Tag Archives: Kevin Costner

Molly’s Game (2017)

08 Monday Jan 2018

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D: Aaron Sorkin / 140m

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong, Chris O’Dowd, J.C. MacKenzie, Brian d’Arcy James, Bill Camp, Graham Greene, Jon Bass

With the issue of women trying to get ahead in a “man’s world” receiving so much attention right now, the arrival of Aaron Sorkin’s debut as a director seems like very good timing indeed. Based on the true story of Molly Bloom (Chastain), a potential Olympic-class skier forced to retire through injury, and how she came to run one of the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker games – twice, Sorkin’s debut is a dazzling whirl through the twilight world of underground gambling where fortunes are won and lost at the turn of a card. Molly begins her second career while working for Dean Keith (Strong), a struggling businessman who hosts his own underground game, and who tells her to oversee the game each week. When her relationship with Keith becomes irretrievably strained, she starts up her own game, steals away one of his main players, an actor referred to as Player X (Cera), and begins to make a name for herself. Avoiding taking a cut of the money being wagered, Molly isn’t doing anything illegal, but she falls foul of Player X’s ego and the game is taken away from her. She moves to New York where she starts another game but this time she begins to take a cut. She bows out after a couple of years, but two years later, finds herself being arrested and charged with, amongst other things, money laundering. Enter the man who will represent her in court, Charlie Jaffey (Elba)…

Like many biopics, Molly’s Game doesn’t tell Bloom’s real story, but instead uses its bare bones to explore a world where gambling is its own addictive drug of choice, and the players wage obscene amounts of money for the thrill of it. It’s a world that Sorkin portrays with a great deal of fidelity, but while it’s an interesting and compelling world to spend time in – and the movie spends as much time there as it can – it does mean that Molly herself is placed firmly in the background. There are too many times where she’s the observer, watching the players while offering a pointed commentary on their habits and foibles. The movie is on firmer ground when it’s showing the process by which Molly and Jaffey spar their way to a workable defence strategy, with her refusal to implicate others or break her own self-imposed ethical code, proving at odds with Jaffey’s efforts to keep her out of jail. The scenes between Chastain and Elba crackle with an urgency and an intensity that isn’t always there when Molly’s past is being recounted, and while Sorkin the director in conjunction with editors Alan Baumgarten, Elliot Graham, and Josh Schaeffer, keeps things moving at quite a lick (the running time doesn’t feel like it’s anywhere near two hours and twenty minutes), the movie’s non-linear approach does undercut any potential or hard-earned momentum.

But if there’s one area of the screenplay that no one should worry about, it’s the dialogue. This is a movie where the dialogue is so well structured and so well held together through the various vocal rhythms associated with the characters, that not one word feels false or sounds awkward when it’s spoken. Sorkin’s good ear works its magic as usual, and there are times when it’s easy to believe that Molly et al spoke these actual words during the real-life situations being depicted. Even a scene late on between Molly and her uncompromising father (Costner), a scene that screams plot contrivance at the top of its lungs, is so deftly written that you can almost forgive the hackneyed nature of it. Sorkin is also well served by his cast, with Chastain and Elba both giving terrific performances, and they in turn are given equally terrific support from the likes of Costner, Cera, and O’Dowd. This is a confident debut feature from Sorkin, and even though some of it feels a little stretched in terms of “did it really happen that way?” there’s no denying the energy and the appeal of seeing one woman carving out her own niche in a man’s world and sticking to her own principles while she does it.

Rating: 8/10 – top-notch performances from Chastain and Elba added to another script full of riches from Sorkin (and his surprisingly flexible direction) make Molly’s Game a hugely enjoyable movie even when it steers perilously close to Movie Biopic Clichés 101; if you’re not into poker some of this will go way over your head, and there are a few silly missteps along the way, but otherwise this is a fast-paced, freewheeling, and above all fun experience that doesn’t rely on depth or subtexts at all in telling Bloom’s story.

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Hidden Figures (2016)

21 Saturday Jan 2017

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D: Theodore Melfi / 126m

Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali, Aldis Hodge, Glen Powell, Kimberly Quinn, Olek Krupa

In 1961, the USA and the USSR were in a race to put a man into space. The Russians had managed to send up a mannequin and a dog on separate missions, while the Americans were struggling to stop their unmanned rockets from blowing up shortly after take-off. The team responsible for this string of non-fatal disasters was based at the NASA complex in Langley, Virginia. In fact, there were several teams working there, including a coloured section overseen by Vivian Mitchell (Dunst). Of the women that worked there, three were best friends: Katherine Goble (Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Monáe). Each had their own specialty: Katherine was a maths genius, Dorothy was a more than competent supervisor (and latent programmer), while Mary was an engineer.

