbach, his last film Frances Ha was a real joy, albeit one that I am not desperate to revisit.  While We’re Young looks like his most commercial film to date, part latter day frat-pack reinvention and part influenced by Woody Allen.  With a quartet of bona-fide A-Listers (Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried) and a culture clash between bored mid-lifers and young hipsters at the very heart of the film, it looks like a sweet, funny film, and of course Driver is one of the men of the moment and watchable in absolutely everything.

 

The Duff

released 6th April

I am a sucker for a good teen high school comedy, which surprisingly is one of the genres that for me delivers the highest percentage of hits (think Mean Girls and Easy A).  Despite not boasting a variety of recognisable names in its cast it is led by Mae Whitman of Arrested Development fame.  As always the idea of this is ludicrous and although there is no great literary concept behind it like Easy A, Clueless or Ten Things I Hate About You, there seems to be enough sharpness, smartness and humour to see it through as a fun comedy.

Lost River

released 10th April

Having premiered at Cannes last year and being universally lambasted in the process I assume I am  in the minority desperately awaiting the release of Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut.  With an absolutely stunning cast made up of previous Gosling collaborators Christina Hendricks, Eva Mendes and Ben Mendelsohn and upcoming British stars Matt Smith, Saoirse Ronan and Iain De Caestecker all the footage I have seen is filled with evocative, surreal and disturbing images that seem to recall the very best of David Lynch.  This made my most anticipated films list of last year, and not even the negative press can dissuade my enthusiasm.

Avengers: Age Of Ultron

released 23rd April

I am an unashamed Marvel fan boy so the second instalment of their mega-franchise team-up has had me salivating since its announcement.  Returning are franchise stars Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and Samuel L. Jackson, to be joined by new additions Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany and James Spader among others.  The trailers make this look like a much darker film that the previous Avengers movie was, and a film that will have clear ramifications upon the vast film schedule announced between now and 2019.

Reviews: Suite Francaise, Run All Night, X + Y

Suite Francaise

“A Great Composition On The Impact Of War”

Director – Saul Dibb

Starring – Michelle Williams, Matthias Schoenaerts, Kristen Scott Thomas, Sam Riley, Ruth Wilson, Tom Schilling, Lambert Wilson, Harriet Walter, Margot Robbie, Alexandra Maria Lara

Screenplay – Matt Charman & Saul Dibb

Cinematography – Eduard Grau

Score – Rael Jones

 

Length – 107 minutes

Certificate – 15

Suite Francaise has to stand as one of my biggest surprises of the year so far.  Having spent months being subjected to the trailers that make it seem like yet another period romance it was only when the release came around that I learned the story behind the film, how it was written in secret by Irene Nemirovsky before she was deported and killed for being Jewish, with her manuscripts laying undiscovered for over 60 years.  Basically synopsised the film is a chronicle of what life in Nazi occupied France was like in a small town, following the influx of German soldiers and Parisian refugees, telling the story from all parts of society.

While Suite Francaise is a very good film it would for me work better as a six or eight part series, allowing the writers to better get into the lives of the characters.  The nominal lead is Michelle Williams’ Lucille, married to a well to do husband, absent at war, and an adulterer at home.  She lives with her formidable mother-in-law (Kristen Scott Thomas) but through her character the film offers a more expansive look at the townsfolk, from the lowly farmers who are her family’s tenants to the Jewish woman hiding in plain sight to the cowardly Viscount and Viscountess, while at the same time taking the time to explore matters from a German point of view.

If that sounds like a lot to take in that is because it is, and I did feel that although each of the little subplots worked nicely in its own little way they are for the most part sidelined and obscured by the main focus of the film, which is unfortunately its least interesting.  I cannot come away from this film without feeling a sense of admiration for director Saul Dibb and his team for truly embracing the potential scope of the cinematic medium, if maybe not quite succeeding in realising it.  This is a phenomenally well made film with excellent production design, made all the more noticeable by Eduard Grau’s glorious cinematography, while Rael Jones shies away from period tropes to deliver a distinctive, memorable score.  The film must also be commended for the way it gets around the conundrum of being an English speaking film in which characters speak French and German, by having French characters speaking English with English accents, German characters speaking German, or speaking in English with German accents when supposedly speaking French.  It may seem like a trivial thing to pick up on but it is noticeable as to how coherent an edge it gives the film.  Despite being trailered as a sun-dappled romance the film sets its stall out with a fantastic sequence of a German bomber attacking a refugee convoy, and continues to give the film a dark, despondent air worthy of a set of characters living under enemy rule.  This harshness and realism of tone was totally unexpected by me and the film was all the better for it.

The reason I am not clamouring my outright admiration for this film from the rooftops is that it is badly let down by a trite romantic centring that never felt like part of the wider canvas upon which this film is painted, and was not particularly well developed anyway.  The character of Lucille is by far and away the least interesting character of the film, some of which is down to the source but Michelle Williams doesn’t help matters.  Outside films like Brokeback Mountain and Blue Valentine I am constantly mystified by the admiration she has garnered throughout her career.  Although she is hampered  by an ill fitting voiceover that does not grant forgiveness to her awfully drippy and ineffectual performance that kills any hopes of chemistry with Matthias Schoenaerts stone dead.  Being lumbered as the improbable romantic lead causes problems for Schoenaerts’ performance too, as his character, the reluctant Nazi, seemed very interesting on paper but less so on screen.

The lack of anything interesting happening between these two characters affected the impact that the tremendous supporting cast could make.  My preference would be to have made the film an ensemble piece, lessening the dominance the primary story has and making more of the various others, all of which bring different wartime issues to the fore.  Kristen Scott Thomas steals every scene she is let near as the waspish, self entitled landowner, but goes A.W.O.L. for half the film as Williams and Schoenaerts take over.  Equally brilliant are Sam Riley as the disabled firebrand farmer and Ruth Wilson as his wife, struggling to make ends meet while fending off the unwanted attention of a German officer.  For me this was as deserving a central story of the film as any.  Meanwhile the stories of the characters played by Lambert Wilson, Harriet Walter and Alexandra Maria Lara are just as strong, but are not afforded enough screen time for the audience to make any real connection with them.

I was surprised at quite how much I liked this film for much of it, and disheartened that it shot itself in the foot quite as badly as it did. For me I have seen more than enough doomed period romances to know what is coming, and there has to be something really special about it to make it stand out and quite frankly, this one wasn’t even average.  It is such a shame that this is the focal point of an otherwise excellent wartime drama.  It reminded me greatly of books like Goodnight Mr Tom, books that captured the very essence of village wartime in Britain, although this obviously has a Gallic tone to it.  If it had just been that film this could well have been one of my films of the year, as it is the stifling effects of the love story mean that it is no more than a slightly above average period drama.

