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thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: Nicholas Hoult

Monthly Roundup – March 2017

01 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Adventure, Alistair Sim, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Bette Davis, Brie Larson, Charlie Day, Collide, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Dougray Scott, Drama, Eran Creevy, Eugenio Ercolani, Felicity Jones, Fist Fight, Gordon Harker, Guiliano Emanuele, Horror, I.T., Ice Cube, Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It, Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday, James Cagney, James Frecheville, Jimmy the Gent, John Moore, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Kong: Skull Island, Michael Curtiz, Mystery, Nicholas Hoult, Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D'Amato, Pierce Brosnan, Review, Richie Keen, Samuel L. Jackson, Steve Barker, The Rezort, Tom Hiddleston, Walter Forde, Zombies

Fist Fight (2017) / D: Richie Keen / 91m

Cast: Ice Cube, Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell, Dean Norris, Christina Hendricks, Kumail Nanjiani, Dennis Haysbert, JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Alexa Nisenson

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Bell’s character wants to have sex with a pupil – and doesn’t think it’s wrong), Fist Fight is a virtually laugh-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

I.T. (2016) / D: John Moore / 95m

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, James Frecheville, Anna Friel, Stefanie Scott, Michael Nyqvist

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Brosnan’s character is a tech mogul who doesn’t know the first thing about the tech he’s promoting), I.T. is a virtually tension-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

Collide (2016) / D: Eran Creevy / 99m

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Felicity Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Marwan Kenzari, Aleksandar Jovanovic, Christian Rubeck, Erdal Yildiz, Clemens Schick, Johnny Palmiero

Rating: 6/10 – Hoult’s backpacker finds himself mixed up with rival gangsters Hopkins and Kingsley, and using his driving skills to stay one step ahead of both of them; the focus is squarely on the action, which is a good thing, as Collide‘s plot is as all over the place as the various cars Hoult throws about on German autobahns, but when it’s bad it’s Hopkins intoning “I’m the destroyer of worlds” bad.

Jimmy the Gent (1934) / D: Michael Curtiz / 67m

Cast: James Cagney, Bette Davis, Allen Jenkins, Alan Dinehart, Alice White, Arthur Hohl, Mayo Methot

Rating: 7/10 – in an effort to woo back his former secretary (Davis), Cagney’s brash racketeer attempts to put a classier spin on his finding “lost” heirs business, and finds himself mellowing when a case challenges his compromised ethics; worth watching just for the pairing of Cagney and Davis, Jimmy the Gent is a typically fast-paced, razor sharp romantic comedy that may seem predictable nowadays but is nevertheless a minor gem that is effortlessly entertaining.

Kong: Skull Island (2017) / D: Jordan Vogt-Roberts / 118m

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Thomas Mann, Corey Hawkins, Toby Kebbell, Tian Jing, John Ortiz, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Richard Jenkins, Terry Notary

Rating: 5/10 – an expedition to a mysterious island in the Pacific yields dangers galore for its participants – Jackson’s crazed Army Colonel, Hiddleston’s ex-SAS captain, Larson’s anti-war photographer, Goodman’s duplicitous government official et al – not the least of which is an angry hundred-foot gorilla called Kong; while Kong: Skull Island may be visually arresting, and its action sequences pleasingly vivid, the lack of a decent plot and characters with any kind of inner life makes the movie yet another franchise-building letdown.

The Rezort (2015) / D: Steve Barker / 93m

Cast: Dougray Scott, Jessica De Gouw, Martin McCann, Elen Rhys, Claire Goose, Jassa Ahluwalia, Lawrence Walker

Rating: 4/10 – after a viral outbreak that turned its victims into flesh-hungry zombies is contained, an island resort opens that offers survivors the chance to hunt down and exterminate zombies with little or no risk of harm – but the resort is targeted from the inside and a group of holiday makers find themselves becoming the hunted; a strong idea that runs out of steam by the halfway mark, The Rezort leaves its cast stranded with a standard “run from this place to the next and look desperate” approach that drains the movie of any tension and makes it all look as generic as the next zombie movie.

Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday (1939) / D: Walter Forde / 90m

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Linden Travers, Wally Patch, Edward Chapman, Philip Leaver, Kynaston Reeves

Rating: 7/10 – a seaside holiday for Inspector Hornleigh (Harker) and his trusty sidekick, Sergeant Bingham (Sim), leads inevitably to a murder case involving an inheritance and a criminal outfit who target their victims with the unwitting aid of döppelgangers; the second of three movies featuring Harker’s irascible policeman and Sim’s less-than-sharp second-in-command, Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday is a simple, easy-going, undemanding bit of fun that manages to combine drama and comedy to good effect, and which still holds up nearly eighty years later.

