Tag Archives: Anthony Hopkins

Monthly Roundup – March 2017

01 Saturday Apr 2017

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Fist Fight (2017) / D: Richie Keen / 91m

Cast: Ice Cube, Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell, Dean Norris, Christina Hendricks, Kumail Nanjiani, Dennis Haysbert, JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Alexa Nisenson

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Bell’s character wants to have sex with a pupil – and doesn’t think it’s wrong), Fist Fight is a virtually laugh-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

I.T. (2016) / D: John Moore / 95m

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, James Frecheville, Anna Friel, Stefanie Scott, Michael Nyqvist

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Brosnan’s character is a tech mogul who doesn’t know the first thing about the tech he’s promoting), I.T. is a virtually tension-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

Collide (2016) / D: Eran Creevy / 99m

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Felicity Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Marwan Kenzari, Aleksandar Jovanovic, Christian Rubeck, Erdal Yildiz, Clemens Schick, Johnny Palmiero

Rating: 6/10 – Hoult’s backpacker finds himself mixed up with rival gangsters Hopkins and Kingsley, and using his driving skills to stay one step ahead of both of them; the focus is squarely on the action, which is a good thing, as Collide‘s plot is as all over the place as the various cars Hoult throws about on German autobahns, but when it’s bad it’s Hopkins intoning “I’m the destroyer of worlds” bad.

Jimmy the Gent (1934) / D: Michael Curtiz / 67m

Cast: James Cagney, Bette Davis, Allen Jenkins, Alan Dinehart, Alice White, Arthur Hohl, Mayo Methot

Rating: 7/10 – in an effort to woo back his former secretary (Davis), Cagney’s brash racketeer attempts to put a classier spin on his finding “lost” heirs business, and finds himself mellowing when a case challenges his compromised ethics; worth watching just for the pairing of Cagney and Davis, Jimmy the Gent is a typically fast-paced, razor sharp romantic comedy that may seem predictable nowadays but is nevertheless a minor gem that is effortlessly entertaining.

Kong: Skull Island (2017) / D: Jordan Vogt-Roberts / 118m

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Thomas Mann, Corey Hawkins, Toby Kebbell, Tian Jing, John Ortiz, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Richard Jenkins, Terry Notary

Rating: 5/10 – an expedition to a mysterious island in the Pacific yields dangers galore for its participants – Jackson’s crazed Army Colonel, Hiddleston’s ex-SAS captain, Larson’s anti-war photographer, Goodman’s duplicitous government official et al – not the least of which is an angry hundred-foot gorilla called Kong; while Kong: Skull Island may be visually arresting, and its action sequences pleasingly vivid, the lack of a decent plot and characters with any kind of inner life makes the movie yet another franchise-building letdown.

The Rezort (2015) / D: Steve Barker / 93m

Cast: Dougray Scott, Jessica De Gouw, Martin McCann, Elen Rhys, Claire Goose, Jassa Ahluwalia, Lawrence Walker

Rating: 4/10 – after a viral outbreak that turned its victims into flesh-hungry zombies is contained, an island resort opens that offers survivors the chance to hunt down and exterminate zombies with little or no risk of harm – but the resort is targeted from the inside and a group of holiday makers find themselves becoming the hunted; a strong idea that runs out of steam by the halfway mark, The Rezort leaves its cast stranded with a standard “run from this place to the next and look desperate” approach that drains the movie of any tension and makes it all look as generic as the next zombie movie.

Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday (1939) / D: Walter Forde / 90m

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Linden Travers, Wally Patch, Edward Chapman, Philip Leaver, Kynaston Reeves

Rating: 7/10 – a seaside holiday for Inspector Hornleigh (Harker) and his trusty sidekick, Sergeant Bingham (Sim), leads inevitably to a murder case involving an inheritance and a criminal outfit who target their victims with the unwitting aid of döppelgangers; the second of three movies featuring Harker’s irascible policeman and Sim’s less-than-sharp second-in-command, Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday is a simple, easy-going, undemanding bit of fun that manages to combine drama and comedy to good effect, and which still holds up nearly eighty years later.

Inspector Hornleigh Gets on It (1941) / D: Walter Forde / 87m

aka Mail Train

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Phyllis Calvert, Edward Chapman, Charles Oliver, Raymond Huntley, Percy Walsh, David Horne

Rating: 7/10 – despite being sidelined from regular detective work through a stint investigating thefts at an army barracks, Hornleigh and Bingham find themselves on the trail of Fifth Columnists; the last in the short-lived series, Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It is as sprightly and entertaining as the previous two instalments, and allows Huntley to make this priceless observation: “One of them’s tall, bald, looks intelligent but isn’t. The other’s short, sour-faced, doesn’t look intelligent but is.”

Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato (2017) / D: Eugenio Ercolani, Guiliano Emanuele / 69m

With: Joe D’Amato (archive footage), Luigi Montefiori, Michele Soavi, Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi, Antonio Tentori, Carlo Maria Cordio, Mark Thompson-Ashworth

Rating: 3/10 – Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D’Amato)’s career in movies is assessed by some of the people who worked with him closely when he first started out; at sixty-nine minutes, Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato is a documentary that feels like it lasts twice as long, thanks to Ercolani and Emanuele’s decision to let their interviewees ramble on at length (and usually about themselves instead of D’Amato), and a random assortment of clips that don’t always illustrate what’s being talked about.

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Mini-Review: Blackway (2015)

28 Tuesday Feb 2017

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Original title: Go With Me

D: Daniel Alfredson / 90m

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Julia Stiles, Alexander Ludwig, Ray Liotta, Steve Bacic, Lochlyn Munro, Hal Holbrook, Dale Wilson

Enderby, British Columbia. Lillian (Stiles) has returned to her hometown following the death of her mother. Working as a waitress in a bar she attracts the unwanted attention of Richard Blackway (Liotta), an ex-police constable turned local crime lord. One night he turns up at her house and frightens her so much that she goes to the local sheriff (Wilson). When he learns that Blackway is involved, the sheriff becomes uninterested in helping her, and tells Lillian to seek out a man named Scotty at one of the lumber companies. Instead of finding Scotty, Lillian is offered help by an old man called Lester (Hopkins), and a young man called Nate (Ludwig). Together they try and track down Blackway, beginning with a man Lester thinks will help them, Fitzgerald (Bacic).

But Fitzgerald is just as afraid of Blackway as the rest of the town. He does give them a lead on Blackway’s whereabouts, and the trio find themselves driving from place to place, either just missing him, or on one occasion, finding him but not where he’s alone. Along the way Nate has a fight with Blackway’s accountant, Murdoch (Munro), an incident at a hotel Blackway runs as a brothel leads to its being set on fire, and the trio reach a point of no return, travelling up into the mountains to an old logging camp where Blackway hides out when he needs to. But will they remain the hunters, or will Blackway turn the tables on them instead?

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Post-Lisbeth Salander, Daniel Alfredson’s career hasn’t been as consistent as he perhaps would have liked. Work on the small screen took him back to his roots until Echoes of the Dead (2013) came along, but that movie couldn’t maintain its initial premise and made some questionable decisions before reaching its conclusion. In the same year as Blackway, Alfredson teamed up with Hopkins for Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, a lacklustre account of the true story that must have convinced the pair to work together again. And so we have Blackway, an austere thriller-cum-unspoken revenge drama that has more going for it than first meets the eye. The movie has a gloomy, penetrating atmosphere that perfectly suits the mood of the piece. Everyone in Enderby looks beaten down, defeated, all but Blackway, whose violent, malevolent nature leaves him as the only person in town enjoying himself.

Liotta revels in his evil nature, and he adds another psycho character to his resumé, infusing the title villain with all the rage and sadism he can muster. There’s a scene where Blackway has his hand around the neck of Fitzgerald’s daughter, squeezing it, and Liotta plays it as if he were playing with a doll. It’s disquieting, and uncomfortable to watch, and tells you everything you need to know about him. Against this we have Stiles’s heroine, unwilling to leave town, and at first, emotional and angry at being treated so horribly. But as the movie progresses, she too appears beaten down, saying less and less, until words become superfluous, until it becomes apparent where tracking down Blackway is going to take her; and her newfound allies. Hopkins is taciturn and determined, and gives one of his better performances of recent years, a proud man looking to redeem himself for something we can guess at, but which we never see confirmed. And there’s a lot that’s left unsaid in Blackway, adding to the austerity and the stripped back nature of the material, and making it far more absorbing and intriguing than it looks.

Rating: 6/10 – once you get past some of the more awkward elements in the script – Blackway never sends his men out to find Lester and co, their search for him seems just a little too easy at times – there’s much to admire about Blackway, and Alfredson keeps it agreeably low-key throughout; a mood piece as much as a thriller, it’s a movie that doesn’t deserve to be dismissed as just another DtV backwoods drama.

Misconduct (2016)

06 Saturday Feb 2016

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Misconduct

D: Shintaro Shimasawa / 106m

Cast: Josh Duhamel, Alice Eve, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, Malin Akerman, Byung-hun Lee, Julia Stiles, Glen Powell, Marcus Lyle Brown

Released as a Lionsgate Premiere (rough translation: not good enough to be shown in cinemas), Misconduct is an early contender for Worst Movie of 2016. It’s ostensibly a thriller but veers off in so many different directions in an effort to be interesting that in the end it’s just a jumbled mess. There’s not even the germ of a good idea here, the script by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason resorting to cliché after cliché and line after line of awful dialogue in its efforts to appear somehow less than the sum of its parts (or the parts of its sum even).

