Wonder Woman (2017)

02 Friday Jun 2017

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Action, Amazons, Ares, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, DC Extended Universe, Drama, Fantasy, Gal Gadot, Patty Jenkins, Review, Robin Wright, Superhero, Themyscira, World War I

D: Patty Jenkins / 141m

Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Saïd Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner, Eugene Brave Rock, Lucy Davis, Elena Anaya, Lilly Aspell

On the hidden island of Themyscira live the Amazons, a fierce warrior tribe of women whose presence in the world has been kept from the rest of mankind by the wishes of Zeus. The only child on the island is Diana (Aspell), the daughter of Queen Hippolyta (Nielsen). Diana is precocious, challenging, disobedient, and determined to become a warrior like the rest of the Amazons, but her mother forbids it. Hippolyta’s sister, Antiope (Wright), trains Diana in secret, though, and she grows into a young woman (Gadot) to be reckoned with: the quickest, most agile, most determined Amazon of them all. With her fighting skills honed under the stewardship of Antiope, Diana finds she lacks a clear purpose in life, until one day the shield keeping the island hidden is penetrated by a plane that crashes into the sea. Diana rescues the lone pilot, Steve Trevor (Pine), who tells the Amazons of “a war to end to all wars”, and who provides all the reason Diana needs to leave the island and seek her destiny (once she leaves she can never return).

The pair travel to London where Trevor alerts the British High Command – led by Sir Patrick Morgan (Thewlis) – to a plot by Germany’s General Ludendorff (Huston) to end the War by use of the most deadliest form of mustard gas yet created. Forced to go it alone, Trevor recruits three old friends – would-be actor Sameer (Taghmaoui), sharpshooter Charlie (Bremner), smuggler the Chief (Brave Rock) – and with Diana, travels to the Belgian Front, where Ludendorff and his chief scientist, Dr Maru (Anaya), are in the process of preparing their new weapon to be used for the first (and they hope, last) time in the War. But Diana has no intention of letting them succeed in their plan, and convinced that Ludendorff is the modern incarnation of Ares, the disgraced God of War, she takes the fight to the Germans, and in the process learns something about herself that has been hidden from her all her life…

The question everyone is asking is an easy one to answer. The question is, is Wonder Woman the best DC Extended Universe movie to date? And the easy answer is Yes, it is. But that’s like saying, if I have one leg shorter than the other, and I have an operation to correct this, will I be better able to walk? Again, the answer is Yes, of course. And so it goes with Wonder Woman, a movie that provides a sharp upturn in quality in relation to its predecessors – Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016) – but which still embraces many of the issues and problems that have plagued those same DCEU productions.

It’s yet another movie where the tone is so earnest and so po-faced that when the script does make an attempt at humour, it’s the same as when Garland Greene says of Billy Bedlam in Con Air (1997): “he’s so angry moments of levity actually cause him pain; gives him headaches. Happiness, for that gentleman, hurts.” The humour is there, tucked away in odd places, but it never feels like an integral part of the overall tone and feel of the movie. It’s as if Allan Heinberg’s script was accused of being too heavy, and was charged with including moments of levity as a direct consequence. What this means in practice is that the movie rarely feels comfortable when it’s tasked with being funny, and seems to breathe a sigh of relief when it can move on and concentrate on providing audiences with an industrious trek through the land of superhero clichés.

As an origin story, it’s akin to the first Thor movie, in that it introduces us to a realm built on myth and legend, and after a suitable period, hijacks the central character and thrusts them into the “real” world, with all its problems and rewards. Themyscira is a first for the DC Extended Universe, a beautifully realised paradise that features sun-dappled buildings, verdant fields, and the healthy glow of bronze and gold. Its relentlessly blue skies stretch as far as the eye can see, and the azure waters of the sea are dazzling. But once the island of Themyscira is left behind, the movie defaults to the muted colour palette and downplayed visual aesthetic that governs all the movies in the DC Extended Universe. Whether we’re in London or the battle-torn Belgian countryside, the movie does its best to be all gloomy backdrop and sombre foreground. It all fits in with the earnest, dramatic nature of the material, but as a visual statement it’s less than satisfying and helps to drain some of the life from the movie as a whole.