* * *

Run All Night

“A Liam Neeson Film That Won’t Have You Running For The Exit”

Director – Jaume Collet-Serra

Starring – Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Ed Harris, Vincent D’Onofrio, Common, Boyd Holbrook, Genesis Rodriguez, Nick Nolte

Screenplay – Brad Ingelsby

Cinematography – Martin Ruhe

Score – Junkie XL

 

Length – 114 minutes

Certificate – 15

No sooner than the utterly wretched Taken 3 has left our screens does Run All Night, the latest example of Liam Neeson’s staggering and somewhat bewildering latter day transformation into an action hero, take its place.  This sees him reteaming with Unknown and Non-Stop director Jaume Collet-Serra to play Jimmy Conlon, a washed up mob hitman whose criminal past has alienated him from his son (Kinnaman) and who gets by thanks to the kindness of mob boss and childhood friend Sean (Harris).  All this comes to an end when a petty feud ends with Jimmy killing Sean’s wayward son to save his own, before going on the run for the night to outsmart and outrun the combined might of the mob and the police.

There was a point last year when Neeson starred in A Walk Among The Tombstones, which was just as dumb as much of his most recent work but it allowed him to display some of his long since forgotten acting abilities.  Run All Night is closer in tone to that film than it is to the Taken series, although it isn’t as light on the action and still has plenty of chase scenes, punch ups and gun play to satisfy the core audience for these films.  I have always found that since his rebirth as an ageing action man the best Liam Neeson films have been those he has made with Collet-Serra (save for The Grey) and that is a pattern that certainly continues here.  Although this is just as generic and predictable as everything he does these days, and contains the usual tick box list of traits that these films carry (he plays an alcoholic, is estranged from at least one member of his family and plays the entire film in his leather jacket) it is not restricted by a stupid example of studio interference demanding a 12A Certificate, and so there is some fun to be had with the violence of the film.

It treads a fine line of blending the more character driven side of the film with the need to be a testosterone fuelled action movie.  There is a moment when it suddenly dawns upon you that you are actually beginning to care for this washed up hitman and the tentative relationship he is building with his estranged son, even if the film does spoil itself by opening with the closing scene before flashing back.  Neeson himself has said in the promotion for this film that he doesn’t expect to be playing these roles for longer than a couple of years more and this does feel like the first steps towards a rehabilitation and reintegration to the kinds of circles in which he was moving prior to 2008.  Amidst all this though are some really well done action sequences.  Sure any film can do a high speed police pursuit followed by a shoot-out convincingly, while no film can do Liam Neeson doing parkour convincingly, yet it takes well used scenes like a subway confrontation or a chase amidst a forest and gives them a vigour while the central scene depicting a game of cat and mouse with a hitman in a burning apartment block is extremely well done with excellent stunt work to boot.

There is not a lot left to say about Neeson’s acting in these films, suffice to say that no matter how terrible the films he releases are he remains a strangely convincing action hero.  There are flashes here maybe not of the top tier work he did early on in his career in films such as Schindler’s List and Michael Collins but certainly reminders that he is a serious actor.  He seemed to be trying to do that in A Walk Among The Tombstones but, like so many of the films he has done of late, a sub-standard supporting cast has left him hampered.  Here he no longer has to deal with badly accented villains but has Ed Harris to play off and while their confrontations may not quite be De Niro and Pacino they bring a not entirely warranted sense of gravitas to proceedings.  Harris is basically reprising his role from A History Of Violence here but if you cast your mind back and remember how terrifying he was there you will see how good an asset he is here.  While Joel Kinnaman is not exactly Mr Charisma he is able to hold his own with Neeson while Vincent D’Onofrio and Nick Nolte are horrendously underused as Common threatens to steal the film as a chillingly cold and clinical hitman.

Run All Night is just as ludicrous as I expected it to be but it is still entertaining at the same time.  It never quite achieves what it so clearly wants to by striking a balance between the necessary action and the luxury of character development, and I did enjoy it much more in the run up to it eschewing any sense of character in favour of action completely.  Worth the time and effort, although it doesn’t need to be pushing two hours, this is a step in the right direction for Neeson.

* * *

X + Y

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“The Perfect Equation For A Truly Wonderful Film”

Director – Morgan Matthews

Starring – Asa Butterfield, Sally Hawkins, Rafe Spall, Eddie Marsan, Jo Yang

Screenplay – James Graham

Cinematography – Danny Cohen

Score – Martin Phipps

 

Length – 112 minutes

Certificate – 12A

X + Y is one of those British films that just effortlessly works seemingly without even trying.  The film, shot in Sheffield, Cambridge and Taiwan is centred around the unfamiliar world of the Mathematics Olympiad.  The centre of the film is Nathan, a young man with a form of Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome driven further away from sociality by the tragic death of his father and the painful inability of his mother to understand him.  Driven by a love of numbers and patterns and inspirational teacher Mr Humphreys he is selected as part of the UK team for the Olympiad, something that will forcibly drive him from out of his shell.

This plot is clearly far-fetched and more than a little unbelievable but the film never feels anything less than believable, even in its final act when it starts to conform to all the stereotypes of British movies, and it does this on the back of a truly well deserved sense of good will developed by a joyous script.  As someone who has a key knowledge of the Autistic Spectrum I have become attuned to how sensitively it must be handled on film, indeed last week there was the intolerably distasteful way the Dave Franco character was mocked and belittled in Unfinished Business.  Often I find films overplay the extent to which characters like this are disconnected from society, or take the Rainman approach of making the central character some card-counting savant.  Morgan Matthews and James Graham clearly have a similar understanding of these characters, as Nathan comes across as a nuanced, genuine character, experiencing all the emotions and issues that typical teenagers go through but experiencing them in a way that no other teenager would.  Similarly there are two or three other autistic characters in minor roles and these are dealt with as tactfully as Nathan, never being denigrated to something to point and laugh at.

Despite it being a totally alien world to me the world in which the maths geniuses inhabited felt just as normal to me as the scenes set in my home city of Sheffield.  The character of Nathan is given just enough introduction before being plunged into this foreign situation and into the unlikely double act with Jo Yang’s character.  In a role that is naturally aloof and at times unsympathetic due to its lack of any real discernible emotion Asa Butterfield delivers a truly sublime performance as Nathan, and cements himself as a true rising star of British cinema today.  His off kilter looks and bright blue yet oddly blank eyes fit the role of Nathan well, and he delivers a performance of such nervousness, at times bordering on tortured, that you truly believe in the fears and discomforts that the character is facing.  While watching it all I could think that for an actor, someone who is naturally confident and extroverted, this kind of closed, unshowy performance must be one of the hardest things to do such is the way it is going totally against their natural flair and so he must be applauded for this, as indeed must be the casting department for finding an actor to play the younger Nathan (Edward Baker-Close) who looks so like Butterfield that I was convinced that the filmmakers had used Benjamin Button style CGI.  The chemistry shared between Butterfield and Jo Yang makes their unlikely and I guess unnecessary romance more than a superfluous plot strand and very quickly ingrained into the necessary fabric of the film.