Despite their obvious capabilities, the institutionalised racism of the time ensures that each of them remains in a pool of temps to be drawn on as and when required. Dorothy is the de facto supervisor of the group, but isn’t officially recognised as such. Mary’s desire to be an engineer is hampered by her needing to take a specific engineering course – which is taught only at a non-segregated school. And Katherine’s intuitive knowledge of advanced mathematics is under-utilised on a regular basis. Things begin to change though, when Katherine is seconded to the Space Task Group, the team responsible for calculating the launch and landing coordinates for each rocket mission.

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Led by Al Harrison (Costner), the team is as inherently racist as an all-white male environment could be. Only Harrison seems able to look past the colour of Katherine’s skin, but he has too much on his plate to ensure that everyone else does. With her work constantly undermined by Harrison’s second-in-command, Paul Stafford (Parsons), and having to spend too much time checking other people’s calculations, Katherine struggles to make any headway in having her talents recognised. When the USSR succeeds in sending Yuri Gagarin into space (and bringing him back), the pressure is on to do the same with a US astronaut. With the arrival of an IBM mainframe computer that will process mathematical formulae and calculations much quicker than Harrison’s team of “computers”, Katherine faces an even bigger challenge: how to retain a human element amongst all the mathematics, and how to ensure that any future manned space flights remain as safe as humanly possible. It all leads to the first manned orbital flight, and making sure that astronaut John Glenn (Powell) returns home in one piece.

Those with a good memory for last year’s Oscars will remember the outcry over the Academy appearing to be racially biased against black and ethnic movie makers. Stars such as Will Smith boycotted the Oscar ceremony, while contention reigned over the nominations the Academy had made in the first place. A year later, and we have Hidden Figures, a movie almost designed to address the issue, and which should see itself gain a slew of nominations. However, the movie is the victim of felicitous timing, having gone into production a full year before last year’s Oscars. Nevertheless, it’s the kind of feelgood, inspiring, let’s-throw-a-light-on-a-little-known-aspect-of-recent-US-history movie that charms audiences and critics alike. And it doesn’t hurt that co-writer/director Theodore Melfi has assembled a great cast to do justice to his and Allison Schroeder’s screenplay, itself adapted from the book by Margot Lee Shetterley.

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While Hidden Figures doesn’t necessarily stand or fall on its performances, having such a (mostly) seasoned cast pays off tremendously. Henson is terrific as Katherine, the unsung hero of the Friendship 7 mission who is more than just a maths genius, while Spencer and Monáe provide equal measures of grit and determination as Dorothy and Mary, guiding their real-life characters through the many professional, personal, and racial pitfalls the two women experienced at the time, and their inspirational, dedicated responses to each potential setback. Both actresses are equally as terrific as Henson, even if they have a little less to do in comparison, but as a trio they prove to be inspired casting. The same can be said for Costner, playing yet another (fictional) fair-minded, no-nonsense authority figure, but doing so with a great deal of charm and delivering his lines with the necessary amount of gravitas and persuasion. The only character who sticks out as unnecessarily stereotypical is Parsons as Katherine’s racist, jealous colleague, who constantly feels threatened by her presence and her abilities. Reduced to giving her glowering looks and blocking her attempts at personal recognition, Parsons’ performance does the actor no favours and will have many viewers thinking, “he’s just playing an evil version of Sheldon Cooper”.

As Mrs Mitchell, Dunst at least gets to see the error of her ways by the movie’s end, while there’s solid support from Ali and Hodge as Katherine’s love interest and Mary’s husband respectively. And there’s a mischievous turn from Powell as John Glenn, who won’t take off unless Katherine has checked the numbers. With so many enjoyable, and finely-tuned performances, the movie is free to explore the ways in which Johnson et al became so integral to the success of the Friendship 7 mission after so many failures. There’s subterfuge (on Dorothy’s part), legal wrangling (by Mary), and pure dogged persistence by Katherine. While it’s true that all three were in the right place at the right time, it’s still equally true that they took advantage of the chances given them, and made the most of those opportunities. In doing so, they forged a path for women (and not just black women) that is still being benefitted from today, and the movie is eager to highlight their achievements – which is as it should be.