Where the movie does score more highly is in its attention to the horrors of life on the Western Front, and the effects of warfare on the local populace. But even that acknowledgment is over quickly so as to facilitate the next action sequence (which unfortunately features the kind of jerky CGI gymnastics from Wonder Woman that you’d be forgiven for thinking wouldn’t be attempted anymore in a movie costing $149 million and released in 2017). There are other nods to the horrors of war – Charlie’s PTSD, musings on the terrible things that man can inflict on his fellow man – but while it’s good to see them addressed – however briefly – it’s as near to depth as the movie gets, and they seem shoehorned into the main storyline rather than arising naturally from it. Diana’s obsession with hunting down Ares also gives rise to further arguments about the nature of war and man’s predilection towards it, but these are largely spurious and serve only to weigh down a final showdown between Diana and Ares that quickly descends into yet another dispiriting bout of disaster porn theatrics.

As the 5000 year old Amazon princess, Gadot builds on her appearance in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and proves that the praise she received in that movie wasn’t just a result of her standing out against its poor structure, lacklustre script, and wayward direction. There are some roles that can only be played by certain actors or actresses, and Gadot owns the part in a way that the likes of Sandra Bullock, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Beyoncé Knowles – all considered for the role in the past – would find incredibly difficult to match or improve upon. Elsewhere, Gadot isn’t the most convincing of actresses, but here she gives a compelling, intuitive performance that stretches her skills as an actress but does so in a way that marks her out – in the DC Extended Universe at least – as the character to look out for. She’s ably supported by Pine who reins in his usual cocky charm; Huston as yet another less than memorable villain; Thewlis as the politician who may or may not be all that he seems; and Wright as Diana’s strong-willed aunt. However, if anyone in the supporting cast has to be picked out, it’s Bremner, who injects some much needed energy into his scenes and who makes Charlie possibly the most well rounded character in the whole movie.

Much has been made of Patty Jenkins being the first female director of a superhero movie featuring a female character as its lead, and Jenkins does do a decent enough job of pushing against the narrow confines of a DC superhero movie. But though she does manage to incorporate some elements of feminism into the story, there aren’t enough to make the movie into something more relevant than it is, and it’s curiously flimsy as an example of female empowerment. This is still, and despite the presence of Wonder Woman herself, a Boys’ Own adventure that could have featured any number of superheroes as its lead protagonist. It gets full marks for its period setting (something that was avoided for a long time before production finally began), but the movie takes too long in getting its audience from London to the Front, takes too much time in attempting to flesh out characters that don’t need fleshing out, and provides enough exposition to deaden the senses more effectively than Dr Maru’s poison gas. A small-scale triumph, then, and a definite improvement on the movies already mentioned above, but there’s still a long way to go before DC and Warner Bros. overcome the same problems they seem incapable – at present – of recognising and prevailing over.

Rating: 6/10 – a movie that starts out strongly (much in the way that Suicide Squad did), Wonder Woman seems set on delivering on the promise it showed in its trailers, and the advance word from preview screenings, but it soon falters and falls prey to the apparently carved-in-stone requirements of the DC Extended Universe; bold and confident in places, yet haphazard and stumbling in others, it’s a movie that surprises more than it dismays, but when it does dismay the effect is, unfortunately, far more noticeable, and has far more repercussions.

All Relative (2014)

29 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Affair, Comedy, Connie Nielsen, Drama, J.C. Khoury, Jonathan Sadowski, Marital problems, Relationships, Review, Romance, Sara Paxton, Weekend fling

D: J.C. Khoury / 85m

Cast: Connie Nielsen, Jonathan Sadowski, Sara Paxton, David Aaron Baker, Al Thompson, Erin Wilhelmi, Liz Fye

Harry (Sadowski) is still getting over the break up with his fiancée – after a year has gone by. He’s continually encouraged to meet new women by his best friend, Jared (Thompson), but he’s afraid to take the plunge. One night, while out bowling with Jared, Harry meets Grace (Paxton); they hit it off but when he walks her home she reveals she’s seeing someone. They part as friends. Later that evening, Harry is in a hotel bar having a drink when he meets Maren (Nielsen). She’s in New York for the weekend and interested in “having fun”. They have sex in her room, but agree that it’s all purely physical. Over the course of the weekend, Harry tells Maren about Grace and she encourages him to call her. Harry and Grace meet up but she still treats him like a friend. When Harry is next with Maren, Grace texts him urgently and he goes to her, but not before Maren has made clear her disappointment with Harry’s reaction.

A month later, Harry and Grace are on their way to meet her parents. He’s nervous as Grace’s father, Phil (Baker), owns the architectural firm where he’s applied for a job. But his nervousness turns to outright dismay when Grace’s mother turns out to be Maren. With cracks in Maren and Phil’s marriage apparent from the beginning, and both Harry and Maren worried that one of them will tell Grace about their weekend together, the visit becomes bogged down by arguments and misunderstandings. When Harry is persuaded to stay over he finds himself giving marital advice to both Maren and Phil in which he preaches the values of listening and honesty – two things he’s not doing with Grace. When he finally decides to tell Grace about his time with her mother, Maren pre-empts him and sends Grace a text from his phone that ends their relationship but without mentioning their affair.