The film constantly treads that fine line between being endearingly charming and sweetly funny and somewhat harsher and more tragic, and it is the more experienced heads among the cast that allow this to be the case.  The oddness of the Maths camp is alleviated somewhat by Eddie Marsan, doing away with his trademark intensity somewhat to deliver his best impression of a totally out of touch teacher on a school trip, with the awful wardrobe and the demeanour that fluctuates between frustration and bonhomie almost ceaselessly.  The real star of the film, the most tragic character and yet the most uplifting is Sally Hawkins.  Playing Nathan’s mother she is clearly torn apart by the twin heartaches of the loss of her husband and subsequent loneliness and her difficulty to connect and manage her son.  The scene in which she argues unsuccessfully with the proprietors of a restaurant to accommodate Nathan’s particular needs and his lack of gratitude at her failure is heartbreaking, as indeed is almost every scene in which she appears.  She is as good an actress as there is out there today, and here forges a great relationship with Rafe Spall’s character, a tortured self loathing MS sufferer.  Spall is as good as I have seen him here, capturing the blackly comic self loathing of the Michael Caine role in Educating Rita.  His character may be more cut and dried on the surface but Spall adds depth to it.  The film allows these supporting characters the space and screen time to develop and be developed by their actors, and act in their own stories rather than just be a framework for Nathan’s, and is all the better for it.

The film disappointingly lost some of its narrative magic in the final act, choosing somewhat bizarrely to start to follow the well trodden narrative path of the sporting underdog movie, somewhat undermining the drama that had been built up to here.  For me this didn’t do the film anywhere near as much harm as it could have, simply because the performances and writing of character had by this point made character my paramount concern, with narrative a  distant second.  Many do bemoan the state of British cinema, but it keeps proving that with writing, directing, acting and technical talent such as that on display in this truly wonderful film, there is nothing to worry about.

* * * *

Reviews: Chappie, Still Alice, Unfinished Business, Kill The Messenger, Hyena

Chappie

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“Blomkamp Sends On Screen A.I. In An Exciting New Direction”

Director – Neill Blomkamp

Starring – Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Yo-Landi Visser, Ninja, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Auret, Sigourney Weaver

Screenplay – Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell

Cinematography – Trent Opaloch

Score – Hans Zimmer

 

Length – 120 minutes

Certificate – 15

A new Neill Blomkamp film is increasingly becoming a reason for fans of science fiction to become very excited.  District 9 was as good a debut as any in the past few years while there was enough good stuff in Elysium to hide its flaws.  The fact is that Blomkamp is a science fiction director of an increasingly rare breed, one that understands that science fiction of the highest order is rooted in ideas and allegory rather than action set-pieces, so the prospect of his forthcoming Alien movie is wonderful.

With Chappie Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, his co-writer are working in the same area as Alex Garland was in Ex Machina, exploring the prospect and subsequent issues that Artificial Intelligence would bring with it.  Set in a not too distant future Johannesburg policed by programmed robots that take a hard line approach to crime fighting.  When the robots’ creator (Dev Patel) uses one of these for an unauthorised A.I. test things go wrong, and the robot, now named Chappie, falls into the possession of a street gang who warp his child’s mind to their criminal aims.  Meanwhile Patel’s rival (Hugh Jackman, complete with mullet and awful wardrobe) sees  this as the perfect chance to get his project, a lumbering all out assault vehicle entitled The Moose into the field.

This is Blomkamp certainly back to somewhere near his best, although in a way which we have not yet seen from him.  In less safe hands a film about an artificial intelligence being with more than a hint of comedy and a tone and style taken from the South African ‘Zef’ rap movement would be a hard sell, and on paper it sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen but ultimately the parts of the film that don’t work are not the pars you would expect seeing that summary.  It benefits from being a very balanced piece of storytelling.  It is clear that unlike Garland, who only saw A.I. as something to be frightened of and a manipulator of the less refined men around it, Blomkamp clearly yearns for Chappie to be something other than a fantastic creation but something made reality, although he notes that at the same time such a creation would promote fear, especially if it fell into the wrong hands.  To tell this story Blomkamp has placed his audience right in the heart of a familiar tale, that of Robocop.  The similarities of a sentient police force, with a bizarre hope of humanity from a machine amidst the brutal environment of a decaying, crime ridden urban environment cannot go unnoticed, nether can the similarities between The Moose and Robocop’s ED-209.

The fact is that what could well be a simple action film about a childlike robot is written in such a way that the action is secondary, for this is primarily a story of love, friendship and humanity, but one that has been marketed poorly as an action film.  As one would expect the design is fabulous, but the design of the robot is one thing, the bringing it to life is a complete other story and it takes a special talent to do so.  Fortunately for this film long-time Blomkamp collaborator Sharlto Copley gives an out of this world motion capture performance that is up there with the best work of Andy Serkis, the pioneer of the form.  Making the most of a script that allows him to grow and mature into the character as the film progresses given the childlike beginnings of the character Copley creates a truly memorable character.  Even if the character was mute I would still be impressed with the way he has captured the mannerisms of a newborn, indeed when he is first revealed he seems to be channelling Bambi on ice.  It is his vocal performance that won me over though, capturing the childish wonderment of the character yet evolving it into the confusion, petulance und lack of surety of a teen caught in a moral minefield, all the while keeping in with the humorous tone of the film.  Similarly great but even more surprisingly were Yo-Landi Visser and Ninja, members of rap group Die Antwoord, who play gangsters.  Fears that this was stunt casting are immediately allayed and they both, Yo-Landi especially, help to craft the moral minefield the film treads, while their music fits the film very well, perfectly combining with Hans Zimmer’s score to give the film a pumped up, hyper feel.  Meanwhile Dev Patel makes the most of a fairly bland role while Blomkamp’s strange inability to memorably write villains continues, as neither Jackman or Sigourney Weaver are given anything of note to do.

I never really expected anything like this from Chappie.  This is a great science fiction film, a great comedy film, a great action film with truly memorable sequences, a great drama and a great film about the meaning of life.  I do wish that the villains were a bit more fleshed out, and I do wish that the news footage angle that starts the film off have not been used, but these are in my opinion small qualms in an otherwise very positive review of an unexpectedly great film, although it must be said that it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Ex Machina, although few this year will.

* * * *

Still Alice

“A Heartbreaking Performance Enlivens An Otherwise Lacklustre Film”

Director – Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland

Starring – Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish

Screenplay – Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland

Cinematography – Denis Lenoir

Score – Ilan Eshkeri

 

Length – 101 minutes

Certificate – 12A

Finally emerging onto British screens after all the awards frenzy has gone away, there is the danger that this film will be judged in light of its successes rather than as the film it is.  Going in to this I had obviously seen all the awards nominations, seen that Julianne Moore’s performance was the only thing that the major awarding bodies were deeming awards worthy, and so had in my mind that this would be an average film about a destructive illness that contained a wonderful performance.

