Tag Archives: Gary Oldman

The Space Between Us (2017)

04 Sunday Feb 2018

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D: Peter Chelsom / 121m

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino, Britt Robertson, BD Wong, Janet Montgomery, Gil Birmingham, Colin Egglesfield

In a strange version of the future that appears to be happening today, space exploration bigwig Nathaniel Shepherd (Oldman) announces the latest mission to Mars, and the crew that are going there to continue the Red Planet’s colonisation. But in one of those “What if?” scenarios that jump start way too many movies, the lone female astronaut, Sarah Elliot (Montgomery), proves to be pregnant. She gives birth to a son on Mars, and promptly dies from eclampsia. And from that moment on, The Space Between Us throws all sense and logic out of the window, and gallops headlong towards absurdity with all the gusto of a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s unsurprising to learn that the movie has been in development in one form or another since 1999, when it was titled Mainland and its central protagonist was a boy born on the Moon. Put in turnaround until it was picked up again in 2014, the basic idea has remained the same – boy born in space wants to visit Earth – but the idea that his physiology would be compromised, perhaps fatally, has also remained. Tough break for the kid, huh? Just don’t think it about it too much, though – no, really, don’t.

The Space Between Us is a movie that wants to tell its cute romantic story against a backdrop of new-fangled technological advancement and old school moral dilemmas. It’s a movie that bounces from scene to scene with no clear through line, and which lets its lovers on the run scenario get sillier and sillier as Gardner and his only friend on Earth, Tulsa (Robertson), avoid capture by stealing cars at every turn staying one step ahead of a pursuing Shepherd and astronaut-nominally-playing-stepmother-to-Gardner Kendra (Gugino) (with all the technology at Shepherd’s disposal you wonder how he’s so bad at catching up to them). Gardner’s mission on Earth is to find his father, something that should be easy enough as he has a photo of the man with his mother, but the script throws huge curve balls in the way of this, including a detour to a shaman (Birmingham), and a sidetrip to an ER where Gardner’s bone implants (don’t ask) barely register as a concern. And along the way, Gardner gets a crash course in human relationships including how not to sound weird, and losing your virginity (not to be funny, but does anyone remember that Eighties movie, Earth Girls Are Easy?).

There are far too many moments and scenes where the average viewer will be asking themselves, Really? Most of them involve Oldman, whose performance can best be described as desperately seeking relevance. Stuck with some of the movie’s worst dialogue, the more than capable Oldman has no redress against the inanities of both the script and his character. It’s a similar situation for Butterfield, playing a role that requires him to be a science whizz on the one hand but one who’s learned absolutely zero social skills while growing up on Mars (yes, he’s smart and dumb at the same time). Gugino and Robertson have interchangeable roles once you take out the sex, and everyone else has no option but to go along with it all and hope for the best. In the director’s chair, Chelsom keeps things moving in the haphazard way the script (by Allan Loeb) dictates, but he appears to lose interest early on, while Barry Peterson’s sharp and detailed cinematography proves to be one of the movie’s few blessings. At several points, Gardner asks people, What’s your favourite thing about Earth? One answer seems obvious: being able to avoid seeing this inane, stupid movie.

Rating: 3/10 – with its tortured science (just think about the environment Gardner has been living in since birth and ask yourself, would he really suffer on Earth?), and equally tortured YA theatrics, The Space Between Us is a movie that trips over itself continually in its efforts to tell a coherent, relatable story; a waste of everybody’s time and effort, the hint should have been taken back in 1999 when rewrites on the original Mainland script proved unworkable.

Monthly Roundup – January 2018

31 Wednesday Jan 2018

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Awakening the Zodiac (2017) / D: Jonathan Wright / 100m

Cast: Shane West, Leslie Bibb, Matt Craven, Nicholas Campbell, Kenneth Welsh, Stephen McHattie

Rating: 4/10 – no one knew it at the time but the notorious (and uncaptured) Zodiac killer filmed the murders he committed, something cash-strapped couple Mick and Zoe Branson (West, Bibb) discover when they come into possession of one of the reels, and then find themselves and those around them targeted by the Zodiac killer himself; there’s the germ of a good idea lurking somewhere in Awakening the Zodiac, but thanks to a sloppy script, wayward direction, and an indifferent approach to the Zodiac killer himself (by the end he’s just a generic movie-made serial killer), this never gets out of first gear, and settles for trundling along and signposting each narrative development with all the skill and style of a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.

Home Again (2017) / D: Hallie Meyers-Shyer / 97m

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Michael Sheen, Candice Bergen, Pico Alexander, Jon Rudnitzky, Nat Wolff, Lake Bell

Rating: 7/10 – when middle-aged fledgling interior designer Alice (Witherspoon) splits from her unreliable husband (Sheen), the last thing she expects to do is allow three young men trying to break into the movie business to move into her guest house – and then become romantically involved with one of them (Alexander); it’s hard to criticise Home Again because despite it being almost drama-free and the very definition of innocuous, it also just wants to give audiences a good time, and on that very basic level it succeeds, but it’s still possibly the most lightweight romantic comedy of 2017.