DF-04856_R2 - Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), flanked by fellow mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) meet the man they helped send into orbit, John Glenn (Glen Powell), in HIDDEN FIGURES. Photo Credit: Hopper Stone.

But though these achievements are rightly recognised and celebrated, and the tensions inherent in the efforts to put Glenn into orbit are confidently addressed and shown, it’s when the movie steps away from the base at Langley and tries to paint a wider picture of the period that it proves to be less successful in its efforts. There are references to the growing civil unrest in the country, and we get to spend time with the trio’s family and friends on various occasions, but Katherine’s romance with Colonel Jim Johnson (Ali) aside, much of these scenes and sequences feel like filler, particularly the political discussions between Mary and her husband, which seem like they’re prodding the movie in another direction, but which ultimately amount to nothing.

Otherwise though, Hidden Figures is a lovingly rendered tribute to three women who smashed through not one but two glass ceilings and contributed greatly to the US winning the space race and eventually landing on the Moon. That their contributions have taken so long to be recognised and honoured by the wider public is a travesty that the movie addresses with no small amount of style and grace. Melfi is to be congratulated for taking such an inspiring, untold tale and doing it full justice, and in the process, making one of the most enjoyable, inspiring and rewarding movies of recent years.

Rating: 8/10 – shining a light on an overlooked story from the early Sixties, Hidden Figures is a generous, captivating movie that plays equally well as both an historical drama and a comedy of manners; with a trio of memorable performances, and richly textured direction from Melfi, this is an object lesson in bringing history alive and making it completely accessible.

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?).

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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).

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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.

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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.

Poster of the Week – JFK (1992)

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

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JFK

JFK (1992)

Oliver Stone’s controversial examination of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy is engrossing, challenging and provocative. This poster for the movie isn’t quite as powerful – though that’s not a bad thing – but it what does do really well is compile some very iconic imagery into an attractive, attention-grabbing whole.

There are three very potent images included here. The first is the shot of Jackie Kennedy reaching over the back of the car with the Security Service agent rushing toward her. Even if you were unaware of the context of that image, you’d still know there was something wrong there, that this woman was in trouble. Knowing the context adds sympathy, sorrow, grief and shock, and the image’s inclusion is a poignant and concise reminder of the events of 22 November 1963.

In contrast, the image of Lee Harvey Oswald clasping a rifle in one hand and copies of the Communist paper The Militant in the other, provokes a different reaction. Whether you regard him as an assassin or a patsy, there’s something about Oswald’s look to camera that makes the viewer a little uneasy. Whatever his involvement in the death of John F. Kennedy, Oswald is still someone who invites suspicion, and this image reinforces that feeling with quiet authority.

Lastly, and perhaps less obviously, there is the torn American flag, a symbol of the “loss of innocence” America as a nation felt in the wake of Kennedy’s death. This was an event that – if such a thing is truly possible – damaged the nation’s psyche. It’s inclusion is the poster’s most subtle aspect, and mixed with the other two images, creates a compelling reflection on the movie’s subject matter.

The further inclusion of an image of Kevin Costner as District Attorney Jim Garrison doesn’t really add anything to the overall design, and appears more of a marketing idea than anything else. But the tag line is certainly apt, and rounds off the poster’s effect quite nicely: “The Story That Won’t Go Away”. How true, indeed.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to let me know.

Draft Day (2014)

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

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Draft Day

D: Ivan Reitman / 110m

Cast: Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary, Frank Langella, Ellen Burstyn, Chadwick Boseman, Sean Combs, Josh Pence, Terry Crews, Arian Foster, Patrick St Esprit, Chi McBride, Tom Welling, Pat Healy, Rosanna Arquette, Sam Elliott

It’s Draft Day in the NFL and the number one pick is quarterback Bo Callahan (Pence). Cleveland Browns general manager Sonny Weaver Jr (Costner) is given the chance to have him as his first choice in the pick but he declines.  Urged by club owner Anthony Molina (Langella) to make “a splash”, Weaver changes his mind and does a deal with the Seattle Seahawks for Callahan that allows them first pick in the draft.  As the news leaks out that the deal has been done, it earns the animosity of the Browns’ Coach Penn (Leary), and defensive player Vontae Mack (Boseman).  Penn wants another player, Ray Jennings (Foster) to be picked in order to complement their existing quarterback Brian Drew (Welling).  Mack wants to play for the Browns, and he tells Weaver that picking Callahan is a bad move.