My thoughts coming out of the film were that it was a film that is certainly buoyed by Julianne Moore’s simply spellbinding turn as Alice Howland, the titular victim of Early-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease but was not in itself an average movie, although saying that not a great one.  What really surprised me coming out were some of the directorial tricks and tics that allow it to be a film with much greater artistic ambition than I had expected, or indeed that it can live up to.  Early on there is a scene where Alice goes for a jog and suffers what must be a terrifying fogging up of the mind, losing all recognition of the familiar environment around her.  This is done in a fantastic pan shot that quite simply yet very effectively blurs the background, leaving only Moore in focus, cleverly using visuals to allow the audience into Alice’s thoughts.  Later on she visits a neurologist in a scene that I would expect from Steve McQueen, in which the neurologist appears off screen as just a disembodied voice.  The camera never moves from Alice’s face, we see her reactions, but never her inquisitor in a single uncut scene.  I would have liked the subsequent scenes in this location to have followed the same path, to give a greater feeling of the degeneration of Alice’s mind, but unfortunately after this initial moment of brilliance the filmmakers revert to more conforming scenes.

Having not read the book upon which this is based I get the impression that it is a better book than this is film, and that the film benefits immensely from the strength of the source material.  Despite only being 100 minutes long and having to quickly get into Alice’s degeneration there feels to be more material than there actually is introducing the audience to the real Alice Howland, rather than the ever hollowing shell that we spend most of the film with.  Similarly the film has no real sense of steady linear narrative, flitting from one scenario to another, they may be moments apart they may be months apart.  It feels like what Lisa Genova has done is create a book that tries its best to capture the befuddled mind of someone with dementia.  There are missteps, such as making Alice a world renowned expert in linguistics.  This just feels like the story is dealing too much in cruel irony, and using someone whose use of words is greater than most to amplify the effects of the disease.  Would a factory worker not have been just as effective, if not more so?

Having skirted around the issue in order to give the film as fair and balanced a review as it deserves I must now turn my gaze to the elephant in the room.  Quite simply Julianne Moore is magnificent, giving a performance that for me totally justifies the hype surrounding it and the awards bestowed upon her.  She has long been one of the very finest actresses of her generation and with this performance she deserves to be crowned the very finest.  The film rests upon her, and needs her to perform in order for it to succeed on its own terms.  Moore gives a selfless performance, there is no grandstanding, no make-up, so she actually looks as someone going through this would.  She flits ceaselessly between vague distance and terrified panic as her senses start to fail her and it is truly harrowing and heartbreaking to watch.  She plays the role with the same dignity she has displayed in the film’s publicity, and this role is a credit to all those who have suffered this horrible illness.  Unfortunately despite their strong performances the supporting cast are given nothing to work with.  Alec Baldwin does well with a role that is surprisingly less sympathetic than I had expected while Kristen Stewart does some fantastic acting as that most clichéd character, the rebellious artsy twenty something.  I felt sorry for Kate Bosworth, who began to get the most interesting character arc of the supporting cast, one I was intrigued immensely by before it is forgotten, while Hunter Parrish spends much of the film M.I.A. as Alice’s son.

There is a moment towards the end of the film as it is beginning to lag when a sequence of events kicks into motion that threatens the possibility of a truly shocking conclusion.  I am not going to say whether such a conclusion came about or not but that when this sequence had ended, I was not sure whether I was happy with the path it had chosen to take or not.  All I know is that I am glad that the typical Hollywood moment of triumphalism where Alice makes a successful speech to the Alzheimer’s Society was not the conclusion, a move I am sure executives would have clamoured for but would have felt like a cheat move to give the film a happy ending.  This is a braver film than that, a film that clearly has a sensitive and deep understanding of its subject but overall there is nothing more than Julianne Moore about it to distinguish it from other films of its ilk.

* * *

Unfinished Business

“Unfinished Business, Totally Finished Career”

Director – Ken Scott

Starring – Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, Sienna Miller, Nick Frost, James Marsden, June Diane Raphael

Screenplay – Steven Conrad

Cinematography – Oliver Stapleton

Score – Alex Wurman

 

Length – 91 minutes

Certificate – 15

The prolonged slide of Vince Vaughn’s career shows no sign in slowing up in this woeful excuse of a comedy.  After The Internship Vaughn has made another film that seems oddly preoccupied with the perilous financial climate in which we are living, as three struggling businessmen from a start-up company try to make a career saving deal.  Pity Vaughn didn’t try to make a career saving film.

I treat the cinema as a place to escape the hardships of everyday life, to kick back and indulge in a piece of fiction.  The same could be said of most people, however those less committed to the cinema are more picky, and for escapism comedy is one of the more prominent genres.  Why then do the makers of this film think that reminding their audience that out there things are hard and times are tough?  I thought that Vaughn had reached the ultimate trough in his career when he and Owen Wilson spent two hours advertising tax avoiders Google but I hadn’t reckoned on Unfinished Business.

This is a film that wouldn’t know a funny set up if it watched the entire back catalogues of Billy Wilder, Richard Pryor and Bill Murray.  This is a film that doesn’t know the difference between bad taste and just rancid putridity.  For example; Dave Franco plays a character who is introduced as a bit dim, and who has a supposedly funny last name (Pancake) that the film milks for all that it has.  I wasn’t laughing at this whatsoever for the first hour fortunately, because at about that time the film declares out of nowhere that he has learning difficulties, totally not a laughing matter.  The film’s set up sees the trio arrive in Berlin at the same time as Oktoberfest, the G8, the Berlin Marathon and a gay fetish festival.  At first you think that this laborious set up is only there so Vaughn will hilariously have to stay in a live in art exhibition but no, the set up allows Tom Wilkinson of all people to get extremely drunk and high and decide to get a divorce, it allows our three protagonists to get tear gassed, it gives Vaughn a self congratulatory pat on the back overcoming the odds moment and it allows for the abysmal scene where Vaughn has to have a conversation in a gay club amidst numerous glory-holes, which concludes with Dave Franco falling face first into a penis, while Nick Frost turns up in leather bondage gear.

Meanwhile, in a totally out of step with the rest of the film side plot, Vaughn’s character has to come to terms with being an absent father, and help his overweight son cope with horrific bullying at school while dealing with his daughter being a bully.  All this is done in a trite, sentimental manner aimed only at creating sympathy for the increasingly egotistical Vaughn, and even with this in mind it doesn’t prevent the writers from throwing in some very uncomfortable jokes.

It is astonishing that looking back ten years or so Vince Vaughn was on an amazing run of films that included Old School, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and Wedding Crashers, all of which still make me laugh today.  Now his career is looking increasingly confined to awful comedies, which are beginning to lose their strange box office pull.  He really needs True Detective to give him a shot in the arm if he is to salvage anything from the wreckage of his career.  Elsewhere quite what possessed Wilkinson, Franco, Miller, Marsden and Frost to participate in this is beyond me, I just hope that the money they earned allows them to make films they want to make in the future.  Hateful and utterly without merit.

*

Kill The Messenger

“All The President’s Men For The Modern Age”

Director – Michael Cuesta

Starring – Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Paz Vega, Michael Sheen, Barry Pepper, Andy Garcia, Yul Vazquez, Ray Liotta, Tim Blake Nelson, Michael Kenneth Williams, Joshua Close, Richard Schiff,

Screenplay – Peter Landesman

Cinematography – Sean Bobbitt

Score – Nathan Johnson

 

Length – 112 minutes

Certificate – 15

In the high octane world of 21st Century cinema films which see a protagonist fighting against the greater forces of what is wrong to prove what is right are incredibly rare.  Sure we all like our big budget piece of popcorn fodder, but films that hark back to the 1970s conspiracy thrillers are just as exciting, albeit a much rarer breed today.  That is what makes Kill The Messenger such a delight.  Set in the mid 1990s it sees small time journalist Gary Webb stumble from a rather unpleasant story defending the property rights of drug barons into the biggest scoop of his career, that the US Government may have been responsible for the influx of drugs into America in the 1980s to prop up the South American nation of Nicaragua.