Downsizing (2017) / D: Alexander Payne / 135m

Cast: Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Rolf Lassgård, Udo Kier, Søren Pilmark, Jason Sudeikis

Rating: 5/10 – the answer to the world’s population crisis is revealed to be shrinking people to the point where they’re five inches tall, something that sad-sack occupational therapist Paul Safranek (Damon) agrees to with alacrity, but being small proves to be no different from being normal-sized, and soon Paul is having to re-think everything he’s ever thought or believed; a closer examination of Downsizing (under a microscope perhaps) reveals a movie that contains too many scenes that pass by without contributing anything to the overall storyline, and a satirical approach to the idea itself that lacks purpose, and sadly for Payne fans, his trademark wit, making it all a dreary, leaden experience that goes on for waaaaaay too long.

Family Fever (2014) / D: Nico Sommer / 71m

Original title: Familien fieber

Cast: Kathrin Waligura, Peter Trabner, Deborah Kaufmann, Jörg Witte, Jan Amazigh Sid, Anais Urban

Rating: 7/10 – when two sets of parents get together for the weekend at the request of their respective children (who are a couple), none of them are able to deal with the fallout that comes with the revelation of a secret that threatens the security of both marriages; a German comedy/drama that doesn’t always go where the viewer might expect it to, Family Fever revels in the awkwardness and frustration felt by its quartet of main characters, and though it sadly runs out of steam in the last fifteen minutes, by then it’s done more than enough to provide plenty of wicked laughs and affecting drama.

Coco (2017) / D: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina / 105m

Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renee Victor, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau

Rating: 8/10 – Miguel (Gonzalez) is a young boy whose family has rejected any kind of music in order to focus on selling shoes, which leads him into all sorts of trouble in the Underworld on Mexico’s Day of the Dead, trouble that could also mean his never returning to the land of the living; right now you’re never quite sure how a Pixar movie is going to work out, but Coco is a treat, its mix of clever character design, beautifully rendered animation (naturally), heartfelt storylines, and memorable songs making it one to savour time and again… though, be warned, you will be in tears towards the end.

Darkest Hour (2017) / D: Joe Wright / 125m

Cast: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Stephen Dillane, Ben Mendelsohn, Ronald Pickup, Nicholas Jones, Samuel West

Rating: 8/10 – it’s 1940 and Great Britain is faced with a challenge: who is to lead them against the fast-approaching menace of the Nazis, and if it has to be Winston Churchill (Oldman), then what can be done to undermine him and his authority?; the answer is quite a bit – for the most part – but history is firm on Churchill’s success, and so Darkest Hour, while featuring a superb performance from Oldman, has no choice but to succumb to retelling events that have already been retold numerous times before, and in doing so doesn’t offer the viewer anything new except for a number of very good performances and assured, and surprisingly sinewy direction from Wright.

Message from the King (2016) / D: Fabrice du Welz / 102m

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Luke Evans, Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, Natalie Martinez, Arthur Darbinyan, Lucan Melkonian, Diego Josef, Tom Felton, Chris Mulkey, Jake Weary

Rating: 5/10 – when his younger sister dies in suspicious circumstances in Los Angeles, South African cab driver Jacob King (Boseman) travels there to find out who caused her death and why – and exact revenge; a throwback to the kind of blaxploitation movies made in the Seventies, Message from the King at least refers to King as an angry brother in the traditional sense, but the movie’s plot is hollow, and the likes of Evans and Molina are wasted in roles that might have seemed fresh (again) in the Seventies, but here feel like caricatures for the movie to focus on in between bouts of King exacting his violent revenge.

The Commuter (2018) / D: Jaume Collet-Serra / 105m

Cast: Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Jonathan Banks, Sam Neill, Elizabeth McGovern, Killian Scott, Shazad Latif, Andy Nyman, Clara Lago, Roland Møller, Florence Pugh

Rating: 4/10 – ex-cop turned insurance salesman Michael MacCauley (Neeson) is approached by a mysterious woman (Farmiga) on his train home and tasked with finding a complete stranger who’s also on the train – what could possibly go wrong?; everything as it turns out, with The Commuter going off the rails soon after, and never getting back on track, something confirmed (if there was any doubt before then) when the script throws in an “I’m Spartacus/I’m Brian” moment (take your pick), as well as reminding everyone that Neeson really is too old for this kind of thing.

The Post (2017) / D: Steven Spielberg / 116m

Cast: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys, Alison Brie, Carrie Coon, Jesse Plemons, David Cross, Zach Woods, Pat Healy

Rating: 9/10 – the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the level of deceit the US government had perpetrated on its citizens about its involvement in Vietnam, is explored through the days leading up to the Washington Times‘ courageous decision to publish despite the threat of imprisonment for treason that the White House was prepared to enforce; Streep is publisher Kay Graham, Hanks is legendary editor Ben Bradlee, and Spielberg is on excellent form, giving The Post a sense of immediacy and potency that other historical dramas can only dream of (and the relevance to today’s US political scene doesn’t even need to be made obvious).

The Open House (2018) / D: Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote / 94m

Cast: Dylan Minnette, Piercey Dalton, Patricia Bethune, Sharif Atkins, Aaron Abrams, Edward Olson, Katie Walder

Rating: 3/10 – a recent widow (Dalton) and her mopey son (Minnette) get away from their grief and their problems at a house that’s up for sale – and find strange things going on there right from the start; an awful thriller that just refuses to make any sense or make either of its two main characters sympathetic, The Open House does everything it can to make you look away… and not in a good way.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017)

29 Tuesday Aug 2017

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D: Patrick Hughes / 118m

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek, Elodie Yung, Joachim de Almeida, Tine Joustra, Sam Hazeldine, Richard E. Grant

