The Transporter Refueled (2015)

10 Thursday Sep 2015

Tags

Action, Camille Delamarre, Car chases, Crime, Ed Skrein, Loan Chabanol, Prostitution, Ray Stevenson, Reboot, Revenge, Review, South of France, Thriller

D: Camille Delamarre / 96m

Cast: Ed Skrein, Ray Stevenson, Loan Chabanol, Gabriella Wright, Tatiana Pajkovic, Wenxia Yu, Radivoje Bukvic, Noémie Lenoir, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Lenn Kudrjawizki, Samir Guesmi, Anatole Taubman

Comments made following an advance US screening of The Transporter Refueled:

“When did Jason Statham get a facelift? Damn, he looks good!”

“Why was Florida full of French people?”

“Where can I learn to drive like the transporter?”

“Why was the transporter’s dad such a manwhore?”

“Who’s Ed Skrein?”

“A roundabout with four conveniently placed fire hydrants – what are the odds?”

“What a great idea to have the final showdown take place on a boat. Well done!”

“The four women looked really good after being prostitutes for fifteen years. What was their skin care regime?”

“It was good that the Russian bad guy and the English good guy had served in the same army at some point.”

“Will the next one be called, The Transporter: Are We There Yet?”

“Shouldn’t it be spelt refuelled?”

Rating: 4/10 – for a fast-paced action movie, The Transporter Refueled is instead quite sluggish, and easily the least of the four movies so far; Skrein doesn’t have Statham’s intensity (or his moves), and the plot – as usual – relies on far too many things falling conveniently into place for comfort, leaving the viewer with the feeling that the three screenwriters weren’t interested in scripting a movie that might have had audiences on the edge of their seats.

Drive Hard (2014)

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Australia, Bank robbery, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Car chases, Corrupt cops, Gold Coast, John Cusack, Review, Thomas Jane

D: Brian Trenchard-Smith / 92m

Cast: John Cusack, Thomas Jane, Zoe Ventoura, Christopher Morris, Yesse Spence, Damien Garvey

Former race car driver Peter Roberts (Jane) runs a driving school but continues to dream of race car glory. His wife, Tessa (Spence) and daughter Rebecca are not entirely supportive of him, and he’s very much stuck in a rut. When a driving lesson with visiting American, Keller (Cusack) begins uncomfortably – Keller seems to know an awful lot about Peter, his family, and his past – Peter decides to end the lesson. Keller persuades him to make a stop at a bank; when Keller comes out it’s clear he’s just committed a robbery, and Peter is now his getaway driver. They evade the police and swap Peter’s clunky driving school car for a souped-up GT before heading further up the coast to where Keller can leave the country.

Of course, Keller hasn’t just committed any old bank robbery, he’s stolen $9 million in bearer bonds from a bank that acts as a front for the crime syndicate that left him high and dry after a job he did for them (Keller is a thief and spent five years in jail). With the bank’s “security” staff after them, as well as the local police (who are on the bank’s payroll), and the Federal police, Peter and Keller have to try and keep a low profile on their journey, something that proves easier said than done. And as their relationship develops, Keller shows Peter that his life isn’t as rosy as he thinks it is. It all leads to a showdown at a marina that sees Peter and Keller working together to get both of them out of danger.

Drive Hard is best summed up in four words: it’s just plain awful. This is movie-making of such depressing witlessness that it makes you wonder how on earth anyone could have thought they were doing a good enough job in the first place. Watching actors of the calibre of Cusack and Jane trying to make any of it interesting or entertaining is like watching two ageing boxers trying to land punches but missing every time. Jane is simply embarrassing; it’s like he’s decided that making his character seem credible just isn’t relevant or necessary. It’s possibly the worst performance he’s ever given on screen. And Cusack is only marginally better, again ditching a credible characterisation in favour of mangled line readings. If there was ever a performance that shouted, “paying the mortgage here!” then this is the one.