As the day carries on, Weaver is forced to confront the notion that Callahan isn’t all he’s made out to be, and that he has serious character flaws that could well cause him to be a liability down the line.  Weaver also has to contend with the news that his girlfriend, Ali (Garner), who works for the Browns as a lawyer, is pregnant.  And as if that wasn’t enough, his mother (Burstyn) arrives at the ground to scatter his father’s ashes on the training field, something that Weaver is resistant of as he had to fire his father as coach the year before.

At the first pick, Weaver surprises everybody with his first choice, and this leads to moves and counter-moves involving the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Seattle Seahawks, moves that will determine whether or not Weaver continues as the Browns’ general manager.

Draft Day - scene

An unabashed sports movie that plays out like a good old-fashioned drama laced with broad, comic elements, Draft Day is the kind of movie you can watch and just let wash over you.  It’s professionally done, with a likeable cast, an enjoyable set up, a good-natured feel to it, and easy-going direction thanks to Reitman, back on form after the regrettable No Strings Attached (2011).  It’s an easy movie to like, then, and the kind of movie that has no other agenda than to entertain its audience for a couple of hours.  In short, it’s the kind of movie that doesn’t come around very often.

The main reason Draft Day is so engaging and fun to watch is due to its performances.  Costner could probably play Sonny Weaver Jr in his sleep, and while the actor brings his usual gravitas to the dramatic scenes, he’s equally appealing (if not more so) when the script throws a comedic curve ball at him.  It’s an assured performance, Costner’s experience and acting chops perfectly suited to the role; he’s back in the kind of everyman hero role he made his own in the late Eighties/early Nineties, but older and wiser, and with less to prove (especially as an actor).  It’s good to see him back doing the kind of role he does best: being the calm at the centre of the storm, the rock that everyone can cling on to and know that they’ll be safe.  For the audience, it’s like seeing an old friend after a number of years have gone by, and picking up right where you left off.

In support, Garner is patient and compassionate, while Leary is ill-tempered and aggressive.  Both actors have roles that play to their strengths, and it’s good to see them sparring so happily with Costner, and with each other.  They may be playing familiar roles, with little variation, but it makes the audience feel comfortable; it’s reassuring in such a way that it puts a smile on the viewer’s face without them realising it.  As the Browns’ owner, Langella is appropriately supercilious, while Boseman, Pence, Welling and Foster offer various approaches to the ways in which young American men can view football as not just a game, but what gives their lives meaning.

Under Reitman’s relaxed though confident direction, the cast keep the momentum going, the movie’s rhythm never allowed to flag or stutter or the audience to lose interest.  If you’re not a fan of American Football, then some of the dialogue is going to seem like it’s spoken in a foreign language, but the script by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman takes pains to explain the various ins and outs of the game itself and the behind the scenes machinations that make up most of what goes on on Draft Day.  It doesn’t succeed entirely, but what gets lost in the “translation” won’t impede anyone’s enjoyment of the movie.  And if it all seems a little too convoluted for its own good, then that’s just the way the NFL has set things up (so go figure).

The various subplots and storylines are all resolved with varying degrees of neatness, though this doesn’t detract from the enjoyment the movie provides, and the approach to the material – albeit lightweight and occasionally superficial – fits with the overall intended effect.  Brightly filmed, and with a serendipitous score courtesy of the ever-reliable John Debney, Draft Day succeeds in bringing back some much needed entertainment in amongst all the horror remakes, scuzzy crime thrillers and high octane superhero movies.

Rating: 8/10 – what it lacks in depth, Draft Day more than makes up for in likability; a return to old-fashioned story telling and all the better for it.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

10 Sunday Aug 2014

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Robin Hood Prince of Thieves

D: Kevin Reynolds / 143m

Cast: Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Alan Rickman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Christian Slater, Geraldine McEwan, Micheal McShane, Michael Wincott, Nick Brimble, Soo Drouet, Walter Sparrow, Harold Innocent, Daniel Newman, Daniel Peacock, Jack Wild, Imogen Bain, Brian Blessed, Sean Connery

Jerusalem, 1194: Having taken part in the Crusades in support of King Richard the Lionheart, Robin of Locksley (Costner) is a prisoner facing a bleak future.  Seizing a chance to escape he finds himself doing so with Moor Azeem (Freeman), who tells Robin he must stay with him until he can repay the debt of Robin saving his life.  Back in England, Robin’s father (Blessed) is killed by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Rickman), his castle razed to the ground, and his lands forfeited.  Four months pass before Robin and Azeem arrive back in England.  When Robin learns of his father’s fate, he seeks out his former childhood friend, Marian (Mastrantonio).  The Sheriff’s men – led by his cousin Guy of Gisborne (Wincott) – chase Robin and Azeem into Sherwood Forest, where they find refuge with a band of outlaws.