There are several moments during The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Hollywood’s latest attempt at the mismatched buddy genre of action thrillers, when the movie’s humour seems to come on a little too strong, as if it’s fighting its way into the script and looking to be front and centre. More often than not it’s a moment of physical comedy, such as the extended scene where Ryan Reynolds’ triple-A rated protection agent, Michael Bryce, is sitting at an outdoor Amsterdam café complaining about the behaviour of Samuel L. Jackson’s veteran assassin, Darius Kincaid. While he vents, chaos erupts all around him, as everyone in the vicinity ducks for cover, and bullets fly indiscriminately. The barman cowers, Bryce keeps on complaining, and eventually a car plows through the tables behind him. On the surface, it’s a funny scene, with Reynolds’ deadpan expression the counterpoint for all the mayhem going on behind him. But watch it a second time and the humour isn’t there anymore. Now it’s a technically clever scene that relies entirely on Reynolds’ performance. Watch it a third time, and it’s a scene to be endured. Should a scene like that provoke such a response so quickly? If it’s really that funny, then the answer is No.

For much of the rest of the movie, the script’s attempts at levity only serve to highlight just how uneven the material truly is. The humour is largely forced, the action is perfunctory (a chase along the canals in Amsterdam should see Kincaid’s commandeered boat reduced to splinters, or the involvement of at least one Dutch police car), and the basic plot is ludicrous before it’s even begun: Gary Oldman’s brutal Belarussian dictator, Dukhovich, on trial at the Hague for being a brutal Belarussian dictator, can only be brought to justice by the testimony of Jackson’s veteran assassin. Cue a race against time from Manchester, England to said trial, with the usual hundreds of disposable bad guys trying to stop Bryce and Kincaid from getting there. Along the way, Bryce’s back story takes up more and more time but never becomes interesting enough to warrant it (he’s still sulking over the death of a client under his protection, though technically the circumstances mean It doesn’t count), while Kincaid is ratting on Dukhovich as a way of getting his wife, Sonia (Hayek), out of jail (yes, folks, he’s doing it for love, the old softie).

It all plays out predictably enough, with supporting characters straight out of Stock City, including Yung’s Interpol agent, Amelia Roussel, who just happens to be Bryce’s ex-girlfriend, and de Almeida’s shifty Interpol boss who may well be in cahoots with Dukhovich (what are the odds?). No matter how much Tom O’Connor’s script tries to instil proceedings with freshness and vitality, the banal nature of the material as a whole brings those attempts crashing down like Redwoods. In the director’s chair, Hughes, who made more out of The Expendables 3 (2014) than was required, has no option but to go with the flow and let his stars do the heavy lifting. As long as he can get them from A to B, Hughes’s work is done, and often before the end of a scene. Others, but particularly those that feature Hayek’s apoplectic performance as Sonia, don’t appear to have had Hughes’ involvement at all. (Sonia looks and sounds like a character brought in from another movie altogether.) By the time we reach the end and justice is done, it’s become possibly the most generic action movie of the year.

But what of the chemistry between Reynolds and Jackson? Surely that’s in the movie’s favour? Well, strangely enough, the pair work better when they’re apart. Reynolds’ lovelorn, soppy-headed protection agent is like a man-child dropped into a war zone, while Jackson – well, Jackson trots out the same hard-headed “motherfucker”-spouting character he’s been portraying ever since the word was invented. Cue angry stare, mad-as-hell stare, glary stare, and angry mad-as-hell glary stare, all of them trotted out at regular points in the movie, and almost as if they qualify as their own action beats. Jackson is seriously wasted here, and not in a good, been-to-Amsterdam-for-some-of-them-chocolate-brownies kind of way either. When they’re together, Reynolds and Jackson spar like an old married couple, an old tired married couple who can no longer stand each other. Oldman grabs his pay cheque with both hands and hams it up accordingly, while the rest of the cast do their best to get through all the absurdity and nonsense with their dignity intact.

All of this indolence and protracted inertia – Bryce and Kincaid have twenty-four hours to get to the Hague but it feels like they’re taking twice as long – allied to the kind of comedy that comes pre-marked as “strained” is all the more dispiriting when you realise that O’Connor’s script was another Black List screenplay, this time from 2011. But back then it didn’t have any comedy. Instead it was a straight drama. But a few weeks before filming began, a two-week rewrite meant less drama and more comedy. And now we have the end result: a poorly assembled collection of scenes that hint constantly at what might have been. Maybe one day the movie will be remade with its original format, but until then this is all we have. It’s just that overall, it’s not enough.

Rating: 4/10 – an idea that probably looked great on paper – Reynolds! Jackson! Comedy! Action! – The Hitman’s Bodyguard translates into something that never takes full advantage of its basic premise, and chugs along quite amiably without ever doing anything to reward the viewer for their patience; with a cast that should have known better, it’s a movie that quickly fades from the memory soon after it’s watched – so it gets something right at least.

Criminal (2016)

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

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Criminal

D: Ariel Vromen / 108m

Cast: Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds, Alice Eve, Michael Pitt, Jordi Mollà, Antje Traue, Amaury Nolasco, Scott Adkins, Lara Decaro

Emotionless career criminal and sociopath Jericho Stewart (Costner) has a motto: “You hurt me… I hurt you worse.” It’s tempting to rephrase said motto so that it reflects Criminal‘s effect on its audience: “You trust the movie… and it gets worse.” For the movie is an unappealing mix of action movie, paranoid thriller and sentimental drama, and it tries to be all these things at once, with varied results.