At the reins, and failing to bring anything remotely interesting or new to proceedings is veteran director (and co-screenwriter) Trenchard-Smith, a cult figure quite well-regarded but on this outing, clearly going through the motions. For a movie with a title like Drive Hard, it’s equally clear that the title came first, and the story and plot came along a very distant second and third. Even the chase sequences – strictly speaking, one chase sequence split into two sections – are dull and uninspired, and you know things are bad when the budget isn’t big enough to come up with at least one decent collision or car wreck. Otherwise there are plenty of shots of Peter and Keller driving through the (admittedly) beautiful Gold Coast countryside on their not very fast trip to the marina, and an encounter with a group of bikers that should provide some much-needed tension but which is resolved with a minimum of fuss and/or bother (basically these bikers are about as scary as a bunch of leather-clad Teletubbies).

There are other encounters along the way – a gas station attendant tries to steal the bonds but ends up like Marvin in Pulp Fiction (1994), an elderly woman at the site of a wedding reception goes gun crazy when she realises who Peter and Keller are – but these (very minor) highlights are still badly paced and edited. The subplot involving the corrupt cops and the Feds is allowed to trundle on in such a contrived manner it makes its resolution all the more welcome, even if it is entirely implausible, and the main bad guy, Rossi (Morris) is so colourless he might as well be see-through. Peter’s relationship with Tessa feels like it was adapted from an agony aunt column, and the solution to their problems proves to be unashamedly sexist.

The worst aspect of this absolute mess of a movie is without doubt the dialogue, with enough clunkers per minute to warrant some kind of award. Cusack seems saddled with most of them, and his attempts to justify his actions are both lame and ludicrous at the same time. Jane blusters his way through his lines with all the enthusiasm of someone who can’t wait to get them over and done with, and Rossi’s attempts to sound threatening are about as impressive as someone trying to intimidate a snail. And as if things couldn’t get any worse, the end credits fail to list the young actress who plays Rebecca, but does list Cusack’s personal chef twice.

Rating: 3/10 – abysmal, and a low point for pretty much everyone concerned, Drive Hard disappoints on almost every level; leaden, tension-free and careless, this is filmmaking for the sake of it and as entertaining as watching your toenails grow.

Need for Speed (2014)

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aaron Paul, Car chases, Car crashes, Cross-country, Dominic Cooper, Imogen Poots, Michael Keaton, Prison, Racing cars, Review, San Francisco, Scott Waugh, Video game

D: Scott Waugh / 132m

Cast: Aaron Paul, Dominic Cooper, Imogen Poots, Michael Keaton, Scott Mescudi, Rami Malek, Ramon Rodriguez, Harrison Gilbertson, Dakota Johnson, Nick Chinlund

At one point in DreamWorks’ Need for Speed, Julia (Poots) comes out of a gas station restroom and sees Officer Lejeune (Chinlund) in the next aisle. Immediately she ducks down and tries to sneak her way out. It’s possibly the stupidest moment in the whole movie – and there’s plenty of others – and makes you wonder if anyone actually read George Gatins’ half-baked, semi-developed script before they committed to filming it. (The answer is clearly: no.) Another question that springs to mind is: are the car chases going to be enough to help the movie make its money back? (Ahh… we’ll get to that.)

Tobey Marshall (Paul) has inherited his father’s auto shop but there are mounting debts he can’t pay, so when old rival Dino Brewster (Cooper) offers him a chance to make $2.7 million on a private race involving Tobey, Dino and Tobey’s friend Little Pete (Gilbertson), he can’t turn it down. But Little Pete is killed in the race, forced to crash by Dino. With Dino denying any involvement, and hiding the car he was driving, Tobey ends up spending two years in prison. Two years later, Tobey is released on parole, and promptly arranges for a car so that he can travel from New York to California and a) take part in a race arranged by mysterious philanthropist Monarch (Keaton), and b) have his revenge on Dino. Dino is taking part in the race, but Tobey needs a way in as its by invitation only. With car dealer Julia along for the ride as the car owner’s representative, Tobey gets the car and himself noticed enough times that Monarch gives him a spot in the race. All he has to do is reach San Francisco within forty-eight hours, avoiding the police and anyone who takes up Dino’s offer of a bounty if Tobey is stopped from getting there.