Robin soon becomes the outlaws’ leader, and they start to rob convoys and shipments that travel through the forest, including a large cache of money that they learn is intended to pay off a group of barons who will support Nottingham’s challenge for the throne in King Richard’s absence.  With their increasing resistance interfering with the Sheriff’s plans, he hires a band of Celts to find and lead an assault on the outlaws’ hideaway.  With several of the outlaws taken prisoner, and with their executions planned to take place on the same day that the Sheriff intends to marry Marian against her wishes, Robin, Azeem and a few remaining outlaws – including Little John (Brimble), Will Scarlett (Slater), and Friar Tuck (McShane) – must save their comrades, stop the marriage, and thwart the Sheriff’s plans to overthrow the monarchy.

Robin Hood Prince of Thieves - scene

Back in 1991, Kevin Costner was fresh off the Oscar-winning success garnered by Dances With Wolves (1990), and audiences had the prospect of Oliver Stone’s JFK to come later in the year.  But in between there was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a movie that promises so much but in practice offers a rather lumpen retelling of the Robin Hood myth, and which makes the mistake of having a lead character who is so bland and unexciting to watch that the movie stumbles along for far too long before it ratchets up the action for its extended, exhilarating climax.

Costner’s Robin is a bit of a dullard, so much so that the romance with Marian makes you question her eyesight and experience of other men.  With such an unnecessary and distracting approach, it falls to the supporting characters to provide any vitality or energy, though we’re talking minor supporting characters in the main, such as Bull (Peacock) and Much (Wild), or McEwan’s cackling turn as the witch Mortianna.  Thank the screenwriters then – Pen Densham and John Watson – that they gave us a Sheriff of Nottingham straight out of the am-dram leagues, and that Alan Rickman (only three years on from his breakout performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard) embraced the pantomime aspects of the character and gave the movie a much-needed boost.  When he’s on screen there are just waves of pleasure generated by his exasperated, frustrated Sheriff, and lines of dialogue that continue to impress even after all this time: “That’s it then.  Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.”  But good as he is, Rickman’s performance only serves to highlight how little effort has gone into making Robin anywhere near as interesting.

It’s not really noticeable either, just how much time elapses over the course of the movie.  It takes Robin and Azeem four months to get home, and once they meet up with the outlaws in the forest, a further five months elapse before the Sheriff is given the idea of hiring the Celts.  This seriously undermines any dramatic tension the movie has – until the planned executions are announced – and this leaves the middle section feeling drawn out and at the mercy of the romance between Robin and Marian, which, despite being well acted by Costner and Mastrantonio, still drains the movie of any impetus it’s managed to build up by then.

The unevenness of the script, and problems with the pacing aside, there’s still much to recommend, from the stirring action set pieces, to the often pointed humour – “Where I come from, we talk to our women. We do not drug them with plants.” – as well as the aforementioned supporting turns, to the look of the movie, its rural settings and heavy greens and browns providing a rich palette for the audience to look at.  Reynolds directs with conviction, and with DoP Douglas Milsome’s help, keeps the camera moving in and around the action, often getting in close at unexpected, but effective, moments.

As an updated version of the classic tale, there are some unfortunate anachronisms throughout (mostly of the verbal variety – would Will Scarlett really have said what he does when Robin and Azeem catapult over a castle wall?), and some of the more modern, ironic sensibilities in the script are at odds with the medieval milieu, but they come across as part of the uneven approach to the material; ultimately these elements  fail to gel but don’t impede a basic enjoyment of the movie, and don’t detract when the movie picks up the pace (and becomes more exciting).

Rating: 7/10 – slow-moving in parts (and geographically amusing – Dover to Nottingham via Hadrian’s Wall, anyone?), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves takes a high concept, big budget approach to a small-scale adventure drama and loses its focus accordingly; with Costner and most of the cast hindered by poor characterisations, it’s left to a bravura finale to rescue the film from being completely bland.

3 Days to Kill (2014)

15 Thursday May 2014

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3 Days to Kill

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.