It’s a movie where everybody is up to no good. Sadly, the audience knows this right from the start, so any “revelations” or twists and turns have the effect of inducing a headache rather than any surprises. The storyline tries to be convoluted in an attempt to mystify anyone unfortunate enough to watch Misconduct, and the basic plot – Hopkins’ pharmaceutical CO is accused of deliberately falsifying bad test results – struggles even to be relevant within the movie’s own structure. Once a badly attached blackmail plot is added to the mix, it gives the movie carte blanche to be as stupid as it wants, a move it takes full advantage of.

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As well as the blackmail plot – instigated by Hopkins’ unbalanced girlfriend (played by Akerman) and involving Duhamel’s ambitious attorney – Misconduct features a dire attempt at adding depth to two of the characters’ lives, Duhamel and his moody, depressed wife Eve, by having them recovering from the loss of a child during pregnancy. Why this subplot is even present is a mystery the movie never answers, along with the presence of Lee as a corporate-sponsored assassin who for some inexplicable reason is dying from some unstated disease (again you have to ask yourself why any of this has been included).

There’s more, but as the movie continues piling absurdity on top of absurdity, the unlucky viewer will find themselves wondering if this is intended more as a parody than a thriller, and will be laughing accordingly, but if it is then no one informed the cast, who struggle through scene after scene with resolutely straight faces and a grim determination to get through it all and reach the end with a degree of integrity still intact. Duhamel is a capable actor, but here he’s as wooden as a fence post and spends most of his screen time looking petulant, or as if there’s a bad smell under his nose (there is, and it’s coming from the script). Matching him for petulance, and using staring off into space a lot as a character trait, Eve gives probably the worst performance of her career so far, as she tries to distance herself from everyone and everything connected with the movie.

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Akerman is a poor femme fatale, her attempt to seduce Duhamel having all the allure of a drunken one-night stand with someone you hope doesn’t give you their number the next morning. As mentioned above, Lee is the assassin who’s close to death, and he sleepwalks through his role making supposedly “deep” comments and trying to appear above it all by refusing to acknowledge that this is one acting gig his agent should be apologising for profusely. And then there’s Stiles, an actress who really should be given better roles than the one she has here, a Kidnap and Response expert who gets to shout at Hopkins a lot and look suitably badass (and that’s basically it).

You get the picture: Misconduct has its fair share of bad performances to match its bad script and wayward direction – Shimasawa, making his first feature, gives an approximation of what a director should be doing – but then there’s Hopkins and Pacino, two Oscar winners now content (like De Niro) to throw away their talent and make terrible movie after terrible movie. Hopkins has the larger amount of screen time, but phones in his performance, and falls back on the kind of aloof, manipulative, all-knowing characterisation he’s played way too often in recent years. When you’ve got Hopkins in a movie and he’s playing a powerful businessman you just know in advance that he’s not going to be putting much effort in, and that’s exactly the case here. Amazingly though, Pacino is worse, his law firm boss coming across as a pale imitation of his role in The Devil’s Advocate (1997). He’s also upstaged by his own hair, which in one scene, looks like the worst comb-back in history. Why either of them took on their roles is the one abiding mystery the movie cannot solve.

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From starting out as a legal thriller – you get the idea the movie might just be about bringing Hopkins’ fraudulent CO to justice, and the hunt for the evidence to prove his negligence – it soon descends into a welter of murder and violence and betrayal on all sides, as the script decides it needs to be more punchy than in its earlier scenes. It leads to one of the movie’s more absurd scenes where Duhamel, having gouged his stomach escaping from the police, buys some glue in a convenience store and uses it to close his wound. And of course, he then runs around as if it had never happened. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

There is an attempt at providing a central murder mystery to keep the audience intrigued, but regular viewers of this kind of movie will spot the culprit from a mile off. But this is in keeping with the movie’s inability to come up with anything new or unpredictable, and again, regular viewers of this kind of star-happy dross will have resigned themselves to the movie’s inevitable outcome(s) long before they reach the end. The makers probably didn’t intend the title Misconduct to be so relevant to its own content and execution, but in one respect they can be applauded: they made sure the movie certainly lived up to it.

Rating: 3/10 – with only its standard, by-the-numbers production effort propping it up in the ratings stakes, Misconduct is a woeful, massively disappointing movie that falls down each and every time it tries to be interesting; with awful dialogue and some truly atrocious performances, it’s a movie that defies explanation as to its existence, and ranks as one of the worst “corporate/legal thrillers” in recent memory.