The film has a feeling of authenticity about it that lends itself to a great plausibility of narrative in spite of the one man journalistic crusade being portrayed.  Notoriously badly portrayed throughout cinema, this film makes the exception when it comes to the newsroom, one of the centres of much of the drama.  This isn’t a place where people are shouting about integrity, waving papers around or flustering over deadlines, but an actual place of work with extras seeming to do actual work.  Despite what it initially seems this is like any other workplace, a hive of bureaucracy initiated by the ever dependable Oliver Platt in a way that feels truly accurate.  Not since Hoffman and Redford played those famed journalistic crusaders for truth Woodward and Bernstein has journalism been so well portrayed on film.  This sense of realism seeps through to the more expansive locations, through the banana republic prisons and side streets right to the corridors of power in Washington.  There was a danger that in the face of such a solid grounding these scenes would come across as too artificial but they do not, and help to tell a compelling story very well.

The film’s narrative is very compelling in the way that it immediately lets you know that something is very awry at the top, simply because tales like this are not put on screen if there isn’t a bit of juicy scandal for self-righteous Hollywood executives to bleat about, even twenty years after the fact.  The film blends real footage with the drama to depict certain parts of the film, most notably the outcry from the black communities in places such as South Central Los Angeles for the influx of life wrecking drugs on their streets.  Many people gave Selma an easy ride this year in my opinion as an apologist film for black persecution in America’s recent past, but in my eyes the gritty documentary style feel that this film gives another, more pertinent aspect of the subjugation of minorities in America than that over-praised movie.  It is funny how the film can continue to be a coherent piece of work despite switching from courtroom to newsroom to home life to South American quest.  Only in its final act when it adds some slightly unnecessary scope to the journalistic world of mid 1990s America does the film lose its otherwise very cutting edge.

Of course a film can have all the scope it wants and succeed in portraying that scope wonderfully yet fail because of a badly constructed leading character.  I have no knowledge of the story here or the man behind it but suffice to say that Gary Webb is as complete a character as you will see on screen all year.  In just a few scenes the film gives him a rounded, if very strained and flawed home life, and believing in a character at his most intimate is half the battle to believe in him anywhere else.  Some may see the recklessness and jovial image as a filmic conceit and it may well be, but to me it felt like the character’s actual personality was coming across on screen.  Much kudos must go to Jeremy Renner for bringing Webb wonderfully to life and giving a fantastic portrayal of a fascinating, brave man.  Some have been very sniffy about his perceived abilities and he has shut himself off in big budget franchises of late but boy can he act, as within two hours he really does run the gamut of emotions, culminating in a fantastic final scene.

Renner is given great support from Rosemarie DeWitt as his wife, with whom he has a great instant chemistry, and two fantastic performances from Platt and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as two of the actors who help to bring the newsroom to life.  Despite the starry cast they are mostly just cameos, albeit very good ones.  True some are a bit obvious (Michael K. Williams as a gangster, Andy Garcia as a Latin gangster, Michael Sheen as a smooth talking politician) but are still good, while Tim Blake Nelson and Barry Pepper are both fantastic as a pair of lawyers who enter the narrative at various junctures.

The mistake films like this have made of late is to feel the need to go high octane in order to create some material for the trailer to entice an entirely different audience in.  This film hasn’t done that, hasn’t sacrificed artistic integrity for box office success, nor has it inserted one jarring scene that lets the film down, but has created a fascinating narrative that had me as on the edge of my seat as any Fast & Furious, Bourne or Mission: Impossible film would.  This is a film that has nothing spectacularly groundbreaking in it, but does everything to a very high standard, a standard that comes through in the finished product.

* * * *

Hyena

“For A Film Called Hyena There Are Few Laughs Here”

Director – Gerard Johnson

Starring – Peter Ferdinando, Stephen Graham, Orli Shuka, Gjevat Kelmendi, Richard Dormer, MyAnna Buring, Elisa Lasowski, Neil Maskell, Tony Pitts

Screenplay – Gerard Johnson

Cinematography – Benjamin Kracun

Score – Matt Johnson

 

Length – 112 minutes

Certificate – 18

Hyena is yet another of those British crime thrillers that goes out of its way to tell and show its audience just how horrible and scary a place the London underworld can be.  Peter Ferdinando is Michael, the type of dinosaur cop that you would be sure wouldn’t exist in the politically correct nonsense of a society in which we live in today.  Despite heading up a sickeningly chauvinistic drugs squad he finds himself drafted onto a task force aimed at two people trafficking Albanians, with whom Michael is in league.

Within ten minutes of the film starting four policemen had done untold damage to the patrons of a sleazy nightclub with their nightsticks and a Turkish gangster had been hacked to death with a machete.  Now I am not one to campaign against violence in the cinema, just last week we saw the release of the similarly gritty Catch Me Daddy, which contains moments of appalling violence, but in the context it seems right.  Here I found that director Gerard Johnson didn’t need to be half as graphic as he was, or indeed include half the violence that he does.  About half way through the unbearably grim film, when he literally rubs salt into the wounds of those bothered by the violence, I genuinely got the idea that he was taking a form of sadistic pleasure in putting both his cast and his audience through the wringer as much as he was.

The film may be a much smarter piece of work than I give it credit for, but unfortunately the narrative took second fiddle for me in the midst of all the beatings, stabbings, rapes and torture that was unnecessarily dragged onto the screen.  The plot was incredibly hard to follow, but I think it centred upon drug trafficking routes and who got a cut from the business they brought.  The film created far too many plot strands than it knew how to do with, which was exemplified by an astonishingly unsatisfactory closing shot.  Elsewhere it was written so poorly that I had to catch my breath at times given the giant leaps I had to make to keep up with the many plots.  I get the feeling that Johnson thinks that his depiction of the London underworld takes inspiration from David Cronenberg’s wonderful Eastern Promises, but what it actually is is Guy Richie without the wit.

Peter Ferdinando actually does a very good job playing the conflicted cop at the centre of it all, even if it is one of the more thankless tasks of the year.  He is decked out in all the paraphernalia one associates with a dodgy London cop, leather jacket, lank, greasy hair and world weary expression and is never allowed to do anything to take his character anywhere away from the stereotypes.  I get the feeling that the performance is strong enough to portray the conflict of the character, but unfortunately the script never let me understand exactly what the conflict was.  Stephen Graham is surprisingly uninspired and more than a bit flat in what could potentially have been a firecracker of a role.  No matter how silly a film it is, the Jason Statham/Paddy Considine starring Blitz was a much more watchable film set in this sort of world, albeit that film could never be accused of aiming for realism.