It begins with London-based CIA agent Bill Pope (Reynolds) being followed by a bunch of bad guys led by Elsa Mueller (Traue). He has a holdall full of money, but he manages to hide it. When he’s tricked into making an “escape” to a cement works, he finds himself under fire and eventually captured by terrorist nutjob Xavier Heimdahl (Mollà). Heimdahl (he’s Spanish but his Scandinavian surname elicits no comment from anyone) wants a flash drive that’s also in the holdall; on it is a wormhole program that will give him complete access and control over the US’s weapons and defence system. But Bill keeps schtum and is beaten to death.

But this is the movies and being dead doesn’t always mean being dead. In Criminal, the twist is that Bill’s memories can be accessed and transferred into the mind of another person; in theory, that is. Pioneer scientist Dr Mahal Franks (Jones) has been trying to get permission for human trial for five years, but with the CIA’s London overseer, Quaker Wells (Oldman), desperate to find the program’s creator, a hacker called Jan Stroop aka The Dutchman (Pitt) before he can sell it to the highest bidder (which was Bill before he was killed), he sees no option but to allow Franks to test his theory that transference of memories is possible in humans. But there’s a catch (isn’t there always?).

Criminal - scene2

Franks’ best candidate to receive Bill’s memories is the aforementioned emotionless career criminal and sociopath Jericho Stewart. Currently in prison, he’s dragged from his cell in the US and shoved on a plane to the UK where Franks operates on him. When he comes to, Wells conveniently fills him in on what’s at stake and his part in it all, but Jericho pretends he doesn’t have any of Bill’s memories. Thinking he’s of no further use, Wells instructs two of his men to take Jericho out into the British countryside somewhere and kill him. But Jericho has other ideas, ideas that centre around a holdall full of money…

Criminal is a movie that offers three storylines for the price of one, and while each one would have made a respectable enough impact as a single movie, Douglas Cook and David Weisberg’s script gets so carried away with itself that the storylines tend to trip each other up and get entangled. Storyline one is a standard world-in-peril scenario that gives Gary Oldman the chance to run around and shout a lot about how much peril the world is in, while storyline two concerns Jericho Stewart’s coming to terms with having Bill’s feelings and emotions, two things he’s had no previous use for. And then there’s storyline three, the (very) unlikely relationship that develops between Jericho and Bill’s wife, Jill (Gadot).

Criminal - scene3

It’s this last storyline that’s the most problematic, and not just because on their first meeting, Jericho uses duct tape to tie Jill to her bed before making off with her jewellery. No, it’s the alacrity with which she lets him stay the night when he returns the next time, albeit wounded and showing clear signs that her husband is in his head somewhere. And while Jan Stroop demonstrates his control over the US’s weapons and defence system by firing a nuclear warhead from a submarine in the atlantic, Jericho and Jill (now there’s a name for a spin-off TV series) share chicken and waffles with her daughter, Emma (Decaro). This is the point in the movie where storylines two and three ride roughshod over storyline one – it literally grinds to a halt – and any pretense of Criminal being an action thriller is forgotten.

The movie rights itself, though – thankfully – and Jericho is soon back to letting out his inner rage, and on one singular occasion, in a way that’s uncomfortably, misogynistically non-PC (and he gloats about it too). Unfortunately it’s a moment that not even Costner can rescue, which is a shame as he’s just about the only consistently good thing in the whole movie. From his first appearance as a fuzzy-wigged prisoner in chains, all animal instincts and snarling antagonism – when he’s shot with a tranquiliser dart he merely grunts and says, “You’re gonna need another one” – Costner gives a terrific performance that holds the movie together; when he’s on screen you can’t take your eyes off him, and when he isn’t, you can’t wait until he’s back. As Jericho begins to deal with the onslaught of Bill’s memories and feelings, Costner articulates the pain he feels with conviction and sincerity – and this despite having to deal with some truly lame dialogue.

Criminal - scene1

Elsewhere, Oldman and Jones pop up at various points to push along the basic plot to its unsurprising conclusion, Reynolds contributes what amounts to an extended cameo that anyone could have played, Eve is completely wasted in a role that amounts to approximately five minutes of screen time and a handful of lines, Mollà never gets a grip on his character’s motivations, Pitt has the same problem, Adkins has a supporting role that doesn’t require him to go up against anyone (not even Costner), and Gadot struggles with a role that most actresses would have had trouble with.

Doing his best to make all this fit together in a halfway credible sense is Vromen, whose last movie was the gripping character study The Iceman (2013). He does his best, and the action sequences, despite offering little in the way of original thrills and spills, have a kinetic energy to them that ensures they stand out from the often plodding nature of the rest of the movie… but it’s the generic nature of the thriller elements that defeats him. Danny Rafic’s editing tries to make the movie feel more vigorous than it actually is, and there’s an appropriately dramatic score by Keith Power and Brian Tyler that provides a degree of ad hoc excitement but like so much of the movie, never fully encapsulates the sense of imminent peril Oldman continually shouts about.

Rating: 5/10 – another high-concept idea gets a lukewarm treatment, leaving Criminal feeling undercooked and dragging its heels when it should be embracing its race against time plotting; fans of Costner won’t be disappointed but otherwise this is an action/thriller/sci-fi/drama hybrid that lets its cast, and the audience, down way too often for its own good.