Solace (2015)

11 Monday Jan 2016

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Solace

D: Afonso Poyart / 101m

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Abbie Cornish, Colin Farrell, Xander Berkeley, Marley Shelton, Janine Turner, Kenny Johnson, Sharon Lawrence

Solace is one of those movies. You know, a movie that dares you not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s a movie that acknowledges the idea of credibility and then tramples all over it with big hob-nailed boots on. It’s so consistently bad that there’s no getting over just how awful it is. And it just goes to show that, sometimes, actors definitely go for the pay cheque rather than the artistic challenge (not that there is one here, unless you count keeping a straight face when the movie gets really silly).

But in amongst all the terrible dialogue and horrible acting, there are lessons to be learnt from Sean Bailey and Ted Griffin’s script, lessons that could prove invaluable if you’ve a mind to write your own serial killer thriller. Here are ten pointers toward making that movie a success.

1 – Always give your central protagonist – here Hopkins’ psychic John Clancy – a heartrending backstory that will have no relevance at all until the final scene, when you can reveal a dark secret that sheds new light on the character and his/her motivations (but which will be redundant in terms of the drama).

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2 – If your central character is a psychic it’s important to keep moving the goalposts in terms of what triggers his/her visions. Start off with being touched by others, then move on to have them be practically all-seeing all by themselves.

3 – If your villain is another psychic with advanced “powers”, don’t forget to make sure that, in the end, he/she is no match for your central character, and can be easily defeated, despite having a talent for seeing every outcome of every situation ahead of time.

4 – If you have to involve the police or Federal authorities, then make sure that those characters are at odds with each other in terms of their beliefs; one should be totally behind your psychic hero, while the other should doubt their abilities, and say so more than once.

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5 – If you have an agent or policeman who doubts the psychic’s abilities then you should definitely include a scene where their history is laid bare with as much detail as possible, and which should be upsetting for them to hear. (This will ensure that the audience is completely impressed with the psychic’s powers.)

6 – It’s very important that your villain should be able to kill on more than one occasion and never leave any DNA or other forensic evidence at any of the crime scenes. This will make him/her seem invincible/uncatchable until it’s time for them to be defeated with ease by the psychic hero.

7 – Always ensure your psychic hero gets to upstage their police partners by making educated guesses that they can pass off as benefits of their psychic abilities. This will be important when the narrative takes a wrong turn or gets bogged down by its own implausibilities.

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8 – When deciding on the killer’s motivations, it’s always best to make them sound like they’re acting with the best of (misguided) intentions. But always be sure to translate those motivations into the kind of dialogue that even the most talented actor couldn’t make convincing.

9 – Never ever insult your audience by including a scene where the psychic refuses to help the authorities because of past traumas. Everyone knows they’ll take the case, and everyone knows their reason for doing so is completely irrelevant (if it’s mentioned at all).

10 – Be sure to include several “psychic montages” that comprise shots and short clips from the rest of the movie interspersed with other, abstract images that have no relevance to the story at all (but which look pretty or ominous). Feel free also to include shots that feature the characters but which don’t actually occur anywhere else in the movie; get away with this by saying these shots are “interpretive”.

Oh, and if you can, get Anthony Hopkins to play your psychic hero. He doesn’t seem to mind what roles he takes on these days.

Rating: 3/10 – originally shot in 2013 and shelved by Warner Bros until it was picked up for distribution by troubled Relativity Media, Solace is a dreadful thriller that deserves to be locked up and never seen again; the cast are wasted, the direction is ham-fisted, and the script refuses to make any sense whatsoever, leaving the viewer with only one option – and you don’t have to be psychic to work out what that is.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken (2015)

10 Sunday Jan 2016

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Kidnapping Mr. Heineken

aka Kidnapping Freddy Heineken

D: Daniel Alfredson / 95m

Cast: Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington, Ryan Kwanten, Anthony Hopkins, Mark van Eeuwen, Thomas Cocquerel, Jemima West, David Dencik

In 1982, five friends working and living in Amsterdam  – Cor Van Hout (Sturgess), Willem Holleeder (Worthington), Jan ‘Cat’ Boellard (Kwanten), Frans ‘Spikes’ Meijer (van Eeuwen), and Martin ‘Brakes’ Erkamps (Cocquerel) – are struggling to keep their construction business from going under. They don’t have any appreciable capital so the banks won’t lend them any money. But Cor has an idea (a New Year’s resolution in fact): to do something big, something that will see them all become immensely rich. That idea leads to a plan, and the plan is to kidnap the owner and founder of the Heineken brewery empire, Alfred ‘Freddy’ Heineken (Hopkins).