Inspector Hornleigh Gets on It (1941) / D: Walter Forde / 87m

aka Mail Train

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Phyllis Calvert, Edward Chapman, Charles Oliver, Raymond Huntley, Percy Walsh, David Horne

Rating: 7/10 – despite being sidelined from regular detective work through a stint investigating thefts at an army barracks, Hornleigh and Bingham find themselves on the trail of Fifth Columnists; the last in the short-lived series, Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It is as sprightly and entertaining as the previous two instalments, and allows Huntley to make this priceless observation: “One of them’s tall, bald, looks intelligent but isn’t. The other’s short, sour-faced, doesn’t look intelligent but is.”

Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato (2017) / D: Eugenio Ercolani, Guiliano Emanuele / 69m

With: Joe D’Amato (archive footage), Luigi Montefiori, Michele Soavi, Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi, Antonio Tentori, Carlo Maria Cordio, Mark Thompson-Ashworth

Rating: 3/10 – Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D’Amato)’s career in movies is assessed by some of the people who worked with him closely when he first started out; at sixty-nine minutes, Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato is a documentary that feels like it lasts twice as long, thanks to Ercolani and Emanuele’s decision to let their interviewees ramble on at length (and usually about themselves instead of D’Amato), and a random assortment of clips that don’t always illustrate what’s being talked about.

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Trailers – Yoga Hosers (2016), Can We Take a Joke? (2016) and Collide (2016)

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Can We Take a Joke?, Collide, Felicity Jones, Kevin Smith, Nicholas Hoult, Previews, Trailers, Yoga Hosers

Watching the trailer for Yoga Hosers, the latest from Kevin Smith, is akin to hearing a long joke with every third sentence left out. You get the idea what’s being said is funny, you know you’re being told a joke so you’re waiting for the punchline (hopefully it’s not in one of those third sentences being left out), and the person telling you the joke is very funny to begin with, so the joke should also be funny – right? And yet, as the joke’s being told you start to get the idea that, actually, it’s not going to be very funny, and that maybe any humour in the joke is in the way it’s being told. Or maybe it’s just not a very good joke in the first place. That’s the idea with Yoga Hosers, whose trailer makes it look like there’s tons of humour in the movie, but at the same makes the movie look like it’s trying too hard to be wacky (oh look – there’s Johnny Depp “in disguise” again!). Smith doesn’t lack for confidence but his scripts aren’t always as water-tight as he might think (“So much nein it’s almost ten”?), and on this evidence he might be in for a mauling from both critics and audiences. Let’s hope not, though, because Smith is always one of cinema’s most idiosyncratic movie makers, and he’s not afraid to take chances; and that’s a good thing.

 

Staying with humour, the documentary Can We Take a Joke? looks at where comedians draw the line (if some of them ever do), and how they can justify stepping over it. In these days of instant outrage fuelled by social media platforms such as Twitter and  Facebook, it’s harder than ever to fly under the radar with a joke, particularly if it’s in response to a recent tragedy, but should comedians be constrained in such a way that an audience is effectively censoring them before they even step out on stage (or through whatever medium they’re broadcasting)? There are arguments for and against, and however you feel about jokes that may cause offence, this exploration of what “offensive” means looks certain to provoke a wider debate, even if it’s only for a short while until somebody else says or does something that the Take Offence brigade objects to.

 

In recent years, Felicity Jones and Nicholas Hoult have both built on their emerging careers to the point where their presence in a movie is something of a guarantee of quality. They’re also both very likeable, have very good screen presence, and franchise experiences aside, have made some very interesting choices in the past. And now we have them appearing in Collide, an action thriller that looks like any number of other action thrillers made in recent years, and also looks like it features the same clichéd character motivations we’ve seen over and over before. The presence of Anthony Hopkins in principal villain mode is not a good sign – hands up anyone who can remember the last decent performance Hopkins gave us – and the sight of Ben Kingsley hamming it up to eleven isn’t encouraging either, but the stunt work appears to be the key element, and in that respect the trailer does make the movie worth seeing just for the vehicular mayhem alone. One to see with low expectations then, and the hope that Jones and Hoult can rescue some of the movie with their performances.

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X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Action, Angel, Apocalypse, Beast, Bryan Singer, Cyclops, Drama, Evan Peters, Havok, James McAvoy, Jean Grey, Jennifer Lawrence, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magneto, Marvel, Michael Fassbender, Mutants, Mystique, Nicholas Hoult, Nightcrawler, Oscar Isaac, Professor Xavier, Psylocke, Quicksilver, Review, Rose Byrne, School for Gifted Children, Sci-fi, Sequel, Storm, Superheroes, Thriller, X-Men

X-Men Apocalypse

D: Bryan Singer / 144m

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne, Evan Peters, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lucas Till, Olivia Munn, Ben Hardy, Alexandra Shipp, Josh Helman, Ally Sheedy

It’s okay.

