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thedullwoodexperiment

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Tag Archives: Charlie Hunnam

Triple Frontier (2019)

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Colombia, Drama, Drug cartel, Garrett Hedlund, Heist, J.C. Chandor, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Review

D: J.C. Chandor / 125m

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona, Sheila Vand, Reynaldo Gallegos, Maddy Wary, Juan Camilo Castillo

While working as a private military advisor combating a drug cartel in Colombia, Santiago “Pope” Garcia (Isaac) learns that the head of the cartel, Lorea (Gallegos), keeps all his money at a safe house in the middle of the jungle. Instead of passing on this information to the authorities, Pope returns to the US to recruit four friends, all ex-Special Forces, for a mission to grab the money for themselves. Each of his friends has a reason for going: Tom “Redfly” Davis (Affleck) is a realtor with financial problems; William “Ironhead” Miller (Hunnam) is a motivational speaker who misses being a part of the military; his brother, Ben (Hedlund), is an MMA fighter who’ll follow wherever Ironhead goes; and Francisco “Catfish” Morales (Pascal) is a pilot whose licence has been withdrawn. They reconnoitre Lorea’s jungle hideout, and determine to raid the place on a Sunday morning when his family and most of his men will be at church. Although Ironhead is wounded, the raid is a success, and they get away with around $250 million in cash. Now all they have to do is stay alive long enough to make it back home…

Triple Frontier‘s production history is in some ways more interesting than the finished movie. Originally set to star Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, and with Kathryn Bigelow directing, delays since 2010 meant that it wasn’t until 2015 that Chandor came aboard and added his own input to Mark Boal’s original screenplay. With Channing Tatum and Tom Hardy having replaced Hanks and Depp at that stage, Mahershala Ali was added to the cast before all three dropped out, and Affleck et al signed on (Affleck even quit the project himself for a while before shooting began). With all this in mind, it’s interesting to re-imagine the movie with those actors in the main roles – and realise that the right choices were made in the end. For though Triple Frontier is ultimately an uneven movie that puts itself in danger of losing its audience’s interest in the final third, its the strength of its final casting that makes the movie so effective. With impressive performances from all concerned – Affleck is particularly good as the morally ambiguous Redfly – the movie plays well when it’s concerned with issues of camaraderie and masculinity (both supportive and toxic), and in showing the levels of trust these men have in each other, even when things are going wrong and blaming each other is a natural response.

The relationships the five men have form the core of the movie, and give it an emotional resonance that most action thrillers never attempt let alone achieve. And Chandor ensures that it’s not all about the money, but more about how all of them except Pope miss being a part of the action. These are men who’ve lost their sense of purpose, their identities now they’re back in the real world, and when the movie focuses on this, it does so perceptively and persuasively. But this is also an action thriller, and for the first two thirds a very accomplished one, with Chandor staging an opening attack on a cartel building with verve and skill, and the raid on Lorea’s house like a chess match with rifles instead of pieces. But then comes the getaway, and though there’s already the sense that it won’t be as smooth and well planned as hoped for, where Chandor and Boal take Redfly and the others leads to a number of surprisingly flat scenes that lack energy and pace, and which feel like the dictionary definition of padding. As a result, a moment of tragedy lacks the impact it should have, and the movie struggles through to an ending that doesn’t carry the dramatic weight that’s expected. Still, it’s a good movie, for the most part, and Chandor continues to show why he’s one of the best directors working today, but this has to be regarded as something of a disappointment.

Rating: 7/10 – as a three-act narrative with both prologue and epilogue, Triple Frontier is only effective up until the end of the second act, when different forces come into play and the focus shifts from being about five men regaining their sense of purpose in the world, and becomes a generic tale of survival against low odds; with ambitions beyond the standard heist movie, it’s a shame then that those ambitions weren’t as well thought out and worked through as they needed to be.

