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King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

10 Wednesday May 2017

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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.

Special Correspondents (2016)

30 Saturday Apr 2016

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Special Correspondents

D: Ricky Gervais / 100m

Cast: Eric Bana, Ricky Gervais, Vera Farmiga, Kelly Macdonald, Kevin Pollak, Raúl Castillo, America Ferrara, Benjamin Bratt, Mimi Kuzyk

Comedians and Netflix – a good combination? After Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous 6 (2015), we now have Ricky Gervais’ Special Correspondents, a movie so leaden and uninspired it makes Sandler’s movie look like a masterpiece (okay, that may be taking it a bit too far). A remake of the French movie Envoyés très spéciaux (2009), this transplants the original’s Paris-Iraq locations for New York-Ecuador, and in the process leaves out the humour that would have made it halfway watchable.

Gervais’ decision to make this movie serves only to highlight his inability to write, act and direct a full-length movie and show consistency in any one department. As the meek, self-negating Ian Finch, a sound engineer for a New York-based radio station, Gervais plays yet another sad-sack loser with zero confidence and a view of himself as a complete nobody. Gervais has played this character, and variations of it, several times now, and it’s as tired as the script he’s put together and somehow managed to get financing for. (If you really want to see just how bad an actor Gervais can be, check out the party scene early on, where it’s just him and Vera Farmiga; see how many grimaces and facial expressions you can spot that are exact replicas of the ones he uses when hosting the Golden Globe Awards… or playing David Brent in The Office.)

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Gervais’ painful attempts at acting aside, it’s his script that deserves the most criticism, ranging as it does from occasionally interesting to crudely simplistic. The basic story – radio journalist and his sound man fake reports from war-torn Ecuador – is lifted wholesale from the French original, and even though that movie wasn’t the most well received movie ever, it’s still better than the ponderous, laugh-free adaptation that Gervais gives us here. Yes, it has a predictable plot; yes, it has characters who are two-dimensional at best; and yes, you couldn’t care about any of them even if your life depended on it, but if after all that it was funny, really laugh-out-loud funny, then it could have been forgiven for all those things. But although Gervais has made room for moments that are clearly meant to be funny, in reality they aren’t, and the movie lurches from one almost-humorous scene to another with all the grace of a punch-drunk boxer fighting his reflection.

It doesn’t help that, Kelly Macdonald’s sweet-on-Ian character, Claire Maddox aside, the other characters are mostly unlikeable, from radio journalist Frank Bonneville (Bana) whose grandstanding and willingness to get the story no matter what makes him look and sound arrogant and unfeeling, to Ian’s wife, Eleanor (Farmiga), a listless shrew who only comes to self-aggrandising life when her husband appears to have been kidnapped by rebel forces. Farmiga, who has the misfortune of wearing one of recent cinema’s most unflattering wigs, does what she can with the role but there’s no subtlety in a part that calls for simpering insincerity at every other turn, and bald-faced self-promotion in between. The same goes for Bana, a more than capable actor here reduced to the role of awkward straight man to Gervais, and who has to spend a lot of screen time waiting for Gervais to deliver the comedic goods (so he gets to wait around a lot).

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In support, Pollak is the radio boss who cares about the legality of a story’s procurement one minute, but is willing to capitalise on the possibility of Frank and Ian being killed the next, while Castillo and Ferrara are the Latin couple, Domingo and Brigida, who help Frank and Ian fabricate their reports. What few laughs there are in the movie are delivered by the couple, playing a couple of innocents who haven’t quite grasped their roles in Frank and Ian’s deception. And in what must have taken him a whole morning to film, Bratt turns up as Frank’s arch-nemesis, TV journalist John Baker, who co-opts one of Frank’s broadcasts as if he knew all about the content all along (Baker is probably meant to provide an element of satire, but instead he comes across as an easy target for Gervais’ mistrust of the Press).

Of course, events dictate that Frank and Ian have to go to Ecuador so that they can “return” to New York and avoid losing their jobs and ending up in jail. It’s during this period in the movie that Gervais’ deficiencies as a director show themselves more clearly than elsewhere. Even with the aid of experienced DoP Terry Stacey, Gervais still manages to present the viewer with shots and scenes that are poorly framed, and there’s a scene with Gervais and Bana where Frank reveals a secret that is so badly assembled it feels like rehearsal footage has somehow made its way permanently into the final movie.

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As mentioned when discussing the trailer, Gervais track record on the big screen has not exactly been luminous, but here he’s come up with a project that will likely mean it will be a long time before he’s asked to write, direct and star in a movie of his own choosing once again. If Gervais has an aptitude for anything it’s for observational comedy, and Special Correspondents doesn’t fit that mold, which makes it even harder to understand why he chose to take it on in the first place.