Child 44 (2015)

04 Monday May 2015

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Child 44

D: Daniel Espinosa / 137m

Cast: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman, Joel Kinnaman, Paddy Considine, Fares Fares, Vincent Cassel, Jason Clarke, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Tara Fitzgerald, Sam Spruell, Charles Dance

In post-war Soviet Russia, Leo Demidov (Hardy) is a respected officer in the Secret Police. Along with wartime comrades Vasili Nikitin (Kinnaman) and Alexei Andreyev (Fares) he investigates crimes against the state. When a suspect, Anatoly Brodsky (Clarke) goes on the run, their pursuit takes them to a farm where Brodsky has taken refuge. Against Leo’s wishes, Vasili kills the farmer’s wife and his young son; this drives a wedge between the two men.

A short while later, Andreyev’s young son is found dead by some railroad tracks. Though it’s clear that he has been murdered, thanks to Stalin’s edict that there shall be “no murder in paradise”, Leo is commanded by his superior, Major Kuzmin (Cassel), to tell Andreyev that the death was accidental. The idea doesn’t sit well with Leo but he goes ahead with it. When another child is murdered, Leo learns that there have been even more, similar cases. At the same time, he is tasked with investigating another suspected enemy of the state: his wife, Raisa (Rapace). She works in a school, and is friendly with one of the teachers, Ivan Sukov (Kaas). When his investigation reveals nothing incriminating about Raisa, his report is used as an excuse to strip Leo of his job and his home.

Leo is sent to Rostov to work under the command of General Mikhail Nesterov (Oldman). There, the discovery of another child’s body leads Leo to believe that the killer is responsible for over forty murders and is using the railway line between Rostov and Moscow as a means of hiding his crimes. Convincing Nesterov of his theory, Leo, aided by Raisa, returns to Moscow to seek help from Andreyev and gain access to files that will provide further information. But Vasili, who has been promoted to Leo’s old post, learns of his being in Moscow and tries to track him down and arrest him. Leo and Raisa manage to get out of Moscow and make their way back to Rostov. Now knowing that this is where the killer lives and works, Leo tries to find him on his own, but he has to work completely outside the law to do so.

Child 44 - scene

Based on the novel by Tom Rob Smith, Child 44 looks, on the surface, to be the kind of quality literary adaptation that offers outstanding performances, first-rate direction, a gripping script, and all of it culminating in a rewarding cinematic experience. Alas, this isn’t that kind of movie.

Instead, Child 44 is one of the most lethargic, dullest thrillers in recent years. It’s hard to say just what is right about the movie, cloaked as it is in a thick layer of cod-Russian accents and the kind of amateur thesping expected from a movie with a much smaller budget.

That such a talented cast appears so ill-at-ease is thanks largely to a script by Richard Price that leaves them high and dry in terms of conviction, and rarely links two scenes with any sense that they’re connected. The movie opens with two scenes that show Leo and Vasili growing up and during the war. Anyone who’s read the novel will know the importance of this, but thanks to Price it has as much relevance later on as its clichéd outcome requires (which isn’t much). There are other moments and aspects of the novel that are included and then ignored, such as Raisa’s initial fear of Leo when they first met, and these go some way to making the movie feel uncoordinated and ill-considered.

And the movie feels rushed once Leo has to look into Raisa’s activities, as if the strain of adapting so much wieldy material became too much and Price had to jettison any subtlety in favour of just ploughing ahead with the thriller side of things. The end result is a movie that plods along avoiding any attempt to re-engage with its audience. As such, it becomes a chore, and the average viewer will be regretting the lengthy running time.

As mentioned above, the cast can do little with what they’re given. Hardy – usually a reliably  hard-working actor – here fails to get to grips with the character of Leo, and gives a drab, uninspired performance that runs out of steam before even a quarter of the movie is over. Raoace, who really should be picking her roles with more perspicacity, is left on the sidelines too much and only ever registers when taking part in a fight scene. Oldman appears halfway through, has a handful of scenes and then disappears until the end; Kinnaman plays Vasili as a one-note sociopath (and looks increasingly like a young Keith Carradine); and Considine is saddled with the role of the killer, but never looks comfortable when trying to make him seem pitiable.

Perhaps it’s as much Espinosa’s fault as the script’s, as the director never seems to have s firm grip on the material, and shoots several scenes with a peculiarly uninvolved approach that makes them seem as if they’ve been included for the sake of it. Under his wing, the movie lacks any real thrills, and the race to track down the killer is hampered by too many longeuers to be entirely effective. And when you have a cast of this quality, not getting the best out of them is practically criminal.

Rating: 4/10 – with its superficial recreation of Soviet Russia, and cruelly dispassionate approach to the material, Child 44 never convinces; when a movie adaptation is this disappointing it’s a sure sign that everyone was having a very long off day.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

31 Thursday Jul 2014

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Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

D: Matt Reeves / 130m

Cast: Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell, Toby Kebbell, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirk Acevedo, Nick Thurston, Terry Notary, Karin Konoval, Judy Greer

Set ten years on from the outbreak of the ALZ-113 virus, and which has decimated the human population, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens with Caesar (Serkis) and his fellow simians having made a home in the woods north of San Francisco.  They have an education system, and a code of behaviour that allows each sub-species of ape to live in harmony; their most important rule is that “ape shall not kill ape”.  Caesar has a wife, Cornelia (Greer), and son Blue Eyes (Thurston); Cornelia is pregnant with their second child.  On a deer hunt, Blue Eyes is attacked and wounded by a bear.  Caesar comes to his aid but the bear is too formidable an opponent.  It’s only when Caesar’s friend Koba (Kebbell) joins the fray that the bear is killed.  With Caesar admonishing his son for getting into such a predicament, Blue Eyes is hurt and upset and begins to resent his father’s attitude.