Unaware of what Maren has done, Harry is told by her as well that Grace no longer believes in his commitment to their relationship and she has ended it. Harry goes back to New York City, but doesn’t give up on Grace, or their relationship, and does his best to win her back.

There’s a point about two thirds into All Relative where Maren and Phil sit down and discuss their marriage and where it’s all gone wrong. It’s a long scene, well acted by Nielsen and Baker, but not as dramatic as it’s meant to be, and it’s a good example of the movie’s inability to make the serious parts of the script really dramatic, and to make the humorous parts really comedic. It’s an awkward mix, made more awkward by the movie’s frankly unbelievable sequence of events once Maren and Grace’s relationship is revealed. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but writer/director Khoury clearly hasn’t worked out how to make Harry’s predicament even remotely credible. And with a conclusion that feels more like a compromise than a realistic outcome, All Relative deprives the viewer of a fully rewarding experience.

Which is a shame as the movie could have been a lot sharper and a lot wittier. The initial scenes between Harry and Jared are handled with a pleasant whimsicality that bodes well for the rest of the movie, and Harry’s bashful approaches to Grace are cute without being overly cringeworthy. It’s all pointing to an enjoyable rom-com with an indie slant, and with the introduction of Maren, an indie rom-com with a slight hint of danger: will Harry have to choose between the two new women in his life? Alas, any edge is pushed to the kerb as the movie enters farce territory with Maren’s reaction to Harry’s arrival. Nielsen’s performance teeters on the overblown at this point (and is a good indicator as to why this is her first “comedy”), but the script, on its way to being completely schizophrenic in tone, helps her out by reining in her outlandish attitude, but only by making her a relative figure of sympathy. As the movie progresses, Maren veers between being cunning and manipulative, and sensitive and thoughtful, but this inconsistency hurts both the character and the movie.

However, Maren’s uncertain personality is nothing compared to Harry’s unnecessary insistence on being truthful. Only in the movies would someone take another person at their word if they said, let’s be completely honest about everything. Harry’s need to reveal all about his fling with Maren often feels like the character can’t get by without the occasional bit of self-flagellation; here, his need provides the movie with what little real drama it can muster, but it feels forced purely by virtue of its repetition. It also leaves Harry sounding like an emotional misanthrope, as if by being completely honest he’ll be better than everyone around him (even if he doesn’t say this outright). Sadowski looks uncomfortable throughout, as if he’s realised that Harry is a bit of a dumbass and he’s decided to act accordingly (to be fair, the script does paint him that way).

With only Grace and Phil given anything remotely reminiscent of a believable personality or character, All Relative falls back too many contrivances and there-for-the-sake-of-it moments to make it all work. Khoury relies heavily on his cast to make the material more effective but alas they can’t, and while Paxton and Baker come out of things with their reputations intact, sadly, Nielsen and Sadowski give mannered, uneven performances that are often uncomfortable to watch. The movie is also quite bland in its look and feel and there’s no appreciable zing to proceedings, events and occurrences happening with what appears to be a frightening lack of consideration or interest on Khoury’s part (and that’s without taking the viewer into account).

Rating: 4/10 – let down by a script that can’t decide what kind of movie it wants to be, All Relative staggers along without making the audience care about its characters or what happens to them; too awkward to work effectively, the movie runs aground with indecent haste and never recovers its forward momentum.

3 Days to Kill (2014)

15 Thursday May 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Amber Heard, Cancer, CIA, Connie Nielsen, Experimental drug, Hailee Steinfeld, Kevin Costner, McG, Paris, Review, The Albino, The Wolf

D: McG / 123m

Cast: Kevin Costner, Amber Heard, Hailee Steinfeld, Connie Nielsen, Tómas Lemarquis, Richard Sammel, Marc Andréoni, Bruno Ricci, Jonas Bloquet, Eriq Ebouaney

Veteran CIA agent Ethan Renner (Costner) is part of a mission to capture international terrorist The Wolf (Sammel). Acting on intelligence that his associate The Albino (Lemarquis) is selling a dirty bomb at a hotel in Belgrade, Ethan and his team attempt to capture him but the mission goes wrong when The Albino recognises one of Ethan’s team. The Albino makes his escape in the ensuing shootout; Ethan chases him but finds himself short of breath, and he collapses. Despite being wounded, The Albino gets away. Ethan blacks out. Later, in a local hospital, a doctor tells him he has cancer, and at best, has 3-5 months to live.