Rating: 3/10 – dire and acutely unfunny, Special Correspondents is yet another English-language remake that shouldn’t have happened (and how many more of those will we see this year?), and shouldn’t have to be watched; Gervais never gets to grips with what his movie is about, or where the laughs should go, leaving the viewer resigned to the idea (from very early on) that this is a movie that has stalled before it’s even started.

The Finest Hours (2016)

18 Monday Apr 2016

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The Finest Hours

D: Craig Gillespie / 117m

Cast: Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Holliday Grainger, Eric Bana, John Ortiz, Kyle Gallner, John Magaro, Graham McTavish, Michael Raymond-James, Beau Knapp, Josh Stewart, Abraham Benrubi, Keiynon Lonsdale, Rachel Brosnahan

On 18 February 1952, the SS Pendleton, sailing from New Orleans to Boston, was one of two ships caught in a severe storm; both broke in two off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The other unfortunate ship was the SS Fort Mercer. With thirty-three crew members aboard the still floating stern of the ship, the Coast Guard despatched a motor boat from nearby Chatham, though with only four crew on board. In rough seas and with no guarantee they would reach the ailing ship in time, the motor boat reached the Pendleton and was able to rescue all but one of the remaining crew. The rescue was widely regarded as one of the most daring rescues in the history of the United States Coast Guard. In 2009, the rescue was the subject of a book, The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Most Daring Sea Rescue by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman.

If the brief account given above seems to indicate that The Finest Hours will be a gripping, edge-of-the-seat recounting of the that daring rescue mission, then potential viewers be warned: the movie doesn’t reach that level of excitement at any point in its running time. Instead the movie elects to be a very pedestrian retelling of the events on that fateful day, and initially, seems more concerned about covering the romance between motor boat skipper Bernie Webber (Pine) and his girlfriend, Miriam Pentinen (Grainger). We get to see how the two meet, and then there’s a protracted sequence where their engagement requires Bernie to speak to his commander, Daniel Cluff (Bana), for permission to wed (it’s a formality but Bernie treats it as if he’s asking Cluff  for something major).

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In the midst of Bernie’s dithering, the SS Fort Mercer‘s plight is reported, but other coast guard stations are already dealing with it. It’s only when the Pendleton’s equal predicament comes to light that Bernie actually stops being a bit of a doormat and chooses to go out to the stricken vessel. Most everyone sees it as a reckless, even suicidal mission, and Bernie is joined by just two of his colleagues, Richard Livesey (Foster) and Andy Fitzgerald (Gallner), and by a seaman, Ervin Maske (Magaro), who just happens to be there when the Pendleton‘s plight is discovered. Each man knows that there’s a good chance they won’t make it to the ship, or even come back, but as Bernie says, “They say you gotta go out. They don’t say you gotta come back”. And with that reassuring quote, the four men take a motor boat out into heavy seas and fight their way over a stretch of treacherous water called the Bar. And from there, and without a compass to guide them, they attempt to find the Pendleton.

Even now it all seems highly dramatic, the kind of heroic true story that proves inspiring, and makes the viewer want to be a part of that rescue mission if it were at all possible. But the movie founders from this point on, and while the crew of the Pendleton, ostensibly led by engineer Ray Sybert (Affleck), struggle to keep the stern afloat until help arrives, Bernie and his crew are faced with a seemingly number of violent swells to overcome, and all of which are bested by Bernie – basically – accelerating over or through them. This repetition proves wearing, and robs the movie of any tension, because no matter how big the approaching waves are, Bernie just floors it, and any sense of peril is quickly and completely dismissed.

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Meanwhile, Sybert has to contend with semi-mutinous crew member D.A. Brown (Raymond-James) and his insistence that they get off the Pendleton by using the lifeboats. In one of the movie’s better scenes, Sybert shows everyone why that isn’t such a good idea, but otherwise any tension is dissipated by Affleck’s restrained performance, and no concrete sense that anyone on the ship is in any real danger (which is disconcerting considering their situation). And this is the movie’s main problem: it doesn’t really know how to make all this frightening or gripping or challenging. Even during the rescue, a sequence which should have ramped up the tension to unbearable levels, the movie fails to capitalise on the situation and keep the viewer on the edge of their seat. Instead the movie acts as a kind of dramatic, clichéd tick box exercise.