Finishing on a similarly serious note to which I started, on the evidence of this I don’t think I’d very much like to be a woman in Gerard Johnson’s world.  To call this film misogynist and outdated in its sexual politics is to be kind.  Here women are to be ogled at, hence the numerous unnecessary scenes set in strip clubs.  There is not one strong female character here, they are either objects to be trafficked, which I guess is within keeping of the film’s story, while even the partners of the cops are shown as nothing but objects to have sex with in the midst of a cocaine binge.  This film apparently takes place in a world where women are not allowed to be police officers, as I didn’t see one throughout the film.  I wasn’t  aware that Life On Mars had become a reality in 2015.  There is a flashiness and style to the film that hints at some promise from first time director Gerard Johnson, however I worry that his deeply troubling attitudes to both violence and women could come to hold him back.

* *

Reviews: It Follows, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Focus, Catch Me Daddy, The Boy Next Door

It Follows

!!! Film Of The Week !!!

“This Modern Horror Classic Will Follow You Into Your Nightmares”

Director – David Robert Mitchell

Starring – Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Lili Sepe, Olivia Luccardi, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary

Screenplay – David Robert Mitchell

Cinematography – Mike Gioulakis

Score – Disasterpeace

 

Length – 100 minutes

Certificate – 15

Horror is the most frustrating genre in cinema, because at its best it can produce the films that reside longest and most potently in your head, but at its worst it proves to be the ideal breeding ground for lazy rip-offs and countless unnecessary sequels.  Recently US horror cinema has been in a particularly low place, oscillating between the unsubtle jump scares and the found footage rubbish that have been polluting cinema screens in recent years.  Fortunately It Follows does not follow that pattern, it is reminiscent of former horror glories but is all of its own.  This could be the best horror film of the 21st Century.

The best thing about It Follows is that despite the obvious homage it is paying to the work of John Carpenter it is the most original thing I have seen for years.  The film revolves around nineteen year old Jay, a college student living in the Detroit suburbs who has a casual fling with an older man.  After they first have sex he incapacitates her with chloroform, ties her to a wheelchair and explains to her that something no-one else can see will now follow her.  It can appear as anything, cannot run, can be passed further down the line by having sex with someone, and cannot be gotten rid of.

Almost everything about this film is sheer perfection.  When one thinks of horror one tends to think of teens in trouble, stalked by some ghoulish creature with some atrocious way of killing them.  The cold opening of this film shows just that, a girl running in a state of undress from her house, terrified by some unknown entity, before driving off in a panic.  We then see her making a tearful farewell phone from a lake shore before the film cuts to her torturously mutilated body.  We never know her name, we never know her history, we don’t know what, who, how or why this has happened to her.  The mystery only heightens the expectation of something truly special.

Something special, innovative and reverential is what the film delivers in bucketloads.  Sex has always played a major role in horror movies, just think back to all the symbology of all the slasher films, each killer a man with a huge bladed object, chasing the virginal teen dressed in white.  Back in the 1990s Wes Craven’s postmodern classic Scream made a point of showing that it was only the whiter than white teen girl that ever survived the final rule, so set in stone are the rules of horror cinema.  This does something much more daring and unsettling with the prominent theme of sex, by making it the cause, the cure, and the major plot point.  Despite never knowing what the villain is here, only that it manifests as anything and everything, the knowledge that it is caused by sex should send a chill up everybody’s spine.  This is the only film to have stuck with me in such an uneasy, unsettling way in quite some time.  The idea of the villain as some form of sexually transmitted disease is an astonishingly potent one and ought to be cinema’s best prophylactic endorsement ever, if the characters weren’t already using one.

What worked just as well as all this was the way the characters were portrayed, and the world in which they inhabit.  I often find horror films guilty of existing only in a rose tinted version of small town America long gone, where everyone knows everyone and life is just peachy.  This is set in the suburbs of Detroit, a city famous for its decline into poverty and violence, which come through somewhat here.  Parents are almost totally absent from the film, and rather than these teenagers sounding the way adults think teenagers sound, living in rooms with enough electrical equipment to populate a medium size branch of Currys and doing nothing other than partying and going to the mall, the teenagers here feel like actual people.  No film I can recall has captured the ennui of 99% of teenage life, aimlessly lounging about, dossing on the sofa watching movies or going on pointless walks just to have a cheeky cigarette.  The film achieves this by being incredibly ambiguous about where it is set.  Aside from the cold opening scene nobody has a cell phone, with cordless house phones being used, and although one character has a rather natty clam shaped e-reader there is not a laptop or computer or tablet in sight.  This non-specificness only adds to the air of mystery about the film, although to me the characters felt like mid 90s Generation X-ers to me, and are played as such by a talented cast led by The Guest’s Maika Monroe, simply superb here and surely the new queen of horror.

The film is shot brilliantly to compliment the truly original script.  Taking the concept of a random, faceless individual walking towards the characters as the villain, cinematographer Mike Gioulakis has a hell of a lot of fun with this, teasing background actors walking towards the screen, never telling the audience whether this is a manifestation of the evil or just an innocent bystander.  These red herring shots keep the audience on its toes and in a state of unease while the camera pans and swivels around in a way that would befit a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, but because of the concept every little detail is up for intense scrutiny.  The only problem I had with the film was that at times it felt as if it went a little too obvious with the manifestations, which are a truly terrifying concept as just normal people, and I felt that on the occasions where the director made them a little more absurd, like something from a haunted house movie, the early knowledge of what was coming made the scene lose some of its potency.  The undisputed star of the film however is the score by Disasterpeace, a hazy electronic number that recalls the best of John Carpenter’s work while serving as the perfect accompaniment to this most unusual yet at the same time painstakingly normal horror movie.  It has not left my iPod since I downloaded it and I doubt it will anytime soon.

Be warned, if you are going into It Follows expecting several jump scares then prepare to be disappointed.  Jump scares are a lazy form of horror, they work once, maybe twice before losing their potency and edge.  Real horror is achieved by whipping up an air of nigh on unbearable dread that doesn’t lift even upon leaving the cinema.  That is what It Follows has to offer.  Thanks to a concept so rooted in danger and terror yet at the same time permanently linked to such a natural part of human behaviour this film has taken hold of me and not let go.  I cannot remember a film that gave me nightmares, yet this one has.  Even if you are not a horror fan I urge you to go and see this pioneering work that proves there is still life in horror cinema, just where you least expect it.

* * * *

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

“Checking In Is Just As Rewarding Second Time Around”

Director – John Madden

Starring – Dev Patel, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup, Diana Hardcastle, Richard Gere, Tamsin Greig, Lillete Dubey, Tina Desai, David Strathairn, Penelope Wilton

Screenplay – Ol Parker

Cinematography – Ben Smithard

Score – Thomas Newman

 

Length – 122 minutes

Certificate – PG

I don’t imagine that The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was a film that anybody ever expected to exist.  Such was the success of the first film, and the goodwill that audiences showed to a vehicle for some of the more distinguished veterans to ply their trade in such a lovely, charming way, that films like this have become a strange staple of British cinema’s output, and made a sequel a financial no brainer.  Set eight months after the first film this sees the residents of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel getting on with their lives in India, while Sonny prepares for his wedding, all the while attempting to get an expansion investment from an American company off the ground.