Needing to pull off this coup quite quickly, the five men begin to plan their abduction and how they will keep the ransom – $35m – and avoid being caught. They begin to watch Heineken to learn his routine, and to figure out the best time to grab him. They also realise that in order to look like professional kidnappers they’ll need to have some money behind them. So they rob a bank, and get away with enough cash to bankroll the abduction. At a shed owned by Jan, they construct soundproof cells where they can keep Heineken (and Ab Doderer (Dencik), his driver), and which are hidden behind false panelling.

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The kidnapping is successful and the five men wait for the ransom note to be found by the police. They hole up at Jan’s shed, taking it in turns to check on Heineken and Doderer, and to wait for the ransom to be paid. But time passes, and after three weeks they’ve heard nothing. Willem is all for sending the police evidence that they will harm Heineken if the ransom isn’t paid, but when it comes to it he can’t do it. Another demand leads to the police and Heineken’s company agreeing to pay the ransom money, and the group successfully attain it. They stash most of it in buried tubes out in the forest, but in the days ahead they become more fearful and paranoid that the police will soon be snapping at their heels, and their long-term friendships begin to fray at the seams.

True stories – in the movies at least – usually come with the disclaimer that certain scenes, characters and/or dialogue have been fictionalised or conflated or created for dramatic purposes. This we know, and it’s always the problem with telling a true story: just how much of what you’re seeing is really true. The answer, of course, is absolutely none of it. It doesn’t matter if its’s based on a true story, or has the backing and involvement of the people it concerns or portrays, every single movie that’s based on a true story, or real events – what you’re watching is never going to be exactly what happened. And while we all know this deep down, still we take for granted that what we’re seeing actually happened, as if the writer(s), director(s) and cast have a special way of recreating past events exactly as they happened.

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Sadly for Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, if that were the case, then it might help obscure or erase the movie’s most fundamental problem: it’s not in the least bit convincing or dramatic enough to work. A belated English language remake of The Heineken Kidnapping (2011), the movie is a tired, tangled piece that features five men who don’t seem to have anything in common except they take to kidnapping with apparent ease, especially when it comes to abandoning their consciences (not one of them offers any objections to the idea). And there’s an incredible naïvete about their decision that’s never properly addressed; none of them have a criminal background but they take to being criminals as if it were the most natural, and easiest, thing in the world.

With the movie establishing an awkward tone from the start, the middle section does little to rescue things, as Heineken gets the chance to be belligerent and caustic to his kidnappers on a regular basis, and they all sit around wondering why the ransom hasn’t been paid. Five more glum-looking faces you’re unlikely to see for quite some time, as the movie – scripted by William Brookfield from the book by Peter R. de Vries – fails to add any tension to proceedings, even when Willem wants to get violent. It gives rise to an odd feeling, that neither Brookfield nor Alfredson have made any connection to the story, and are telling it out of some sense of obligation.

The same can be said of the cast. Sturgess, usually a sharp-minded presence on screen, here seems held back by the vagaries of the script, in particular with regard to Cor’s relationship with his girlfriend Sonia (West), which appears to be of minor importance during the abduction but assumes a disproportionate relevance in the movie’s final third. Worthington continues to make audiences wonder why he gets so much work, giving a performance that’s so stiff you expect him to seize up at any moment. And Kwanten, thanks to one of the scruffiest wigs seen in ages, will have viewers trying to work out who he is (in real life) rather than how good his performance is. But spare a thought for Hopkins, playing yet another supporting performance and having to go from assured patriarch to rambling mental patient in the space of a competently edited chase sequence.

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The story of Alfred Heineken’s kidnapping was a major news story at the time – in Holland at least – and is notable still today for the ransom being the largest ever paid for an individual, and for the fact that some of the money has never been recovered. The movie cites this at the end, along with the fates of the main characters (two of which may come as a very big surprise). But by then you’ll be less than interested, and just as relieved as Heineken probably was at being rescued from it all.

Rating: 4/10 – plodding, uninspired and plain dull for long stretches, Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is a movie that lacks commitment from its cast and crew, and ambles along with all the urgency of a downhill racer missing his skis; broadly factual (ironically, de Vries, who was an advisor on the movie, subsequently refused to watch the movie, citing numerous discrepancies between the movie and what really happened), this is a movie that gives new meaning to the words defiantly turgid.

Noah (2014)

06 Sunday Apr 2014

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Noah

D: Darren Aronofsky / 138m

Cast: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth, Leo McHugh-Carroll, Anthony Hopkins, Marton Csokas, Frank Langella, Nick Nolte, Mark Margolis, Kevin Durand

It’s an unlikely idea for a fantasy movie, but Noah, as imagined by Darren Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel, is exactly that, a semi-religious essay on perceived personal sin and the demands of unwanted destiny tricked out with elaborate special effects sequences and… rock monsters.  The story of the ark is a tale told in many religions – the Biblical version isn’t even the first  – but here, Aronofsky removes any mention of God and has his characters reference The Creator instead.  With this choice in place, the decision to include Adam and Eve, the apple from the Tree of Forbidden Knowledge, and Cain and Abel becomes a little puzzling, especially when the bulk of the film is a fairly straightforward interpretation of chapters 6-9 of the Book of Genesis.