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King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

10 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Action, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Camelot, Charlie Hunnam, Djimon Hounsou, Drama, Eric Bana, Excalibur, Fantasy, Guy Ritchie, Jude Law, Londinium, Review

D: Guy Ritchie / 126m

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Eric Bana, Aidan Gillen, Freddie Fox, Craig McGinlay, Tom Wu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Neil Maskell, Annabelle Wallis, Geoff Bell, Poppy Delevingne, Bleu Landau, Peter Ferdinando, Mikael Persbrandt, Michael McElhatton

The tagline for King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a simple yet effective one: “from nothing comes a king”. But to quote William Shakespeare (and with the most sincerest of apologies), a better tagline would be, “nothing will come of nothing”. In fact, there are several famous Shakespeare quotes that are apposite for Guy Ritchie’s latest outing, so in an effort to provide a unique review for a movie that offers nothing that is in the remotest sense “unique”, here are some of the Bard’s most well known pieces of dialogue, and their relevance to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

“Now is the winter of our discontent” (Richard III) – strictly speaking, it’s spring right now, but the sentiment remains the same whatever the season. Ritchie, along with co-screenwriters Joby Harold and Lionel Wigram (his producing partner), offers audiences a King Arthur re-style that lurches from one CGI-heavy action sequence to another, all of which are edited in such a way as to remove every last ounce of excitement from every single one of them.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) – it’s hard to work out just who fits this quote more, Warner Bros. for asking Ritchie to make this movie, or Ritchie for accepting the challenge. Perhaps it should be a joint award, as the end result stretches credibility at every turn, appears as if it was collated from a dozen different scripts, and ensures its cast of characters remain as one-dimensional as possible in order to match the quality of the narrative. This leads to Hunnam et al all struggling to give decent performances, and all looking uncomfortable throughout.

“We have seen better days” (Timon of Athens) – each year brings us a fantasy movie that attempts to bring us something out of the ordinary, something we haven’t seen before, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword certainly has aspirations in that department, but instead it ends up looking and sounding like an uninspired retread/mash up of The Lord of the Rings (with bigger elephants), Game of Thrones (without the style), and weirdly, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) (skip the better days angle on this one).

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” (Twelfth Night) – this is the central conceit that infuses the character of Arthur, but once again we have to put up with a character denying his destiny for half the movie before taking up the mantle that he’s been due all along, and then finally going out and kicking some ass. It’s a tired character arc that’s been done so often it’s lost any kind of dramatic weight, and now feels obligatory, as if every character faced with this kind of choice has to be humble and committed to self-denial. If the movie had really wanted to bring us something out of the ordinary, Arthur would have found out he was the rightful King, grabbed up Excalibur, left Londinium, and killed evil uncle Vortigern (Law) at the first opportunity (and shaved at least half an hour off the movie’s two hour running time).

“All that glisters is not gold” (The Merchant of Venice) – the presence of Ritchie behind the camera, and with such a talented cast in front of it, just goes to show that you can’t judge a movie by its intentions. If you saw the first trailer and thought, “Hmm, this looks great!” then a) the makers of that particular trailer got off lightly, and b) there’s not much anyone can do for you. This is a movie that delights in showing off its various boxes of tricks, but as so often happens in these cases (where ambition should have been strangled at birth), once the tricks have been showcased, it becomes obvious that there wasn’t any substance behind them at all. And this is what this movie wants you to forget: that it’s made up of various boxes of tricks and very little else.

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” (The Tempest) – watching King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is an often painful, dispiriting way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s also one that should have no problem in uniting audiences in expressing their general displeasure at what they’ve witnessed. They say that watching movies at the cinema qualifies as a communal experience. It’s such a shame then that so many people are going to be disappointed by a movie that flails around looking for a cohesive story to tell, and which does so without any attempt at providing wit or panache to help it along.

“But, for my own part, it was Greek to me” (Julius Caesar) – in this reimagining of the Arthurian legend (complete with a Camelot that isn’t mentioned by name, only title caption), the once and future king is an East End brothel owner long before there were actual East End brothel owners, and long before anyone added the word “mate” to the end of a sentence. Ritchie and his screenwriter chums may believe this adds a certain piquancy to the dialogue, but instead it feels more out of place than organic, and on occasion, forced. It’s a verbal affectation that does the movie no favours and soon becomes distracting instead of part and parcel of the movie’s overall tone (as intended).

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth) – while Ritchie is by no means an idiot (libel lawyers take heed), this is still a movie that assaults the senses at every opportunity, and which never keeps still. This is a movie for people who can’t bear to see a shot last more than five seconds, who can’t watch an action sequence unless it’s cut into non-sequential chunks, and who like their soundtrack pumped up as much as the movie hopes they are already. The action lacks intensity (though it strives repeatedly to attain the intensity it needs in order to be halfway effective), and the spectacle soon becomes mind-numbing in its repetitiveness. And the occasional quiet moments? Just filler, until the next action sequence comes along.