Less a story and more a collection of random little excerpts thrown haphazardly together the film gets away with this thanks to its bizarre provincial charm.  Although it clearly struggles with the vast and expanding cast nobody is wasted or forgotten, with each and every actor getting at least one moment to shine.  All this is done with a charm, gentle wit that will make this film a joyous staple of Sunday afternoon television for many years to come.  Of the veteran actors Maggie Smith is given the most to do and does so with relish.  Her character was one of the few ill judged moments of the first film, her racist attitude sitting at odds with everything else.  Although the Pauline conversion of her character is not at all believable it is welcomed, bringing a likability to this hilariously forthright and cantankerous character.  Elsewhere Judi Dench and Bill Nighy are surprisingly subtle in their portrayal of a couple debating whether a later life relationship is for them, although Nighy especially maintains the suaveness that makes him such a joy to watch on screen, while Ronald Pickup and Diana Hardcastle have some of the film’s more far-fetched yet touching moments.  Celia Imrie is the star of the pensioners however with her sixty year old teenager routine never failing to raise a smile, although like everyone else she develops her character with real heart.

The glue that holds all these disparate elements together though is Dev Patel, who has really developed as an actor and is a surprising comic talent in this film.  He benefits from a wonderful screenplay by Ol Parker who has clearly seen, and enjoyed Fawlty Towers.  Especially early on in the film Patel does a great job of channelling John Cleese’s two faced charm when trying to impress a suspected hotel inspector.  There are several Fawlty Towers episodes going on at once here, and unsurprisingly this is the aspect of the film that I enjoyed the most, given how well it pays homage to that great sitcom.  Patel of course benefits from the additions of Richard Gere and Tamsin Greig to complicate matters and from the increasing of Lillete Dubey’s role as Sonny’s mother.

The filmmakers also use their intelligence in utilising India not just as a setting but as an additional character in the vast ensemble.  It would be a waste to not acknowledge the wonderful cultural setting that the film is exploiting, so to set the film in the week leading up to Sonny and Sunaina’s wedding allows it to depict the wonderfully colourful and vibrant nuptials.  This is a real visual high point of a film, especially with the exceptionally choreographed wedding dance, although every scene has something utterly wonderful to look at.  Of course it does play out as a bit of a travelogue, with almost every Indian character one of the successful elite.  The film almost totally ignores the less successful or fortunate members of their society, and when it does venture into the life of a taxi driver, even his humble home is photographed as a paradise, while a foray into a fabric factory neglects to tackle the issue of sweatshop labour.

Niggles aside this is a truly fantastic watch.  It may be a very crowded film, could possibly do with one or two less threads.  Even though Penelope Wilton’s cameo is at the time fabulous and much welcomed, looking back I couldn’t help but feel that it unnecessarily took screen time from one of the other developing storylines.  This is not a film that you really need to think about, every little plot development is signalled a mile off and so there is no surprise, but it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it makes you laugh constantly throughout its not insignificant two hour run time.  This is a film that clearly knows its demographic, and the formula that made it work first time out and doesn’t even attempt to stray from them.  All it sets out to be is a fun, easy and good-natured film, which it achieves with great gusto.

* * *

Focus

“Smith And Robbie Are Undone By A Lack Of Focus”

Director – Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

Starring – Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro, Gerald McRaney, Adrian Martinez, Brennan Brown, BD Wong

Screenplay – Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

Cinematography – Xavier Perez Grobet

Score – Nick Urata

 

Length – 105 minutes

Certificate – 15

The career of Will Smith has taken a notable nosedive from the days of Hancock and I Am Legend, when he could open a brand new property on his name alone.  Too many self righteous awards courters (Seven Pounds) or abysmal vanity projects (After Earth) have put a real tarnish on his stardom, a tarnish that Focus is unlikely to get rid of.  Focus is a con movie, but not a caper.  It is a romantic film, but not a comedy.  For a film called Focus it is astonishing as to how little focus it actually shows with regards to both the genre and tone it is aiming for and the story it wants to tell.

The plot (or plots if you care, seeing as the film has two of them) is separated by three years.  In the first half of the film Nicky (Smith) is introduced as a master of short cons.  He takes newcomer Jess under his wing and installs her into his team to pickpocket and con the patrons of the Super Bowl.  Of course a romantic interest develops until he uses her as part of a bigger con at the actual game, leaving her with $80,000 at the side of the road.  Fast forward three years and Nicky is in Argentina, being employed by a racing team owner to sell false trade secrets to his rivals.  Things are complicated by the arrival of Jess as the girlfriend of said racing magnate.  Obviously the frisson of attraction takes hold again, but is it real, is Jess conning Nicky? Is Nicky conning Jess?  Frankly by this point the response is ‘who cares?’

Right from the opening scene, a glimmering, glossy shot across some American metropolis or other, with stunningly designed interiors, my heart sank.  I knew immediately that this was going to be a film of style over substance to some ridiculous degree, a film where the Director of Photography and Production Designer have been given free rein to make the film look as lavish as possible, no matter what detrimental effect that has on everything else.  This certainly isn’t helped by a script that, while not incomprehensible, is hard to fathom how anyone ever considered it to be an acceptable structure for an actual film.  For years there was a program on BBC1 called Hustle, about a group of con artists pulling a con each week.  It was glossy, all surface, insubstantial and ridiculous, but it was also great fun.  This film is like two episodes of Hustle shunted together, taking on the glossy, insubstantial and ridiculous elements but forgetting about the entertaining.  Each half of the film features a character that could only be described as a ‘Villain of the Week’ played thanklessly by B.D. Wong and Rodrigo Santoro respectively.  It is that stupid a format that I felt cheated, because once the second story kicks in it more or less renders the first half of the film redundant, cheating me out of fifty minutes of my life.

Where Will Smith used to go hand in hand with effortless charm, the likes of which would possibly save this film, all there is now is effortless.  Smith looks to have no passion or enthusiasm for being in this film whatsoever, just coasting from scene to scene driven by the pay-cheque at the end.  The only positive in his performance is that he does strike up a decent chemistry with Margot Robbie, but otherwise the Will Smith of old is nowhere to be seen.  Robbie on the other hand does a good job here in cementing herself as a real movie star, rather than just a flash in the pan after The Wolf On Wall Street.  She is everything Smith is not, effortlessly charming, good fun and an engaging on screen performance.  My only qualms with her performance are that she doesn’t really show much range, and the film’s thrusting a twenty four year old woman and a forty six year old man into a relationship without referencing the age gap feels a bit off.  Elsewhere only supporting players Gerald McRaney and Adrian Martinez have the necessary wit for the genre.

Much like Requa and Ficarra’s previous film Crazy, Stupid, Love this film is an awkward mish-mash of different genre conventions that never glue together to make a satisfying and coherent film.  It is shocking to see quite how far Smith’s star has waned here, and whether his career can recover from yet another dud like this is still to be seen.  Elsewhere the mantra of ‘all surface no feeling’ is what should be used to best describe a film that was essentially and fatally flawed at inception.