After an opening sequence that conflates the first five chapters, the inclusion of fallen angels – called the Watchers – who came to earth to support Man in his endeavours but were punished by The Creator by being turned into creatures made of rocks – and who were in turn attacked and cast out by Man – comes as a bit of a surprise (it also brings to mind the rock monster seen in Galaxy Quest (1999), not the best point of reference for a Bible story).  From there we see Noah as a young man with his father, Lamech (Csokas).  Lamech is killed by a chieftain called Tubal-Cain (Finn Wittrock); he wants Lamech’s land for his own people (and appears to have instituted the concept of manifest destiny several thousand years before it was first thought of).  Noah escapes and we next see him as an adult (Crowe).  He is married to Naameh (Connelly) and has three young sons, Shem, Ham and baby Japheth.  Noah is plagued by visions of the world covered by water.  He takes his family with him to visit his grandfather, Methuselah (Hopkins), in the hope that he can explain what the visions mean.  On the way they come across the scene of a slaughter, and rescue the only survivor, a young girl called Ila; Naameh quickly deduces that the wound she has will stop her from having children.

Methuselah believes The Creator has chosen Noah for a special task, and induces a vision that tells Noah he should build an ark.  Fast forward several years and with the help of the Watchers, the ark is nearly completed.  Shem (Booth) and Ila (Watson) have fallen in love, while Ham (Lerman) has a rebellious spark in him that Noah is unhappy about.  One day a large contingent of men led by Tubal-Cain (Winstone) come to the ark in an attempt to take control of it but the threat of the Watchers stops them.  Noah goes to their nearby encampment in the search for wives for his sons bout what he sees there, including uncontrollable lusts and signs of cannibalism, convinces him that the Creator’s plan is for the whole of Mankind to be wiped out, including Noah and his family.

Ham also travels to the encampment and there he meets Na’el (Madison Davenport).  At the same time, Ila meets Methuselah for the first time and he blesses her, curing her barrenness.  When the rain begins to fall, presaging the flood, Noah goes in search of Ham.  When he finds him, Noah is forced to leave Na’el behind – she has her leg caught in a trap – and she is trampled to death in the rush by Tubal-Cain’s people to get to the ark.  The Watchers aid Noah in keeping Tubal-Cain and his people from boarding the ark as the earth is engulfed in a terrible flood of water and massive funnels of water shoot skywards from the ground.  Somehow, Tubal-Cain manages to get aboard though he is injured in the attempt.  His boarding is witnessed by Ham, who, being angry with Noah over the death of Na’el, aids Tubal-Cain in his recovery.

Adrift on the waters, Ila learns she is pregnant and while Naameh and Shem are overjoyed, Noah is horrified.  Certain that The Creator’s intention is for all of mankind to be destroyed, he tells his family that if Ila has a girl – meaning further children could be born – he will have no choice but to kill her.  Ila and Shem attempt to escape the ark but Noah stops them.  Moments later, Ila goes into labour… and Ham draws Noah into an ambush with a recovered Tubal-Cain.

Noah - scene

A long-cherished project of Aronofsky’s, Noah reaches us with the weight of expectation weighing heavy about its celluloid shoulders, and while the movie takes quite a few mis-steps in its waterborne journey, there’s a lot here to offset any weaknesses.  Aronofsky is a confident, innovative director and he handles the movie’s themes of sin and redemption, and sacrifice and fortitude, with considerable ease, and is aided by a commanding performance by Crowe.  Between them they have created a Noah who carries the weight of his Creator’s plan with all the strength of purpose and stoicism needed to carry it through.  It’s an impressive turn from Crowe, the kind of meaty role he obviously relishes playing, and here he doesn’t disappoint.  Under Aronofsky’s intelligent direction, Crowe is completely convincing throughout, a patriarch given an unenviable task and determined that even the hardest of personal sacrifices won’t deflect him.  (It’s no surprise how the movie ends, but when the moment comes – and it’s largely thanks to Crowe’s unpredictability as an actor – the audience isn’t certain he’ll relent from killing Ila’s offspring.)