Rating: 3/10 – you’ll laugh (unintentionally but often), you’ll cry (at the cumulative absurdity/lack of ideas on display), you’ll want to believe that somewhere, in an alternate reality perhaps, that Ritchie has made a masterpiece; alas, a terrible plot and central narrative counter any such notions, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reaches us adrift on a shoddy raft of its own making, taking on water with every swell, and capable only of letting off distress flare after distress flare.

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The Lost City of Z (2016)

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adventure, Charlie Hunnam, Drama, Explorer, Hidden civilisation, Historical drama, James Gray, Perceval Fawcett, Review, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, South America, Thriller, Tom Holland, True story

D: James Gray / 141m

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Angus Macfadyen, Ian McDiarmid, Harry Melling, Franco Nero

A throwback to the kind of big budget adventure stories made in the Seventies and Eighties, with location filming designed to heighten the events shown, The Lost City of Z concerns the efforts of military man turned explorer Perceval “Percy” Fawcett (Hunnam) to find a city he believes is hidden somewhere in the Amazonian jungle. Covering the years between 1905 and 1925, the movie introduces us to Fawcett the military man while he’s posted to Ireland, and finding it difficult to advance through the ranks thanks to what a senior officer refers to as, “an unfortunate choice in ancestors”. Good fortune arrives in the form of a secondment to the Royal Geographical Society, where he is asked to map an area of jungle on the Brazil-Bolivia border.

Fawcett accepts the commission, and finds himself in the company of fellow military men Henry Costin (Pattinson) and Arthur Manley (Ashley). While they carry out their task, Fawcett finds what he believes is evidence of an advanced civilisation that once existed within the jungle but which has remained, until now, undiscovered. When he returns to England, and presents his findings to the RGS, they and he are ridiculed, and the idea that the indigenous tribes are anything but “savages” is dismissed. Fawcett does, however, find an ally in RGS member James Murray (Macfadyen), who agrees to fund a further expedition in search of what Fawcett is calling “the lost city of Z”. And so in 1911, Fawcett, accompanied again by Costin and Manley, and with Murray in tow, returns to the Bolivian jungle.

The expedition, however, suffers a series of setbacks, from the loss of equipment to Murray’s inability to deal with the harsh, uncompromising environment. Forced to turn back despite Fawcett’s conviction that they are close to finding the lost city, the trio return home just as war in Europe breaks out. They find themselves fighting together in France, and during a push across the Somme in 1916, Fawcett falls victim to a chlorine gas attack and is temporarily blinded. Invalided out of the Army, Fawcett believes his exploring days are now behind him. That is, until his son, Jack (Holland), convinces him that they should travel together to Bolivia, and make one more effort to find the lost city. And so, in 1925, the pair set off into the jungle in an effort to prove once and for all that the fabled city and its ancient civilisation did exist.

Based on the book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009) by David Grann, James Gray’s adaptation is sincere, meticulously researched, beautifully shot by Darius Khondji, engaging on a Boys’ Own adventure level, and yet, despite everyone’s best efforts, not as interesting to watch as it should be. The tale of Fawcett’s obsession should be strong, compelling stuff, but thanks to Gray’s adaptation covering such a long period of time, the movie suffers from being episodic, and as a result, feels hesitant in some scenes and overly confident in others. Gray handles the material well, but the narrative’s stop-start approach – something that Gray in both roles as screenwriter and director fails to find a solution for – means that it’s always difficult for the viewer to maintain interest in a story that, ultimately, isn’t going to lead anywhere.

If you already know the outcome of Fawcett’s third expedition to the Bolivian jungle, then this movie won’t necessarily be of interest. Having to wade through a succession of failures before this point, the movie does its best to make each disappointment and setback in Fawcett’s life part of a never-give-up, never-say-die attitude that drives the man forward, but the key word in Grann’s title – “obsession” – never really applies, and that’s partly due to Gray’s script, which never portrays Fawcett as passionate in his beliefs. It’s also due to Hunnam’s less-than-charismatic performance, one that will have viewers wondering why Costin and Manley stick with Fawcett for so long, and how he managed to attract backers for his second and third expeditions. Watching the movie, it gives the impression that the idea of a hidden civilisation in the Bolivian jungle is more enticing than the idea of Fawcett being the man to lead the search.

The expeditions themselves lack any tension, even when Fawcett and his companions encounter a tribe of cannibals, and though Gray shows an impressive capacity for framing the jungle scenes in such a way that they feel other-worldly, these sections of the movie go by without making as much of an impact as Gray was no doubt aiming for. There are also signposted moments that are straight out of Predictable Storytelling 101, such as when Fawcett holds a book up in front of his face and an arrow pierces it, stopping just inches away from hitting him. Or the moment where Murray demands an apology from Fawcett, and he agrees to do so, and then turns and apologises to Costin and Manley instead.