Later, Blue Eyes and his friend, Ash (Doc Shaw) encounter a human, Carver (Acevedo).  He panics and shoots Ash.  Alerted by the gunshot, Caesar and several other apes rush to the scene.  They find that Carver is part of a small party of humans led by Malcolm (Clarke).  Caesar tells the humans to leave but sends Koba and two other chimps to follow them.  Malcolm and his party return to their base in San Francisco where it becomes clear their fuel reserves are close to running out and their purpose in being in the woods was to find the nearby hydroelectric dam that could be restarted and restore power to the city.  The humans’ leader, Dreyfus (Oldman) is suspicious of the apes and frightened by how advanced they have become.  When Caesar rides in to their sanctuary and tells them he doesn’t want any conflict but will fight the humans if necessary, Dreyfus in turn escalates the tensions the humans already feel, and prepares them for “a war”.

Malcolm convinces Dreyfus to let him and a team – including his wife, Ellie (Russell) and son Alex (Smit-McPhee) – have three days to get the dam running again.  Caesar agrees to help them but Koba mistrusts the humans and fears Caesar is too soft on them.  Again, an incident involving Carver and a gun has Caesar telling the humans to leave but this time Caesar allows them to stay in order to help Cornelia who has fallen sick since giving birth.  Koba, who has been scouting the humans’ compound and is aware of their arsenal, accuses Caesar of loving humans more than apes.  Caesar attacks him but stops short of killing him.  Koba returns to the compound and seizes some weapons, killing two men in the process.  He then returns to the forest where he uses a rifle to shoot Caesar who falls through the tree canopy.  Malcolm’s group run for their lives and in the process find Caesar’s body.  He guides them to his old home with Will Rodman (James Franco), where he begins to recuperate.  Meanwhile, Koba, having made it look like the humans have killed Caesar, attacks the human compound.  Dreyfus and the humans mount a defence but are soon overrun.  Now it is the humans’ turn to feel what it’s like to be caged…

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - scene

The unexpected success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) was due largely to that movie’s intelligent handling of its plot and various storylines, allied to some of the most impressive motion capture performances seen since the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  With Rise proving such a formidable reimagining of the Planet of the Apes franchise, it seemed unlikely that a sequel would be as good, but thanks to an equally impressive script – by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver – and virtually a quantum leap forward in mo-cap rendering, Dawn more than holds its own against its predecessor, and does so with a darker visual style and more interplay between the apes.  It’s a feast for the eyes, the ears, the heart and the soul, gripping throughout, with trenchant observations about the (not-so-many) differences between humans and apes, and how mistrust can so easily spawn unwanted bloodshed.

The focus is firmly on Caesar in this outing, his leadership abilities and how they shape his approach to the humans, brought to the fore from the beginning, his memories of his previous life still haunting him.  The movie shows his strength and compassion, matching his awareness of the humans capability for duplicity with his knowledge that, like himself and his extended family, they’re just trying to survive.  Caesar’s matched by the character of Malcolm, two “people” who are able to acknowledge the benefits that can be found in the two groups’ working together; it’s not unfair to say that during the course of the movie the two become friends, and this adds an extra layer of meaning to the cooperation between the two species.  As Caesar says at one point, in respect of Will Rodman, “[He was] a good man… like you.”

The movie pits Caesar and Malcolm against more fundamentalist characters in each faction, with Koba’s animosity towards the humans borne out of the pain and terror he experienced as a lab animal, while Dreyfus sees the apes as the cause of humanity’s destruction.  Neither character has much time for unity or the notion of making peace between the two groups, but they are both passionate in their own ways, even if their actions are potentially disastrous to both groups; that their personal feelings are allowed to sway their actions – in the same way that Caesar and Malcolm are able to generate mutual self-respect and understanding – show clearly, and quite cleverly, that whichever side of the argument characters are on, the similarities between the groups are many.

With this dramatic groundwork in place the movie is free to embellish upon those themes with an emotional layer that acts as an evincive counterpart to the action, and underpins those sequences with simplicity and conviction.  It’s an often delicate balancing act, but again, the script is well-constructed and while the course of events is in many ways as predictable as the flow of a river, it’s the many unexpected undercurrents that are continually surprising and moving.  Reeves, who is already attached as writer/director of the next Apes movie, due in 2016, allows the action to flow organically from the drama of each development in the plot, and extracts excellent performances all round.  He maintains the visual style of Rise while augmenting it with a more subdued approach to the lighting (but then this is meant to be a “darker” movie), and keeps the camera moving in ever more inventive, and unexpected, ways.

On the performance side, Serkis and Kebbell offer truly astonishing performances, making it even more difficult to say that motion capture isn’t a valid form of acting, the two actors’ expressions clearly conveying their characters’ emotions through the digital assembly.  There’s not a single misstep in either of their portrayals, and while Serkis’ innate understanding of mo-cap is as commanding as ever, it’s Kebbell’s performance that is the more compelling, making the traumatised Koba one of the most remarkable, and memorable, characters seen in recent years.  By comparison, the (recognisably) human cast offer sterling performances but have to make more of an effort to make an impact.  Clarke, one of Australia’s best exports, overcomes some perfunctory characterisation to breathe life into Malcolm and make him more accessible than he at first appears, and Oldman does the same with Dreyfus, heightening the character’s paranoid leadership through the sadness he still carries with him over the loss of his family.  In support, Russell is solid despite having little to do, Smit-McPhee is in the same boat, while Acevedo makes Carver’s xenophobia vivid and deplorable at the same time.