Crowe is ably supported by Connelly and Watson, though some of the aforementioned mis-steps derive from the other male cast members.  Winstone plays a pre-Christian version of (basically) himself, complete with East London accent and mangled phrasing.  Lerman’s boyish face still can’t adequately portray any emotion except surprise (as both Percy Jackson movies will attest), while Booth is wetter than the flood and given too little to do to make a better impression.  And with Crowe on such impressive form it makes the trio’s deficiencies even more obvious.  In particular, this leads to the scenes between Tubal-Cain and Ham appearing leaden and less dramatic than they should be (not to mention too formulaic for their own good).  As for Hopkins, the less said about his truly embarrassing performance the better (though the script should bear some of the blame too.  Berries?  Really?).

Noah is often amazing to look at, with Aronofsky and director of photography Matthew Libatique exploiting Iceland’s volcanic terrain to stunning effect.  There’s a creation sequence two thirds in that looks good but holds up the movie but also seems at odds with the message that the world is the work of The Creator, as if the movie doesn’t want to be explicitly identified as a religious movie (which it isn’t anyway).  It’s this kind of fence-sitting that undermines the movie for most of its running time.  In taking a Biblical story where God seeks to expunge Man from the world only to relent when He sees the good in Noah, Aronofsky seems uncertain if he wants faith to be a central part of things, when clearly it is.  There’s a snake skin – supposedly handed down from the Garden of Eden (yes, from that snake) – that was Noah’s father’s but it’s taken by Tubal-Cain.  It’s referred to visually on several occasions but its purpose or relevance is never made clear, except possibly as a means of passing on inherited knowledge or wisdom (and I’m guessing here, it really isn’t that clear).  Another mis-step is the inclusion of the Watchers, an addition to the flood myth that might be the movie’s most ill-judged decision.  On top of their relation to the monster in Galaxy Quest, once they start laying waste to Tubal-Cain’s followers they most resemble the Ents from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002).  The idea of their being fallen angels is a good one but rock monsters?  Was that the only incarnation they could have had?  (Hang on, let me check my scripture.  Oh, I can’t.)

On a minor level, Crowe’s hair is a serious concern throughout, as is his clothing at the end (is he really wearing a suit at one point?), while Connelly stays the same all the way through.  Aronofsky appropriates some character names: in the Book of Genesis, Tubal-Cain is the son of Lamech and his sister’s name is Naamah (close enough, eh?).  This makes Tubal-Cain and Noah brothers, and Naameh his – well, let’s not go there.

Noah has its strong points, and for much of its running time, Aronofsky has a sure hand on the tiller but too often it trips over itself in its efforts to avoid any potential theological disputes.  In trying to please both sides of the is-there/isn’t-there a God argument, Aronofsky relents on the effectiveness of the drama and avoids making Noah anything more than a man-has-vision-and-does-what-it-tells-him story that lacks the necessary resonance for such a huge responsibility.  Aronofsky should thank The Creator that Crowe took on the role, for without him, what credible dramatic focus the movie has would have been lost.

Rating: 7/10 – on reflection a better movie than it seems while watching it, Noah suffers from its director’s indecisions but regains its edge thanks to Crowe’s intuitive performance; beautiful to look at, and with occasional moments of genius, but only just enough to offset the movie’s larger problems.

 

Red 2 (2013)

17 Sunday Nov 2013

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D: Dean Parisot / 116m

Cast: Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Byung-hun Lee, Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Neal McDonough, David Thewlis, Brian Cox, Garrick Hagon, Tim Pigott-Smith

A surprise hit in 2010, Red was fun to watch because it had an ageing cast (Parker excepted) indulging in the kind of action movie heroics that (Willis excepted) you wouldn’t normally find them involved in. Everyone looked like they were having a great time, so it was almost a certainty there would be a sequel. And here it is.

Following on from the first movie, Frank Moses (Willis) is still having trouble settling down with Sarah (Parker). When Marvin (Malkovich) warns that someone is coming for both of them, he then fakes his own death. At the funeral, Frank is taken in for questioning by federal agents.  Frank and Marvin are accused of having worked on Project Nightshade, an operation carried out over thirty years before whose purpose was to plant a nuclear bomb in Moscow. After Frank survives an attempt to kill him by sinister US agent Jack Horton (McDonough), the Americans hire Han (Lee) to complete the task, while the British give the job to old friend and ally Victoria (Mirren). Both countries have their reasons for putting Frank and Marvin on their most wanted lists, and as the movie progresses those reasons become clearer and clearer, and have a lot to do with missing-presumed-dead scientist Edward Bailey (Hopkins). In order to clear themselves, Frank, Marvin and Sarah travel from the US to Paris to Moscow and then to London in their efforts to stop the bomb from being set off. Along the way they are variously helped and/or hindered by terrorist The Frog (Thewlis), Russian official Ivan (Cox), and an ex-flame of Frank’s, Katja (Zeta-Jones).