Also problematical is Fawcett’s relationship with his wife, Nina (Miller). She accepts his going to Bolivia in 1906, and is supportive of the trip. But when it comes time for the 1911 trip, Nina wants to go with him, and the pair have an awkward argument where Fawcett plays down her physical ability to make the journey there and back, and she argues that she has endured childbirth (twice by now) and if she can weather that particular experience then the jungle shouldn’t be any worse. Again, it’s an awkward exchange that feels out-of-place – and designed to give Miller something to do other than play the otherwise doting wife – and feels even more out-of-place when their oldest son, Jack, suggests a third trip and she agrees without so much as a murmur. Perhaps Gray felt the need to include a slice of proto-feminism amongst all the testosterone flying around, but if so, it’s not something that works.

By the time Fawcett and his eldest son get to Bolivia, viewers will probably be wondering how this is all going to pan out. Those in the know will find Gray’s choice of endings (technically, there are three) unlikely, overly poignant, and at odds with the tone of the movie thus far. That said, Gray does give Miller another chance to stand out from the overwhelmingly male cast, and while wish fulfilment is the order of the day, it sits uncomfortably with what we know of Fawcett and that last trip.

Overall, The Lost City of Z is a sterile drama that never hits any emotional highs and struggles to provide the audience with a sense of just how important Fawcett’s search for a hidden civilisation really was back in the Georgian era (or even if it was). There’s the usual degree of sexism sitting alongside the kind of blinkered attitudes that seem to define the period, and though Gray keeps the movie interesting on a visual level, with spectacular scenery and beautifully composed individual shots aplenty, it’s on a dramatic level that the movie fails to gain traction, becoming a succession of scenes that aim for a classic adventure feel, but which lack the depth to elevate it to such lofty heights. An adventure then, but one that offers scant reward for both its characters’ efforts, and the audience’s.

Rating: 6/10 – not as compelling or as rich in detail as viewers will need in order to gain maximum enjoyment from it, The Lost City of Z wastes its potential by making Fawcett’s “obsession” a strictly pedestrian affair; Gray delivers on the production side but can’t seem to work his magic on his own script or the cast, leaving the movie feeling like it’s always about to step up a gear while remaining steadfastly in neutral.

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Trailers – Hacksaw Ridge (2016), Split (2017) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

11 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Andrew Garfield, Charlie Hunnam, Desmond T. Doss, Fantasy, Guy Ritchie, Hacksaw Ridge, James McAvoy, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, M. Night Shyamalan, Mel Gibson, Previews, Psychological thriller, Split, Trailers, True story, War

If you don’t know who Desmond T. Doss was, then prepare to be amazed. The trailer for Hacksaw Ridge introduces us to a man whose pacifist leanings led to his being the only non-weapons carrying member of the US Army during World War II, and who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery and courage in rescuing over seventy-five men during the Battle of Okinawa. It’s an incredible tale, and judging from the trailer this could very well be in contention for a whole slew of awards once it goes on general release in November 2016. Advance word is overwhelmingly positive, and many people who’ve seen the movie already are praising its director, Mel Gibson – making his first movie behind the camera since Apocalypto (2006) – for the way in which he presents both the intensity and horror of the conflict on Okinawa, and Doss’s personal faith and its effect on the men around him. Andrew Garfield looks to have finally found a movie that allows him to step up to the mark in terms of his acting ability, and there’s advance word that Vince Vaughn (seen briefly here as a drill sergeant) gives his best performance yet in a movie. If all this early praise is to be believed, then this could prove to be one of the finest war movies ever made, and a reminder that Gibson, whatever his personal problems in recent years, is still a damn fine movie maker.

 

The latest from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, Split looks like an attempt at making a disturbing psychological thriller based around the notion that a kidnapper with multiple personalities – 23, in fact – is doing so at the behest of the strongest, most fearful personality of the lot… the Beast. It remains to be seen if Shyamalan can pull off this particular storyline with anything like the degree of credibility it needs (and having James McAvoy playing the central character, Kevin(!), will certainly help his chances), or if the mechanics of the narrative will require McAvoy to shift personalities at too rapid a speed for things to remain plausible. This being Shyamalan, it’s hard to tell, but what can be discerned from Split‘s first trailer is that he’s going for a taut, gripping viewing experience, the kind he hasn’t really tried before, and one without any supernatural elements either. It’s easy to dismiss Shyamalan as a writer/director, but The Visit (2015) was a welcome semi-return to form, and he’s such a strong, distinctive, visually arresting director that it’s about time his skills as a writer were able to once again match those he has as a director.

