Journeyman (2017)

03 Friday Aug 2018

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Anthony Welsh, Boxing, Brain injury, Drama, Jodie Whittaker, Paddy Considine, Rehabilitation, Review

D: Paddy Considine / 92m

Cast: Paddy Considine, Jodie Whittaker, Anthony Welsh, Tony Pitts, Paul Popplewell

For Matty Burton (Considine), his upcoming defence of his newly attained WBO World Middleweight Championship title, will be his last fight. He’s an average boxer who has become champion by default, and his best years are behind him. But his pride is pushing him to take up the challenge of rising star Andre Bryte (Welsh) and despite the younger boxer’s considerable talent, hope to win the fight. The bout is a bruising, punishing encounter, and Matty endures several traumatic blows to the head. Back home after the fight, he collapses. When he wakes, his memory is impaired and his personality is changed. His wife, Emma (Whittaker), does her best to help him with his rehabilitation, but when Matty becomes prone to violent outbursts when he doesn’t get what he wants, this and an incident involving their baby daughter, Mia, prompts her to leave him, for the safety of both of them. Another traumatising experience leads Matty back to the gym where his former trainers, Richie (Pitts) and Jackie (Popplewell), decide to take over his rehabilitation, and help him do enough to win Emma back – but will be able to fight back against the brain injury that has changed him so drastically…?

A powerful and uncompromising movie, Journeyman is Paddy Considine’s second outing as writer/director – after the equally impressive Tyrannosaur (2011) – and a showcase for his considerable talents both behind and in front of the camera. As a writer, Considine has a knack for keeping dialogue to a minimum while still allowing his characters to express so much of how they’re feeling. Here, the challenge is to ensure that Matty, despite his memory loss and personality change, is still fundamentally the same man, and Considine achieves this by the slow reveal of key phrases from pre-injury moments that show a mind in turmoil, but one that’s also able to lock onto those important phrases. It’s an emotional process as well, one that highlights Matty’s progress, and which gives hope for his eventual rehabilitation. As a director, Considine pays close attention to the small details that help in Matty’s recovery, such as remembering his father’s name, while also showing just how difficult it is through things such as Matty leaving tea bags in people’s drinks. He never romanticises Matty’s struggle, either, keeping the drama of his situation entirely credible, and the pitfalls and setbacks he experiences are often heart-rending.

But it’s Considine’s work as an actor that is the most impressive here. As Matty, he gives a tour-de-force portrayal of a proud man brought low by a traumatic experience, and the problems he faces in regaining everything he’s lost. It’s an unsentimental, sobering performance, flecked with moments of quiet yet affecting pathos and unsparing emotional simplicity. You can sense the pain behind Matty’s seemingly vacant gaze, and the depth of that pain. Considine is in a class of his own, wringing every last piece of poignancy and heartfelt regret from Matty’s journey back to himself. Alongside him, Whittaker – in what is effectively a secondary role – is a worried presence as Emma, anxious enough before the fight, and then increasingly so afterwards as her marriage begins to implode, and it becomes clear there’s nothing she can do in the short term to stop it. The future Doctor Who has perhaps the less “difficult” role, but Considine is such an unselfish actor that Whittaker is given the room to make Emma an equally integral part of Matty’s story. If there’s one moment of mild controversy it’s when Considine lets boxing off the hook for Matty’s injury – would he have sustained it otherwise? – but otherwise this is a fiercely intelligent, tough, and demanding movie that, thankfully, doesn’t pull its punches.

Rating: 9/10 – a sincere and credible story told incredibly well by its writer/director/star, Journeyman lands knockout after knockout in its unflinching tale of a boxer’s struggle to reboot his life; Considine’s performance is simply astonishing, and is the beating heart of a movie that packs an emotional wallop over and over again.

Angel of Death (2009)

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Assassin, Brain injury, Crime, Drama, Jake Abel, Justin Huen, Lucy Lawless, Paul Etheredge, Review, Stuntwoman, Thriller, Vail Bloom, Web series, Zoë Bell

D: Paul Etheredge / 77m

Cast: Zoë Bell, Jake Abel, Vail Bloom, Justin Huen, Doug Jones, Lucy Lawless, Brian Poth, Ingrid Rogers, John Serge, Lucy Lawless

The career of Zoë Bell is one you could charitably and fairly say is all due to the influence and intervention of one Quentin Tarantino. If he hadn’t picked her to a) be Uma Thurman’s stunt double in both Kill Bill movies, and b) to do the “ship’s mast” stunt in Death Proof (2007), then it’s unlikely she would have the acting career that has followed in the wake of those movies (prior to Death Proof, her only big screen appearance – believe it or not – was in Billy Elliot (2000). A short stint on Lost (2008) followed, but Angel of Death was the first movie to put Bell front and centre.