If the movie stumbles once or twice – and it does – it quickly picks itself up again and marches on boldly, its intelligence and surprisingly complex take on what it means to be “human” carrying it forward with an almost Shakespearean air of confidence.  The CGI apes fit seamlessly into the forest surroundings, and if sometimes their facial expressions aren’t quite as sharply detailed in medium shot as they are in close-up, it’s a minor distraction (and is no doubt already being addressed for the next movie).  With an even greater threat facing Caesar and the ape community in the future, Dawn serves as notice that science fiction, when it’s as well thought out and assembled as this movie is, can be as compelling and significant as any modern day drama, and just as impressive.

Rating: 9/10 – thought-provoking and convincing in equal measure, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is that rare sequel: one that complements and expands on its predecessor with accomplished ease; with some knowing references to the original series of films, and a firm grip on what it wants to say, this instalment rewards the viewer on so many levels it’s as brilliant an accomplishment as you’re likely to see all year.

RoboCop (2014)

20 Thursday Mar 2014

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QUAD_UK_ROBO_101294f.indd

D: José Padilha / 117m

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Harley, Michael K. Williams, Jennifer Ehle, Jay Baruchel, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Samuel L. Jackson, Aimee Garcia, Douglas Urbanski, John Paul Ruttan, Patrick Garrow, Zach Grenier

With the Eighties being increasingly plundered for material that can be remade, rebooted or re-imagined, the likelihood of a new RoboCop movie was always a strong possibility.  Now that it’s here, it’s inevitable that the comparisons between this version and Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 original are appearing thick and fast, with equally inevitable results: it’s not the same (shock! horror!).

From the black suit to the addition of a wife and child, RoboCop is – and was always going to be – a different beast from its predecessor(s) (let’s not even mention the animated and live action TV series’).  Some things remain the same though.  Alex Murphy (Kinnaman) is still a Detroit cop, working with his partner, Jack Lewis (Williams) to bring down crime boss Antoine Vallon (Garrow).  When the pair get too close, Lewis is wounded in a shootout and Murphy is subsequently blown up outside his home.  With his life hanging in the balance, OmniCorp boss Raymond Sellars (Keaton) offers his wife Clara (Cornish) a way to keep Alex alive: sign up to their research programme, headed by Dr Norton (Oldman).

Three months later, Alex is restored to waking consciousness to find himself encased in a metal suit and horrified by what is happening to him.  After an escape attempt fails he begins to accept the reality of his situation and works with Norton to make the best of things and, more importantly, find his way back to Clara and his son David (Ruttan).  With a projected annual return of $600 billion if their robot police programme is a success – and if a bill banning robot police officers is repealed by the Senate – OmniCorp is determined not to let Alex’s individuality ruin their investment.  They take steps to control his emotional and judgmental responses, but reckon without his love for his family – and his need for revenge on Vallon – overriding their protocols.  Soon, Alex begins to understand the depth of Sellars’ duplicity, and with his partner’s help, sets out to – yes, you’ve guessed it – bring Sellars to justice.

RoboCop (2014) - scene

Although Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner – the screenwriters of the 1987 version – are credited alongside newbie Josh Zetumer, little remains from their script except various names, the Detroit location, and the movie’s basic structure.  It’s not a bad (exo-) skeleton to hang things on and ensures the movie doesn’t stray too far from the (in-built) audience’s expectations.  The major difference here is that Alex isn’t killed but is critically injured, making his memories and emotions a much more potent angle to explore… except the movie doesn’t.  With the exception of a brief (read: cut short in the editing process) scene where Alex goes home for the first time as RoboCop, there’s no real exploration of what Alex might be feeling beyond having Kinnaman look aggrieved for a few moments in-between the action elements.

There’s also a lot of talking.  RoboCop may be the first action movie in a long time to spend so much of its screen time having its secondary characters talk so often, and to so little effect.  Jackson ramps it up as a thinly disguised version of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, spouting diatribes as only he can, and providing the movie with its thinly disguised attack on corporate America and the media as devious bedfellows (Jackson also gets to say m*thaf*cka, so some things are all right with the world).  And then there’s the continual back-and-forth between Sellars and Norton where Norton voices a concern or a negative opinion, and Sellars just waffles a few sentences and Norton goes away appeased.  (I swear I have no idea what Michael Keaton is saying in those scenes.)

With all this dialogue and by-the-numbers plotting, how then do the action scenes fare?  Well, one first-person shooter sequence aside (which sticks out like a sore thumb), RoboCop delivers fairly effective if unexceptional action beats until it wimps out altogether and gives us one of the most ineffectual showdowns in action cinema history (look for the well-armed guard who doesn’t fire a shot – no, look for him: once RoboCop appears he all but vanishes).  And if I have to make one comparison only between this version and the 1987 movie, it’s that Vallon is a poor, practically disposable villain when set against Clarence Boddicker.

The cast perform efficiently enough and Kinnaman makes for a strong-jawed hero, while Oldman does his best with a character whose motivations change from scene to scene (and sometimes within them).  Keaton underplays Sellars and only occasionally shows off the nervous energy that made him so exciting to watch earlier on in his career, and Baruchel gets to play the annoying marketing character you hope gets killed by an ED-209.  As Clara, Cornish has little to do but look angry or upset from the sidelines, and Jean-Baptiste (so brilliant in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies) is here reduced to treading water until her character is no longer required by the narrative.