3 Days to Kill - scene

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.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

07 Friday Feb 2014

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Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit

D: Kenneth Branagh / 105m

Cast: Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Keira Knightley, Kenneth Branagh, Lenn Kudrjawizki, Alec Utgoff, Peter Andersson, Elena Velikanova, Nonso Anozie, Seth Ayott, Colm Feore, Gemma Chan

With franchise reboots seemingly the order of the day in Hollywood at the moment, we shouldn’t be too surprised to find Tom Clancy’s CIA analyst dusted down and given a new lease of life courtesy of parent company Paramount.  Twelve years on from the frankly underwhelming The Sum of All Fears, we find our hero not only younger but given the dubious benefit of an origin story.  It’s a slightly too comfortable move by Paramount, and while you can understand they might want to make a few more Jack Ryan movies in the future, this is quite a soft, predictable movie for a “first” outing.

We first meet Ryan at college in England on the day of 9/11.  The terrible events of that day prompt him to enlist in the Marines and we move on to events in Afghanistan that see Ryan badly injured and needing intense physical therapy so that he can walk again.  Here he meets two people who will be instrumental in getting him back on his feet: junior doctor Cathy Muller (Knightley), and shadowy spook Thomas Harper (Costner).  Fast forward ten more years and Ryan is working on Wall Street as an undercover analyst working for Harper and looking for financial dealings and transactions that might indicate terrorist funding.  He is living with Cathy who knows nothing of his double life.  When Ryan discovers Russian accounts that are being hidden from view, he travels to Moscow to investigate.  Surviving an attempt on his life, Ryan meets businessman Viktor Cheverin (Branagh) and discovers a plot to destabilise the US economy.  To make matters more complicated, there’s a terrorist attack being planned, and Ryan’s girlfriend turns up unexpectedly in Moscow.

Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit - scene

While the plotting and characterisations in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit are fairly simple and straightforward, there’s a disconnect between the high-tech gadgetry and versatility of the modern communications devices on display, against the feel and visual styling that Branagh brings to the fore throughout.  This is very much an Eighties spy thriller, with many of the Cold War frills that were prevalent then, and there’s a large debt owed to The Fourth Protocol (1987).  The script tries its best to avoid the usual clichés but remains a fairly sterile affair, devoid of any real tension and saddled with the kind of arch-villainy better suited to a Bond movie.  (Indeed, Branagh’s character and performance would have looked completely at home during Pierce Brosnan’s tenure.)  What elements the movie does pilfer from recent years gives it more of a Jason Bourne feel but without the angst.  When Cathy turns up in Moscow there’s a sense that hers and Ryan’s relationship – given such a strong focus in the first third of the movie – is going to continue in the same vein, but the script relegates her to the necessary damsel in distress; and once she’s saved she’s removed from the movie altogether until the inevitable coda (but not before she’s conveniently validated Ryan’s double life, previously a plot point that drove their relationship).

With Cheverin’s financial machinations lacking the flair or excitement that can only be offset by a series of (thankfully) non-CGI action sequences, the movie plays out its showdowns and action beats proficiently enough without giving us anything new or different.  (The last third, with its chases through Moscow and Manhattan, also seem to  provide a potential cure for back pain: Ryan’s injuries from Afghanistan, still causing him problems today, are forgotten about as he’s thrown around a lot in vehicle collisions and found hanging out the back of a truck.)  There’s a distinct lack of tension as well, and the short scene where Ryan determines both the location of the terrorist attack and the person who’ll carry it out, is laughably preposterous.  Branagh juggles the various elements to good effect but thanks to the script’s holding back, he can’t quite make things as exciting as they should be.

Pine is okay as the newest Ryan on the block, his youth and inexperience played to good effect until he’s required to don the mantle of action hero.  Knightley takes the generic girlfriend role and manages to make it interesting, though she’s hampered by the script’s reluctance to include her character as anything more than attractive window-dressing (it’ll be interesting to see if she returns for any sequels).  As the equally generic villain, Branagh fares better as the patriot willing to sacrifice anything to humble the West, but it’s Costner, experiencing a bit of a career revival at the moment, who fares the best.  He gives a quiet, unshowy performance that adds some much-needed gravitas to the proceedings, and he dominates each scene he appears in.

Rating: 7/10 – as a reboot, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit shows too much restraint on the action front, and has a plot that is too underwhelming for its own good (even if it does sound a credible threat); if there is a sequel it will need to take some bigger steps if it’s going to compete with the Bonds and the Bournes of this world.