Red 2 - scene

The first movie, as mentioned above, was fun to watch, but Red 2 is a chore. From the opening sequence to the final scene, the movie lumbers from set up to set up, barely pausing to catch its own breath. If it did, if it gave itself a chance to breathe, then there’s more chance the audience would realise how poor a sequel it is, so the movie doesn’t let up. Willis, Malkovich and Hopkins overact as if their careers depend on it, while Parker stretches kooky to flat-out annoying. Lee is underused, McDonough makes the most of his early scenes, while Zeta-Jones succeeds in putting the fatal in femme fatale. Only Helen Mirren emerges unscathed from a script – by Jon and Erich Hoeber – that dispenses with any attempt at characterisation, pays lip service to the idea of a coherent plot, and includes some of the worst dialogue this side of an Adam Sandler movie (Jack & Jill anyone?).

The action sequences are perfunctory and often poorly edited, and the humour that punctuates the movie seems forced rather than organic. It’s the same old schtick from the first movie but less interesting and on a bigger budget. Parisot directs as if he’s not responsible for anything that appears on screen, and nothing can detract from the sense of hopelessness that builds toward the incredibly naff – and predictable – showdown between Willis and the movie’s main villain (their identity in itself completely predictable). It’s somehow more disappointing when a big budget movie with a talented cast tanks so badly – you’d think someone might look at the script and say, “hang on, can’t we do something about this?”. If this is a cast and crew that are doing their best, perhaps they just shouldn’t bother.

Rating: 4/10 – an unremittingly bad sequel to a moderately good first movie, Red 2 stutters and stumbles its way through a disaster of a script; saved from a lower rating by some good location work, and the pleasure of seeing Helen Mirren showing everyone else how it should be done.

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

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Thor The Dark World

D: Alan Taylor / 120m

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Eccleston, Stellan Skarsgård, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Jaimie Alexander, Zachary Levi, Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Rene Russo

Another sequel to Avengers Assemble, rather than to the first Thor movie, this opens with a prologue that introduces us to the Dark Elves, evil creatures who want to see an end to the Nine Realms (if you’re not a Marvel fan, just go with me on this).  Their leader Malekith (Eccleston) plans to use the Aether, a swirling mass of energy that will allow him to do this when the realms are in alignment.  Thwarted by Odin’s (Hopkins) father, Malekith is forced into hiding, and the Aether is hidden “where no one will find it”.

Fast forward five thousand years (how often the realms are in alignment) and Malekith returns to do his worst.  Meanwhile, Loki (Hiddleston) is imprisoned in Asgard, Jane Foster (Portman) is unhappy that two years have past since she last saw Thor (Hemsworth), and Thor is busy bringing peace to the Nine Realms by fighting anyone who stands in his way.  Alerted to strange phenomena in a deserted warehouse somewhere in London, Jane stumbles across the Aether and becomes its host.  With Jane’s life on the line, it’s up to Thor to save both her and thwart Malekith’s evil plans.  But in order to do so he’ll need help…

Thor The Dark World - scene

This third outing for Thor is huge fun from start to finish, with spectacular set-pieces, humour that ranges from subtle to broader than Volstagg’s (Stevenson) pectorals, gravitas courtesy of Hopkins (as Odin) and Russo (as Frigga), further explorations of the fraternal bond that chafes between Thor and Loki, and the best cameo from another Avenger… ever.  The romance between Thor and Jane is given more space – which is a good thing otherwise Portman would have remained sorely under-used – while the accepted jealousy that Sif (Alexander) feels towards Jane is handled effectively.  It’s the quiet moments such as these that offset the action sequences so well, and while those sequences are directed with accomplished flair by Taylor, it’s the ongoing character developments that Marvel are getting right each time.  At the heart of the film , though, is the relationship between Thor and Loki, here given added depth by their having to work together to defeat Malekith; the interaction between Hemsworth and Hiddleston is a joy to watch.  Hiddleston has a ball (again) as Loki and grabs all the best lines, while Hemsworth continues to mature in the role he’s made his own.  Of the supporting cast, Elba, Russo and Dennings shine, while Eccleston makes more of a villain whose sole motivation seems to be ‘destroy everything’.

Taylor handles the various twists and turns of the storyline with experienced aplomb – can we stop mentioning he worked on Game of Thrones now? – and while the script by Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely has its fair share of plot contrivances, they don’t detract from the enjoyment provided by this latest instalment in Marvel’s plans to dominate the cinema box office.  There’s also some great location work at Greenwich (three stops from Charing Cross on the underground – really?), and fantastic production design courtesy of Charles Wood.

Rating: 8/10 – top-notch episode from Phase 2 of the Marvel Universe that also helps set up the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy; bold and more confident in every way.  And by the way, note to Marvel: find some way to give Loki his own movie – okay?