The movie also marginalises all its characters with the exception of Miriam. While Bernie and his crew become mere figures on a boat who are focused on the seas ahead, everyone back at Chatham is kept either hanging round the coast guard radio, or eventually, in a risible sequence where the townsfolk gather their cars at the dock with their headlights on to guide poor Bernie home, asked to pull together and be part of the heroic effort themselves. This is partly down to Miriam, who makes an attempt to get the rescue mission called off because Bernie has decided to do the right thing. It’s an incredibly selfish thing to do, but the movie tries to make her look heroic rather than self-serving, and it never recovers from it. And once he is out there, and despite several dozen close ups, Pine’s Bernie could be just about anyone getting buckets of water thrown over them.

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The Finest Hours also has an odd visual look about it, one that heightens the artificality of the CGI rendered waves and the Pendleton‘s exterior, particularly when the actual rescue is in progress. It’s at this point that the viewer will be unable to retain a sense of the scope and size of the mission itself, and will be trapped into thinking, “what a small tank they must have used”. And then, with the trip out to the stricken Pendleton having taken so long, the movie rushes the return trip, and the movie ends without ever establishing itself as a thrill-ride or a serious, dramatic tale of heroism on the high seas.

Partly this is due to the structure of the script, which pays too much attention to events playing out on land rather than at sea, and Gillespie’s watered-down direction (pun intended). As a result, the cast make little impact, with only Grainger standing out from the faceless crowd – Foster is one of several cast members who are completely wasted in their roles – and the movie lurches from one unconvincing scene to the next, devoid of any sense of unease, and ending up as stranded as the Pendleton is in the few hours left to it before it sinks completely.

Rating: 5/10 – only occasionally (and even then briefly) powerful, The Finest Hours does scant justice to its true story, and introduces too many fictional elements to make it work effectively; with a bland central performance from Pine, and without a strong-minded director at the helm, the movie disappoints more than it impresses and seems almost wilfully lacklustre.

Mini-Review: Closed Circuit (2013)

25 Sunday May 2014

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D: John Crowley / 96m

Cast: Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall, Ciarán Hinds, Jim Broadbent, Riz Ahmed, Anne-Marie Duff, Julia Stiles, Kenneth Cranham, Denis Moschitto

When a bomb goes off at a London market, the investigation leads to the arrest of Farroukh Erdogan (Moschitto). Government evidence that might support his case must be deliberated in closed court before an open trial can be conducted. Following the death of Erdogan’s lawyer, Martin Rose (Bana) is asked by the Attorney General (Broadbent) to represent the suspect at the open trial, while Claudia Simmons-Howe (Hall) is chosen to represent Erdogan at the closed hearings. Neither can be in contact with each other once the government evidence is submitted, but as both become aware they’re being followed, they begin to realise there’s more to the case than meets the eye.

Martin discovers that Erdogan is an MI5 agent who was working within the terrorist cell that carried out the bombing. With Erdogan refusing to confirm or deny anything, it’s unclear if he has double-crossed MI5, or the cell has set him up instead. Meanwhile, Claudia learns that Farroukh’s family are more involved than anyone thought. Claudia and Martin choose to work together – in spite of the risk of being disbarred – and endeavour to find out if MI5 had any further, more damaging involvement in the bombing.

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Closed Circuit wants to be topical and thought-provoking but is too predictable – and cynical – to be entirely effective. Government involvement in terrorist matters is hardly news, and the idea that a cover up might be taking place is clear from the outset. The cat-and-mouse game that follows ticks all the relevant boxes – murder made to look like suicide, an MI5 overseer (Ahmed) who makes veiled threats, the revelation of a colleague working against Martin and Claudia – and there’s a subplot around Martin and Claudia’s having had an affair in the past that is dramatically redundant, but on the whole, the movie is a well-crafted, if obvious thriller that never quite takes off. Bana and Hall don’t quite gel as a couple, Crowley’s direction is efficient if indistinctive, and the script by Steven Knight isn’t as sharp as it needs to be.

Rating: 6/10 – as a paranoid conspiracy thriller, Closed Circuit is neither exciting nor provocative enough to succeed fully; with its idea of a government cover up, it’s also thirty years too late to provide much of a surprise.

 

Lone Survivor (2013)

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

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Lone Survivor

D: Peter Berg / 121m

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Eric Bana, Alexander Ludwig, Yousuf Azami, Ali Suliman, Sammy Sheik

Based on the book by Marcus Luttrell, a serving Navy SEAL in Afghanistan in 2005, Lone Survivor tells the story of how Luttrell and three fellow SEALs found themselves under attack from the Taliban when a mission, Operation Red Wings, went horribly wrong.