Having been pensioned off from the CIA, Ethan moves to Paris where his estranged wife, Tina (Nielsen), and daughter Zooey (Steinfeld) live. He tries to reestablish his relationship with Zooey but his first attempts are clumsy and backfire on him. When Tina has to go to London for a few days, Ethan persuades her that he can look after Zooey, and he moves into their apartment. That same day, Ethan is approached by Vivi Delay (Heard), a senior CIA agent who wants him to continue looking for The Wolf, and offers him an experimental drug that will stave off the effects of his cancer enough to extend his life by a few more months. Ethan accepts the job. He begins targeting known associates of The Wolf and The Albino, until he learns that The Albino will be in Paris in a few days’ time.

His relationship with Zooey improves slowly, and is cemented when he saves her from being raped in a nightclub. As their time together becomes more and more important to Zooey, Ethan has to juggle the demands made on him as a father, and as an agent. Tina returns home and is pleased to see Ethan and Zooey getting on so well, and she and Ethan have a reconciliation. His mission to capture The Wolf comes to a head when Zooey’s boyfriend Hugh (Bloquet) invites them to a party at his parents’ home, and in one of those amazing moments of serendipity that exist only in the movies, it turns out that Hugh’s father is The Wolf’s Paris business partner, and he’s there as well.

Another low-concept idea from the mind of Luc Besson, 3 Days to Kill bears all the hallmarks of a hastily put together movie production and lurches from one badly thought out scene to another, trading on Costner’s innate gravitas as an actor (and then doing it’s best to undermine that gravitas with some ill-considered comedy beats), and complete with awful dialogue and weak characterisations. Not one of the relationships foisted on us by Besson and co-writer Adi Hasak is at all plausible, and Ethan himself is a bizarre combination of action hero, concerned absentee father, and comedic torturer. The movie is full of awkward moments that add nothing to the plot but do succeed in padding out the running time. There is a whole third-string storyline involving Ethan’s apartment and the family of squatters that have taken it over; unable to evict them, Ethan allows his anger at their being there to develop into a strange paternal devotion: when one of patriarch Jules’s (Ebouaney) daughters has a child in the apartment, Ethan is on hand to become a de facto godfather (and hold the baby).

Even more bizarre is the character of Vivi Delay, portrayed by Heard as a mixture of modern-day vamp and emotionally vacant dominatrix. The actress’ interpretation of the role is (hopefully) based on what direction there is in the script, but if it’s not then it’s a freakish performance and one that makes Heard look like an amateur trying to break free from regional theatre. Even the way she delivers her lines – arch, and laced with undisguised sarcasm – makes them sound like a first draft reading, and it’s a relief that she’s not on screen any more than she is. Steinfeld is equally guilty of putting in a sub-par performance, giving us a moody teenager that no one would believe in, and failing to make Zooey’s relationship with Ethan anything other perfunctory and/or glib (depending on a scene’s requirements). Nielsen has the thankless role of mother removed for the sake of the plot, while Costner (who has said he liked the character of Ethan, but didn’t like the movie) does his best with one of the most uneven roles of his career. (You know an actor’s in trouble when his character name is a combination of Ethan Hunt and Jeremy Renner from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.) Looking uncomfortable throughout, and burdened with the daunting prospect of injecting some credibility into the proceedings, Costner does just enough to keep the audience from tuning out completely, and shows that it’s not only Liam Neeson who can still kick ass at an advanced age (Costner is 59).

Under the less than capable direction of McG, 3 Days to Kill is a mess of a movie that only moves up a notch with its action scenes, including a cleverly constructed kidnapping involving a bus, a bicycle, and a small claymore mine. The Paris locations are also worth mentioning, as is the somewhat bucolic score by Guillaume Roussel, and the often tightly-framed compositions of veteran cinematographer Thierry Arbogast. As a thrill ride, the movie is fitfully effective, but as an absorbing, entertaining piece it’s as lightweight as a feather, with too many narrative absurdities than it could ever overcome, including the experimental drug that only Vivi knows anything about (oh yeah?).

Rating: 4/10 – a second-hand script (replete with Besson’s recurring penchant for casual racism) masquerading as a polished action movie, 3 Days to Kill never lives up to its initial promise; with weak direction and the kind of cast that deserves more, the movie struggles to establish the same tone throughout, and boasts the kind of unlucky central performance from its star that, in the Nineties, would have doomed his career quicker than The Postman did.