Except that Angel of Death was originally a web series, ten episodes that aired on Crackle in March 2009 and which ran eight to ten minutes per episode. The series had limited success (a second season was considered but has yet to be made), but it provided Bell with a showcase for her obvious physical talents, while at the same time highlighting her limitations with dialogue and characterisation. For every kick-ass moment where she punches and kicks people in the face, there’s another that sees her mangle her lines as if the effort of disguising her New Zealand accent is too difficult when combined with speaking like an American.

However distracting Bell’s limitations may be though, Angel of Death provides the stuntwoman-turned-actress with a platform on which she can showcase her tremendous physical presence. Bell plays Eve, an assassin working for shadowy fixer Graham (Poth). The pair are partners in both their professional and private lives, and there’s an edge to their relationship that has more to do with Eve’s unwillingness to be treated like an employee rather than an equal. A straightforward hit is initially successful, but goes wrong when Eve finds herself facing two unexpected bodyguards and their charge, the target’s teenage daughter. Eve dispatches all three, but not before one of the bodyguards manages to stab her in the head (leaving the blade in her skull).

How you react to the sight of Bell with a knife sticking out of her head will set the tone for the rest of the movie. Keep a straight face, and you’ll find yourself accepting the movie’s more perverse developments with an ease that will probably surprise you. Laugh, and you’ll find yourself deriding those selfsame developments with the same amount of ease. And if that image isn’t enough to sway matters one way or the other, then the later image of Doug Jones’ mob-related Dr Rankin pulling it out without benefit of anaesthetic or proper surgical procedure, will decide things once and for all (clue: your ribs should be aching).

But to paraphrase Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben: with great cranial relief, comes great responsibility, because Eve begins to have disturbing visions of the teenage girl she killed. Worse yet, these visions have the effect of causing her to go after the people involved in hiring her. This leads her to Arthur Max (Serge), an underworld fixer in the same vein as Graham but with less of a conscience. Eve takes the first of several beatings before she manages to kill him. This brings her to the attention of Max’s boss, the young but suitably psychopathic Cameron Downes (Abel). Downes is the son of an ailing crime boss, and has designs on inheriting the business sooner than his father may have planned. He’s a nasty piece of work whose weapon of choice is a cutthroat razor.

With Eve trusting no one, everyone is out to find her, including Graham, Cameron, the FBI, and a former colleague, Franklin (Huen), who winds up working for Cameron’s duplicitous sister, Regina (Bloom). With Eve’s hallucinations having an increasingly deleterious effect, she soon finds herself face-to-face with a bloodthirsty Cameron, but with the odds stacked massively against her. (You can guess the outcome, especially given a second season was mooted.)

Amongst all the bone-cracking fight scenes, the script by Ed Brubaker makes random attempts to give Eve and Graham’s relationship a sense of poignancy, and gives Huen a chance to humanise his character – even though he’s supposed to be a hitman (who instead comes across as a bit of a whinger). Etheredge directs things with an eye for making Eve’s world a low-budget film noir (the action seems to take place in and around the seedy tenement building in which Eve lives), but beyond the visual look of the movie he has no control over the actors or the vagaries of Brubaker’s credibility-lite screenplay.

But this is an action movie first and foremost, and Etheredge does know where to put the camera during the numerous fight sequences. Alas, and despite Bell being her own stuntwoman for these sequences, these scenes are perfunctory and Ron Yuan’s fight choreography isn’t particularly thrilling, leaving them looking and feeling brutal, but without the emotional connection to Eve that would have you willing her on when things aren’t going her way. The episodic nature of the material doesn’t help either, or the way in which Eve recovers from each bout as if it’s never happened (really, she has powers of recovery that would embarrass the Wolverine).

But in the end, none of this is Bell’s fault. Brubaker’s script is a mess, Etheredge’s direction is cumbersome at best and lazy at worst, and the cast go about their performances as if each of them were appearing in a completely different movie. There’s a short, filmed-in-a-day performance by Lawless that is meant to provide some comic relief, but by the time she appears, there’s been too much comedy elsewhere for her ex-hooker character to register as anything more than a cameo for Bell’s benefit (Bell was Lawless’ stunt double on Xena – Warrior Princess). Bell does her best, and she’s surprisingly watchable, but only seems comfortable when she’s kicking ass, and not trying to approximate the kind of PTSD her character is suffering from.

Rating: 4/10 – Bell is the star attraction here, but like so many low-budget action thrillers, Angel of Death is strong on mood but weak on plausibiity; there’s some unnecessary comic strip transitions between episodes, some equally unnecessary attempts at providing depth, and a nagging sense that no one really felt there would be a second season.