Sent to locate and if possible, terminate the life of high-ranking Taliban leader Ahmad Shah (Azami), four SEALs, Luttrell (Wahlberg), Murphy (Kitsch), Dietz (Hirsch) and Axelson (Foster), find their target but at a camp where they would be heavily outnumbered if they engaged with Shah and his men. With their comms down, the group fall back to a position of safety before they attempt to reach higher ground for a better chance of their comms working.  There they are discovered by a trio of goat herders.  Stopping them from getting away, Luttrell and the rest of the team are faced with the dilemma of what to do with them.  The SEALs can either let them go, tie them up and leave them (with a good chance that the goat herders would perish after time), or kill them outright there and then.  Dietz and Axelson are keen for the third option to happen but Luttrell argues against it, until Murphy, as the team leader, decides they must be let go, despite knowing that the trio will tell the Taliban their location.  With the goat herders released, the four men have to get to higher ground and try and contact their base so they can be rescued.

Soon, Shah’s militia have caught up with them and the SEALs find themselves in a running firefight.  Still trying to contact their base, one by one the men are either shot or suffer injuries – Axelson twists an ankle, Dietz loses two or three fingers – that hamper their escape.  And one by one, the SEALs lose their lives until only Luttrell remains.  Faced with the daunting task of making it out alive by himself, Luttrell’s luck changes when he is discovered by nearby Pashtun villagers led by Gulab (Suliman).  He is given shelter while the villagers arrange for the nearest US base to be contacted, and Luttrell’s rescue can be effected.  Before that can happen, though, Shah’s men, led by second-in-command Taraq (Sheik), learn of his whereabouts and attack the village…

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Luttrell’s story is a remarkable one, a true tale of heroism and courage set against tremendous odds, and one in which his determination to survive reinforces how powerful that determination can be in an individual.  It’s worth noting that when Luttrell was found by the Pashtun villagers he had a number of fractures, a broken back, and various shrapnel wounds; later he sustained a gunshot wound as well.  We should salute the man’s bravery.  Lone Survivor is a testament to that, and to the team’s bravery as a whole.

However, under Peter Berg’s direction, Lone Survivor doesn’t quite hit the mark.  The one thing that’s missing from the movie is, perversely, any real sense of who these men are, even Luttrell.  We get no back stories, just perfunctory mentions of family back home, and the by-now familiar hazing that goes on in probably every military unit around the world.  All four men are presented as there were at that point in time; there’s no depth, no understanding of why these men have become SEALs or what it means to them.  In many ways, the script – adapted by Berg from Luttrell’s memoir – avoids getting to know these men, and this has a desensitising effect when they’re ambushed later in the movie.  When they come under fire, and begin sustaining injuries, there’s no emotional connection for the audience to make.  There are two scenes where the men are forced to put distance between them and Shah’s men by hurling themselves down rocky hillsides.  Instead of wincing at the punishment being (self-)inflicted, the viewer is instead left admiring the stunt work involved.

The extended encounter between the SEALs and the Taliban is set up well and there is a degree of tension before the first shot is fired.  After that, though, the movie settles for becoming the cinematic version of a video game, with – for the viewer – increased confusion as to where each man is in relation to the other, and even to their enemy.  When Murphy reaches a ledge where he can use his satellite phone to contact the base, it seems too far from where his comrades are, at that point, pinned down.  The same applies when Axelson is separated from Luttrell; again he appears to have travelled some considerable distance (albeit to no avail).  It’s these little anomalies that undermine the narrative and keep the firelight from being as tense and exciting as it should be.  When Luttrell finally manages to elude his attackers and is found by his rescuers, you have no real idea of how far he’s travelled, or even how he’s managed to avoid detection.

With all the attention given over to the physical exploits on display, there’s little for Wahlberg et al to do but decry each successive injury and show how much pain they are in.  Even in the relatively quieter moments in the village, where Luttrell befriends a young boy, there’s little for Wahlberg to do except look fearful and in pain (although there is a wonderful moment involving the word ‘knife’).

Ultimately, Lone Survivor feels like a movie that has just missed out on its full potential.  Berg’s direction is more than adequate for the material and while his script doesn’t help his own efforts in that area, he still manages to elicit good performances from his lead players.  The photography is polished and shows off the rugged countryside where the action takes place to often beautiful effect, and the sound editing is appropriately exciting and immersive during the firefight.  With a couple of uncredited appearances by Luttrell – watch for the SEAL who knocks over the coffee that newbie Patton (Ludwig) then has to clear up – Lone Survivor may have that participant’s blessing, but its audience will feel they need a lot more before they can give theirs.

Rating: 7/10 – while the action sequences are expertly staged and executed, they’re still not as exciting as they should have been, and the performances are bogged down by a lack of depth; not a complete misfire, but one that needed to beef up the characters and engage the audience’s sympathy a whole lot more.