* *

Catch Me Daddy

“British Cinema At Its Most Breathtakingly Brutal”

Director – Daniel Wolfe

Starring – Sameena Jabeen Ahmed, Connor McCarron, Gary Lewis, Barry Nunney, Anwar Hussain, Ali Ahmad, Adrian Hussain, Shoby Kaman, Wasim Zakir

Screenplay – Daniel & Matthew Wolfe

Cinematography – Robbie Ryan

Score – Daniel Thomas Freeman & Matthew Watson

 

Length – 112 minutes

Certificate – 15

Daniel and Matthew Wolfe’s unheralded new film is one of the most brutal, unsettling, harrowing yet utterly compelling films I have seen in quite some time.  Laila is a teenage girl of Pakistani origins who has run away from her family and is living with her white boyfriend in a caravan in West Yorkshire.  The film sees them try to evade capture by her family, and by a mysterious pair of men also on their trail.

What is so great about this film is that it both lives up to and defies expectations of what to expect from an independent British film, especially one from Screen Yorkshire.  On the one hand it is gritty, with moments of excruciating violence and at times incredibly hard to watch.  What some would call a kitchen sink drama.  On the other hand it is less of a drama than a chase thriller, as Laila and her boyfriend Aaron take flight from these two groups of men across the darkness of the West Yorkshire Moors.  It works well that we know nothing about the history of any of the characters prior to the events of the film.  Recent news stories did have an effect upon my reading of Laila’s reasons for leaving, and the sight of four Pakistani men chasing a girl across Yorkshire is incredibly unsettling given recent events, but this does give the unclear narrative added strength.

While the film makes good use of settings that are incredibly familiar to a Yorkshireman such as myself, they will be just as effective for those less familiar with them.  The Moors have an eerie, spooky feel to them that is ripe to be exploited by the film for the thriller aspect of the picture.  Elsewhere the film plays out in some of the seedier sides of Yorkshire, rundown urban streets with grim, grotty takeaways, their harsh artificial lighting a stark contrast to the naturalness of the outdoors.  This is an incredibly druggy film, with every character engaging in either Cocaine or Marijuana use, or in some cases both.  This druggy haze is accentuated by the music choices of the film, all giving it a distinctively psychedelic, trippy edge.  This culminates with the lead character doing an incredibly bizarre drug influenced dance routine to Patti Smith’s Horses, to strangely excellent effect.

Played brilliantly by Sameena Jabeen Ahmed the character of Laila is one of astonishingly realised potential.  She is strong, resourceful and intelligent, even if she finds herself in a strange dead end.  Desperate to fit into modern Western life despite her roots she has a strange look about her that superbly compliments everything else going on here.  Despite being a novice actress in her first leading role Ali does a great job at hinting at the horrors that her character has had to face in the past.  While nobody else in the cast can quite match up to her, not being given either the screen time or script development to make as much of an impact, nobody lets the side down, with Gary Lewis doing a great job of capturing the dark, mysterious contradictions of his character while Anwar Hussain and Wasim Zakir two of the most terrifying villains of recent times thanks to their utter believability.

In the end the film maybe takes its violence a little too far.  I felt that not all the bloodshed that happens in the third act was necessary, although the final confrontation between Laila and her monstrous father was a superb exercise in unbearable tension.  This is more of a warning than a complaint, as the screening I was in saw a few walkouts in the final sequences, but overall these didn’t detract from the film for me.  It was a nice change to see British independent cinema put its own slant on such an American genre, while still maintaining such a British feel to it.  It is not for everybody, yet it is really worthy of any attention it receives, while Sameena Jabeen Ahmed is a star for the future if this is anything to go by.

* * * *

The Boy Next Door

“Will Make You Want To Move House For All The Wrong Reasons”

Director – Rob Cohen

Starring – Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Guzman, Ian Nelson, John Corbett, Kristin Chenoweth

Screenplay – Barbara Curry

Cinematography – David McFarland

Score – Nathan Barr & Randy Edelman

 

Length – 91 minutes

Certificate – 15

Don’t get me wrong, B Movies can be good and fun in their own distinctive way.  This film doesn’t manage to be by a long way.  It isn’t helped by being inexplicably given a theatrical release, when it clearly ought to be going straight to DVD.  The plot feels like something you might see on Channel 5 at half past two on a weekday afternoon.  Claire is an English teacher whose husband is separated from her because he had an affair with his secretary.  Her son is a shy, bullied individual brought out of his shell by the kind, cool, hunky boy who moves in next door.  Against all her better judgements Claire engages in a night of passion with said boy (Noah), who then becomes psychotic when she tries to end things.

It is quite a sign of the enlightened times in which we now live in that a woman has the lead in what is essentially a 21st Century remake of Fatal Attraction.  It is nice to see that women have moved on from being merely crazed, bunny boiling plot devices to actually being actual human beings.  Unfortunately the casting of Jennifer Lopez goes against all of this advancement with how astonishingly sexist it actually is.  Yes she is playing a strong female character and at one point I do believe the film actually passed The Bechdel Test but boy does that not even cover half the problems.  The character Lopez is playing you see is an English teacher with a major fondness for the classics, specifically Homer’s The Iliad.  Unfortunately Lopez is about as unconvincing an actress to play an Iliad loving Classics teacher as I could thing, and the way she is seen reading said book she had may as well be reading Cosmopolitan.  The way she is dressed is also a huge issue as far as believability goes.  In her domestic scenes she spends the entire film wafting around in the contents of what seems to be the contents of the world’s most expensive lingerie catalogue while elsewhere she appears to be shooting one of her music videos rather than playing a dowdy forty something mother.

It is not just Lopez who fails to convince me, Ryan Guzman is laughably bad as the psycho.  He plays psycho with a dead eyed stare that may not have looked quite as bad had his character not been given some of the film’s very worst writing.  Believe me when I say I laughed out loud at some of his incredibly awkwardly delivered lines.  There is absolutely no chemistry between him and Lopez, making the sex scene between then, supposed to be shot tastefully and artfully but ending up looking like badly made porn, the film’s comedic high point.  He is not alone at failing completely to provide adequate support to Lopez, as Ian Nelson and John Corbett are equally wooden and unconvincing as her son and husband, while Kristin Chenoweth is so irritating as her best friend (the least convincing on-screen Vice Principal ever) that I was sat praying that she met a sticky demise.

The film’s utter failure even continues to its three big ‘action’ sequences, a race against the clock for Lopez to remove a load of erotic pictures of her from her classroom, the world’s worst edited driving sequence, after Noah has developed a brake line cutting habit, and the obligatory final confrontation in a burning barn.  Edited for violence, sex and language this would genuinely be at home in the Channel 5 schedules.  Unfortunately the ‘so bad its good’ card it plays at the beginning is only valid for so long and so after a while I found myself stopping laughing at the film’s utter stupidity, and being bored to tears by it’s incredible tedium.

*