 

At first sight, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword looks like a spirited romp through an alternative Arthurian timeline, one where the fabled King begins life as a child of the streets, but still ends up removing Excalibur from its stone and ruling a kingdom. And while there’s nothing remotely wrong with the idea of retelling the Arthur legend in such a way, what is obviously, clearly, undoubtedly, unquestionably and visibly wrong here is the way in which that idea has been executed. Guy Ritchie may be a very talented director, and he may have assembled a very talented cast – Charlie Hunnam, Jude Law, Eric Bana, Djimon Hounsou, Aidan Gillen, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, and, erm, David Beckham – but the tone of the movie is plainly off by a country mile. Martial arts fight sequences, modern day humour, large-scale battle sequences straight out of the Peter Jackson Middle Earth Playbook, and a visual style that apes any number of other fantasy movies made in recent years; all these aspects and more make the movie feel derivative and lacking in originality. While it’s evidently been created with the intention of being one of 2017’s must-see tentpole movies, here’s a prediction: come next March we’ll all be asking the same question, “Why, Guy, why?”

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Crimson Peak (2015)

17 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Allerdale Hall, Charlie Hunnam, Drama, Ghosts, Gothic romance, Guillermo del Toro, Horror, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Murder, Review, Thriller, Tom Hiddleston

Crimson Peak

D: Guillermo del Toro / 119m

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones, Jonathan Hyde, Bruce Gray

When Edith Cushing (Wasikowska) is a young child her mother dies unexpectedly. After the funeral, Edith is visited by the ghost of her mother who warns her to “beware of Crimson Peak”. Fourteen years later, Edith is trying to establish herself as a writer. She has written a novel about ghosts but her intended publisher wants her to include a romance (though she feels this is unnecessary). Her father (Beaver), a self-made industrialist, is supportive of her efforts, and lets her type up her manuscript at his offices. There she meets Sir Thomas Sharpe, a visiting aristocrat from England, who is looking for financial backing for an invention of his that will aid in the mining of red clay at his home in Northumberland. But while Edith finds herself attracted to Thomas, her father takes a dislike to him and refuses to back him.

When a secret about Thomas is discovered it leads to the death of Edith’s father. Heartbroken, she turns to Thomas and his sister, Lady Lucille (Chastain) for support, and soon agrees to marry him. Together, they travel to England and the Sharpe family home, a towering gothic edifice called Allerdale Hall. The house is falling apart, and stands atop a clay mine that it is slowly sinking into. As she settles into her new life, Edith comes to discover that the house harbours secrets that neither Thomas nor Lucille want her to know about. Meanwhile, back in New York, Edith’s childhood friend Dr Alan McMichael (Hunnam), already suspicious of the way in which her father died, begins his own investigation.

Plagued by ghostly visions, Edith begins to unravel the secrets of Allerdale Hall, secrets that lead her to believe that Thomas’s mother was murdered there, and that there is some connection with his recent trips to places such as Edinburgh and Milan. The discovery of luggage engraved with the initials E.S. provides a further clue that links to the visions she has. At the same time she begins to fall ill, while McMichael learns the same secret that led to her father’s death and believing Edith to be in danger, he decides to leave for England.

Crimson Peak - scene

A project that del Toro has been looking to film since 2006, Crimson Peak arrives with a great deal of anticipation and hype preceeding it, and with the enviable status of being the only movie of its kind – a gothic romance with distinct horror overtones – to be released in 2015. It’s a movie that splits its narrative in two, and in the process ends up making the first part more effective than the second, which has the unfortunate effect of leaving viewers with the impression that del Toro and co-screenwriter Matthew Robbins had a firmer grasp of what they were trying to achieve with the scenes set in New York than they did with the ones at Allerdale Hall.

This leads to the movie lacking a sense of true development once we’re ensconced in the Sharpe ancestral family home. It should be the other way round but while del Toro and Robbins expand on the mystery behind Thomas and Lucille’s motives, it soon becomes apparent that the ghostly visions Edith experiences are less of a threat to her and more of a series of clues as to what has happened at the Hall in the past. With this in mind, it’s puzzling that del Toro has decided to make these apparitions as scary as possible, and in particular the spectral wraith that is Edith’s mother (played by the erstwhile Doug Jones), a depiction that seems at odds with her role as a guardian in death of her daughter’s safety – did she have to be so frightening?