Padilha directs with an efficiency and a drive that never quite translates into sustained tension, and there are too many filler shots of RoboCop zooming through the streets of Detroit on his customised motorbike.  That said, there are things to like: Lula Carvalho’s steel-burnished photography; Murphy’s treatment of hired mercenary Mattox (Haley) after a training exercise; a short scene where a man with robotic hands plays the guitar; Mattox’s choice of music during Murphy’s first training session (plus Norton’s bemused response); the seamless special effects, a predictably vast improvement on 1987; and the movie’s best scene by far: the moment when Murphy discovers just how much of himself fills the suit.

Ultimately, what’s missing from RoboCop is a clear attempt at relating the emotional trauma of being a man in a “tin suit”.  Without it, RoboCop doesn’t engage in the way it should do, and many scenes pass by without having any meaningful effect on the audience.  It makes for frustrating viewing, and robs the movie of any real drama; sadly, it all ends up being just too impersonal.

Rating: 6/10 – a tidier script would have helped but this is by no means a disaster; a shaky start to a new series of movies(?) but enjoyable enough despite its flaws.

Paranoia (2013)

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

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Paranoia

D: Robert Luketic / 106m

Cast: Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman, Amber Heard, Harrison Ford, Lucas Till, Embeth Davidtz, Julian McMahon, Josh Holloway, Richard Dreyfuss

When the final history of movies comes to be written, and all the various genres and sub-genres are assessed and valued, one type of movie will probably be given short shrift by its assessors: the industrial espionage thriller. In the real world, the cut and thrust of commercial enterprise, with often billions – and companies’ reputations – at stake, must play out with some degree of dramatic potential, but when it comes to the movies, this dramatic potential is all too often squandered for the sake of cinematic familiarity. And so it goes with Paranoia, a thriller based around the power play between two communications empires and the youngish would-be player who gets caught in the middle.

The player is Adam Cassidy (Hemsworth), an entry-level employee working for Nicolas Wyatt (Oldman). When a pitch to secure a position at Wyatt’s company fails disastrously, Adam decides to have one last splurge on his company credit card.  $16,000 later, he finds himself being blackmailed by Wyatt into going to work for Wyatt’s long-time rival, Jock Goddard (Ford). Once he has Goddard’s trust and knows his way around the company, Adam’s task is to steal details of the new, revolutionary smart phone that Goddard is planning to release onto the market. Along the way Adam meets and falls for Emma Jennings (Heard), an executive at Goddard’s company. As Wyatt increases the pressure on Adam to get the info he needs, Adam must decide if the path he has chosen is the right one.

PARANOIA

The problem with Paranoia – aside from the fact that the movie is mis-titled – is that we don’t care about anyone in the movie…at all. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Adam because his dad Frank (Dreyfuss) is ill and it’s a struggle for them to pay for the mounting medical bills. But Frank, who is on oxygen a lot of the time, continues to smoke; it’s this that gets him hospitalised and pushes the costs up. When Adam loses his job with Wyatt he doesn’t consider his responsibilities, he just goes out with his team and runs up a huge bill, another one he can’t pay.  So when Wyatt blackmails Adam into working for him as an industrial spy, there’s no sympathy for him at all. (I wanted him to really suffer as the movie went on but Adam is the “hero” in the movie, so that only goes so far.) Even when Wyatt threatens to hurt Frank if Adam doesn’t go along with his plan, you’re left thinking “yeah, that’s fair enough”. Adam is a slightly older version of the ‘callow youth’ the movies like to put in peril every so often, but here it doesn’t work. He’s simply not a good enough person for the audience to get behind.  Even when he begins to realise the real position he’s in, it’s still a case of “you got yourself into this mess…”.

As Adam, Hemsworth fails to make any connection with the audience, playing him as someone who thinks he’s smart but who actually hasn’t learnt anything in his twenty-seven years on the planet. Hemsworth is not the greatest actor in the world – watch how he tries to explain to Emma that he’s done some things he should have told her about – and there are times when the relevant emotion comes along a beat or two after it’s required, but as the character isn’t fully formed anyway – thanks to Jason Dean Hall and Barry L. Levy’s unconvincing screenplay – he does the best he can under the circumstances. Oldman uses an awkward mix of Cockney and mid-Atlantic vocal swagger as the keystone of his performance, while Heard, an actress who has yet to realise her full potential, is given little to do other than appear vapid and superficially strong. It’s Ford who impresses most, although that’s not saying much; he’s saddled with some of the most turgid dialogue this side of Star Wars (so he’s probably used to it), but at least he puts some energy and commitment into his performance, even if it counts, ultimately, for nothing. In a supporting role, McMahon exudes icy menace as Wyatt’s enforcer, Meechum, but Davidtz, as Wyatt’s PA, looks embarrassed throughout.

The direction by Robert Luketic is low-key and close to pedestrian, while the photography offers an almost wintry, subdued look that matches the downbeat aspects of the storyline and the grubby nature of the proceedings. The script struggles to add depth or texture to both events and characters, and the outcome can be seen from a mile off (you could even say it was phoned in). As a thriller, Paranoia never really hits the mark, and as a drama it’s too undercooked to be effective. Everyone involved has done better elsewhere, and probably will do again. What matters here is whether or not a hundred and five minutes of your time could be used doing something better instead.

Rating: 5/10 – an unimaginative thriller that goes through the motions for most of its running time, Paranoia never engages its audience or provides a way in to become involved; a shame then considering the talent taking part.