Concussion (2015)

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Albert Brooks, Alec Baldwin, Brain injury, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CTE, David Morse, Dr Bennet Omalu, Drama, Football players, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mike Webster, NFL, Pathologist, Pittsburgh Stealers, Review, Suicide, True story, Will Smith

D: Peter Landesman / 123m

Cast: Will Smith, Alec Baldwin, Albert Brooks, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Morse, Arliss Howard, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Paul Reiser, Luke Wilson, Stephen Moyer, Matthew Willig, Richard T. Jones, Hill Harper, Sara Lindsey, Mike O’Malley, Eddie Marsan

America’s National Football League, the NFL, until recently, would have had us believe that there is no correlation between severe head trauma and mental deterioration. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you’re hit in the head repeatedly over a long period of time, that it’s going to have a long-term effect; we’ve all seen too many punch-drunk boxers to disbelieve that one. But the NFL, despite apparently being aware of the dangers inherent in such a violent contact sport, did nothing about it. Players who developed mental health problems would often take their own lives, so overwhelming was their condition(s). And for years, no one outside the NFL knew anything about it.

And then in 2002, an unlikely “hero” appeared in the shape and form of Nigerian-born pathologist, Dr Bennet Omalu (Smith). While performing an autopsy on Pittsburgh Stealers legend Mike Webster, Omalu was unable to determine why Webster’s brain showed no signs of disease or damage, and yet his character and personality had changed to the extent that he was pulling out his own teeth and then supergluing them back in. Omalu conducted further research and tests on samples of Webster’s brain, and in doing so, discovered evidence of what he named CTE – Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Omalu realised that CTE was caused by the repeated blows to the head that football players experienced in every game, and that this something that needed to be brought to the attention of both the NFL and the public.

Omalu published his findings, and almost immediately the NFL began ridiculing his work and his theories (though within the medical profession it was regarded as an accurate representation of what was happening). Attacked on all sides, Omalu found an unexpected ally in the form of former Pittsburgh Stealers team doctor, Julian Bailes (Baldwin). He confirmed what Omalu was beginning to suspect: that the NFL were complicit in what was happening to a lot of former players. Omalu sought to open a dialogue with the NFL but they wanted nothing to do with him, and continued to criticise and rubbish his findings.

More former players died, usually from suicide. Omalu now had enough evidence to take to the NFL and prove his theory. But the NFL blindsided him, and when his boss (and friend), Dr Cyril Wecht (Brooks) was charged with multiple counts of fraud, Omalu was left with little room to manoeuvre. Unwilling to put his friends and colleagues in the line of fire, Omalu decided to quit and relocate to California with his wife, Prema (Mbatha-Raw). And then three years later, another ex-player killed himself, but this time, in such a way that not even the NFL could ignore. Now, Omalu had a chance to get his message across – but would the NFL listen?

Concussion is a small movie with a big message to pass on. That it does so intermittently, and with very little passion attached to it, makes for an uneasy ride as Omalu continually points out the obvious, and is then ignored for his temerity as a foreign national to be someone who doesn’t follow the game, or know who half the local players are. Various justifications are made on the game’s ruling body’s behalf, but the real question – why would you place such highly-paid, professional athletes in such a potentially harmful environment, and not do something to alert them to the risks they’re taking? – is never really answered.

Partly it’s because the focus is squarely on Bennet Omalu and his relationships with medicine and science and his faith (Omalu meets his future wife at church, where he’s asked to take her in as a favour to the parish). With the NFL refusing to engage with the issue unless forced to, the movie has to surmise much of the league’s reasoning, and this leads to awkward, melodramatic moments such as when ex-player and league bigwig Dave Duerson (Akinnuoye-Agbaje) confronts Omalu and dishes up a large plate of hostility and bile. The movie also marginalises a lot of the minor characters, from Dr Ron Hamilton (Moyer), who helped Omalu get the recognition he needed from other doctors and medical personnel, to Omalu’s own wife, Prema, who, one personal tragedy aside, appears to be there to remind audiences just how good a man Omalu is.

As the emabttled pathologist, Smith makes up for the soulless, joyless performance he gave in After Earth (2013) by making Omalu an earnest, justice-seeking missile of the truth. It is a better performance – by quite some margin – but it’s a relentlessly dour one as well, with Smith constantly frowning as if he’d lost something and couldn’t find it. Smith is a more than capable actor – see Ali (2001) if confirmation is needed – but here he’s let down by the movie’s pedestrian, made-for-home video tone, the connect-the-dots approach of the script, and Landesman’s unfocused direction. And there are too many scenes where the time to be passionate about the subject is given the equivalent of a hall pass.

The movie ends up being a lengthy one-sided examination of the head trauma issue as seen through the eyes of a moral evangelist – Omalu implores more than one person to “tell the truth”. But once Omalu has established that CTE exists and is a very real killer, the NFL’s intractability comes into play (no pun intended), and the audience is left waiting for a resolution that looks increasingly unlikely to happen. And yet, when it does, it lacks the impact required to have audiences cheering in their seats at seeing justice prevail. And as if to add to the dourness of Smith’s portrayal, the pre-end credits updates reveal the degree of inertia the issue has suffered since Omalu brought CTE to the public – and the NFL’s – attention.

Rating: 6/10 – anyone doubting the existence of CTE should look to Concussion‘s uncompromising approach to the subject and rethink accordingly; sadly though, as a movie, it lacks the crusading zeal that would have made the issue that much more exciting and/or gripping.