But while the recreation of pre-1900 New York is achieved with considerable success, it’s not until we reach Allerdale Hall that del Toro reveals the true focus of the movie: making that towering creation feel like a living, breathing character in its own right. The Hall is a triumph of production and set design, and is endlessly fascinating in its construction, with darkness leeching from the walls and corridors that look like they’ve been carved out of the vertebrae and rib cages of dead whales. Everywhere you look there’s another interesting detail to take in, some new quirk of the architecture to observe, but so good is this attention to detail that it overwhelms the story, leaving Edith’s plight of secondary importance. And with a subterranean level thrown in for good measure, the house and its “personality” become far more interesting than the pallid-by-comparison storyline involving Edith and the conspiring Sharpes (though you might wonder where all the leaves that tumble continuously through the roof are coming from, as the house is shown to sit proudly alone at the top of a hill).

As a gothic romance, the movie is on better ground, with Thomas’s pursuit of Edith feeling more than expedient from the beginning, and as he becomes less and less sure of the path that he and Lucille have embarked upon, it becomes obvious that his true feelings will cause his doom. Hiddleston relays the torment and indecision that Thomas endures with a great deal of yearning for a chance to be free of his family burden, and makes the character more sympathetic than his initial actions would warrant. As the wounded and betrayed Edith, Wasikowska ensures her would-be author isn’t shown as too soft or easily dominated, but is still asked to rein in Edith’s assertiveness in moments where the script requires it. She and Hiddleston do well in making their characters’ relationship more credible than most, but despite their good work there’s just not enough passion on display to make their feelings for each other too convincing.

Crimson Peak - scene2

The same can’t be said for Chastain, an actress who it seems can turn her hand to any character in any genre. As the taciturn and tightly controlled Lucille she’s a riveting presence in any scene she’s in, even when she’s in the background. By the movie’s end she’s asked to abandon all the subtleties she’s imbued her performance with in favour of a more traditional approach required by the material. Before this, Chastain is quietly chilling, her manipulative, simmering-with-anger personality more compelling in its intensity than any of the house’s blood-slicked apparitions. (In comparison, Hunnam is the movie’s anodyne hero, and one who almost operates as an historical forerunner of Hallorann from Kubrick’s The Shining.)

By the time the mystery has been revealed and the machinations of the plot (loosely) explained and sewn up, the movie has descended into the kind of bloody, violent showdown that audiences will be expecting, but it isn’t the best showdown you’re ever likely to see, and it lacks vitality. Partly this is due to the pacing, and partly due to the editing, which never picks up the pace, and never seems likely to add any kind of punch to proceedings. It all leads to an oddly melancholy ending that befits a gothic romance, but not the thriller this movie has become. With so much effort having gone into the look and feel of the movie, viewers may well feel let down by this half-hearted denouement, and they’d be right to, but the movie retains a strange fascination even at the end, and one that lingers long after the closing credits.

Rating: 7/10 – not as chilling or impressive on the plot or storyline front as it is when it comes to how the movie looks, Crimson Peak falls short on delivering the chills and thrills it promises to provide; del Toro has made better movies, and will probably make better ones in the future, but for now this will have to serve as a reminder, however disappointing, that there’s no one else out there who can make this kind of movie and with this kind of ardour.

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    Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001)
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Blogs I Follow

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  • Fast Film Reviews
  • The Film Blog
  • All Things Movies UK
  • movieblort
  • Interpreting the Stars
  • Let's Go To The Movies
  • Movie Reviews 101
  • That Moment In
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Film History
  • Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)

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Rubbish Talk

Film 4 Fan

A Movie Blog

Fast Film Reviews

for those who like their movie reviews short and sweet

The Film Blog

The official blog of everything in film

All Things Movies UK

Movie Reviews and Original Articles

movieblort

No-nonsense, unqualified, uneducated & spoiler free movie reviews.

Interpreting the Stars

Dave Examines Movies

Let's Go To The Movies

Film and Theatre Lover!

Movie Reviews 101

Daily Movie Reviews

That Moment In

Movie Moments & More

Dan the Man's Movie Reviews

All my aimless thoughts, ideas, and ramblings, all packed into one site!

Film History

Telling the story of film

Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)

Australian movie blog - like Margaret and David, just a little younger

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