Naturally, Tobey has help along the way from fellow mechanics and friends Benny (Mescudi), Finn (Malek), and Joe (Rodriguez). Benny is also a pilot and keeps stealing planes and helicopters in order to provide Tobey with eyes in the sky along the route. Finn and Joe help refuel the car while it’s in motion, and generally follow along the route Tobey takes in case of back up (which is eventually needed when Tobey reaches San Francisco). Monarch provides a running commentary on Tobey’s progress, and acts as commentator when the race starts. Julia provides the inevitable romantic interest, and Dino is the sneering villain we all want to see crash and burn like Little Pete does. Which leaves Tobey, the mostly silent but determined underdog who should win the race but only if he watches out for dastardly Dino and his habit of running people off the road.

If it seems a little predicable so far, then that’s because it is. Need for Speed is a movie without an original thought under its bonnet, a handful of barely convincing performances, and lines of dialogue that prove impossible to give credibility to. It’s movie-making by cliché, a string of ill-thought out scenes and low-key characters whose combined motivations couldn’t power a light bulb. Once again, it’s the fault of the script, a horrible concoction that almost screams, “Rush job!” This is Gatins’ first produced screenplay, and it’s ironic that he was an associate producer on a movie called You Stupid Man (2002); he gets hardly anything right. This leaves the cast to deal with mountains of trite and terrible dialogue, third-rate plot contrivances, scenes so laughable they should be included in a training scheme for aspiring writers – at random: Benny in a military jail asking for an iPad and being allowed to follow the race on it… and all the while the guard holds it up for him to watch – and some of the most perfunctory dialogue this side of a script by George Lucas (have I mentioned the dialogue enough yet?).

With director Scott Waugh unable to breathe any life into the movie when there’s no chase going on, Need for Speed has to depend on its action scenes to gain any brownie points or gold stars. Much has been made already of the fact that CGI hasn’t been used in the car chase sequences, and that all the smash-ups were done for real. And so they should be. But while Paul and Cooper may have spent time learning how to race so they could seen behind the wheel as much as possible, what the filmmakers have failed to realise is that, racing, in and of itself, is only really interesting or attention-grabbing when something goes wrong. So yes, the car chases are exciting, but only if you find the idea of a car going really fast in competition with another car, and (inevitably) on a deserted stretch of road, to be truly exciting. On this evidence, it’s almost exciting, but what’s missing is a real sense of danger. When Tobey is in Detroit and he’s being chased by the police, there’s never the slightest doubt that he’ll get away (and yes, I know that’s obvious, he’s the hero, after all) so the movie drops down a gear or two and makes his escape both a high point and, from a technical viewpoint, a bit of a let-down.

This is the highly regarded “two-lane grasshopper” manoeuvre, where Tobey accelerates up an embankment and powers his car over two lanes of traffic to land safely in a third and drive away without being followed any further – at all. It sounds like a great stunt, and on paper it is, but in the movie it’s a short sequence made up of five or six different shots (one of which is a long shot of the car in mid-flight), that doesn’t let the viewer see it happen in one fluid take (unlike, say, the bridge jump in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974). It’s like the scene in Speed (1995) where the bus has to jump the gap in the freeway; it was done for real, but the way it’s cut together leaves you thinking it wasn’t. Sadly, it’s the same here.

There are some positives, though. Keaton – on a bit of a roll at the moment – reminds us just how exciting a performer he can be, and lifts the movie out of the doldrums whenever he’s on screen. The crashes, when they happen, are spectacular and thrilling, and a testament to the creative abilities of the stunt team; they all look suitably life-threatening. Paul and Poots, reunited after appearing together in A Long Way Down (2014), have a chemistry that helps their scenes immeasurably, and the location photography ensures the movie is nothing less than beautiful to look at in places.

Rating: 4/10 – fans will disagree but Need for Speed doesn’t have that kinetic charge that would have elevated it above other chase movies; the script’s deficiencies hurt it tremendously, too, and no matter how fast Messrs Paul and Cooper may try, that’s one (very major) problem they can’t outrun.