Rating: 6/10 – an average sequel that offers a muddled storyline complete with yet more disaster porn, the best thing you can say about X-Men: Apocalypse is that it’s competently made; without a strong emotional core to help the audience care about the characters, or a real sense of impending apocalypse to make the stakes all the more gripping, this is a sequel that fails to build on the good work achieved in the previous two instalments.

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Kill Your Friends (2015)

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Black comedy, Blackmail, Craig Roberts, Drama, Drugs, Ed Skrein, Georgia King, James Corden, John Niven, Junkie XL, Literary adaptation, Murder, Music industry, Nicholas Hoult, Owen Harris, Review, Unigram

Kill Your Friends

D: Owen Harris / 103m

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Craig Roberts, Georgia King, Joseph Mawle, Edward Hogg, Tom Riley, Jim Piddock, James Corden, Ed Skrein, Rosanna Arquette, Moritz Bleibtreu, Dustin Demri-Burns, Osy Ikhile, Ella Smith

For a movie that’s set in 1997 and focuses on an ambitious A&R man, Kill Your Friends actually has little to do with the music of the time (except when it comes to its soundtrack), and instead creates its own musicians and bands for the audience to groove to. It’s a curious thing to experience, that such a movie would choose to ignore the music that was around at the time, especially when there was so many good records out there. ’97 was the year that The Verve gave us their Bitter Sweet Symphony, Chumbawamba were Tubthumping, Natalie Imbruglia was Torn, and Elton John reworked Candle in the Wind in tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. But Kill Your Friends operates in a bubble of its own making, restricting itself to a narrow musical world where the deal is all important and not the music, and the means absolutely justifies the end.

That the world of the A&R man is a cutthroat world where everyone is out to succeed at the expense of everyone else shouldn’t come as any surprise, but the movie is often grindingly obvious in its approach to this idea, and the level to which it takes this idea is often glaringly excessive. The movie’s anti-hero, Steven Stelfox (Hoult), is determined to get to the top and he’s not too worried how he gets there. When we first meet him he’s in the company of fellow A&R man Waters (Corden), snorting cocaine and mixing drug-fuelled cocktails in an attempt to render his colleague either dead or too far gone to function. (Sadly for Steven, Waters’ ability to ingest hard drugs and still come to work the next day is quite impressive.)

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With record deals to be made and hits to be manufactured, Steven takes a young talent scout called Darren (Roberts) under his wing, and starts to teach him how to get ahead in the music business. But Steven’s idea of “teaching” consists of constant reminders that no one knows anything (as in the movie industry?), and to misquote Sparks, that “talent isn’t an asset”. When an old friend of Steven’s, Rent (Skrein), introduces him to the girl band he’s managing, it’s no surprise that they’re four tuneless, talentless wannabes, manufactured into producing a “surprise” number one record. It’s at moments like these that the satire slaps the viewer in the face and yells, “Did you see what we did there? Did you?” If the movie wasn’t so tiresome and cynical, the viewer wouldn’t be either.

As Steven connives and manipulates and eventually murders his way to the top, the movie does its best to get the audience to root for him, but it’s not actually possible. Despite Hoult’s best efforts to make him likeable, Steven is a crude caricature of a man, his better qualities stifled to the point of non-existence and lacking any kind of moral attributes – however deeply buried – for the viewer to latch onto. He’s an ambitious, soulless, predatory, evil-minded bastard, a lower-tier monster who doesn’t deserve to make it to the top, or gain our attention. There’s a moment when he’s talking to a band in a club and they’re asking him what will happen if they sign with his record company. For around thirty seconds Steven regales them with the various ways in which he and his company will abuse and mistreat them, and then spit them out when they’re no longer viable. It’s meant to be funny and disturbingly honest all at the same time, but instead it’s another heavy-handed example of what we already know: that in the music industry you should always beware: because you’re swimming with sharks. (And, predictably, it’s all a dream sequence.)

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With the movie lacking subtlety or appreciable flair throughout, there’s little beyond the traditional topics of sex and drugs and work envy to get excited about. Owen Harris’s direction consists of throwing the characters into sharp relief, such as when Steven’s PA, the equally ambitious Rebecca (King), blackmails him into helping her reach the top. It’s not exactly a surprise – this movie doesn’t do surprises – and most viewers will have been waiting for her to drop the faithful servant routine, but as one of the few characters we can have some sympathy for (at least to start with), her transformation into calculating co-conspirator smacks of laziness on the part of John Niven (here adapting his own novel).

With so much amoral, yet banal behaviour going on, it’s amazing then that the movie retains as much energy as it does, claiming the viewer’s undivided attention from time to time (often in its club scenes) and using said energy to push the rest of the scenes through in a kind of bizarre version of cinematic life support. There are also sporadic moments of humour, but none memorable enough to help the movie overall, and certainly not enough to help erase the memory of Edward Hogg’s dumb-as-a-bag-of-nails policeman, a character so brain-curdlingly simplistic in his creation that he’s not even of the rank of caricature.

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But what of the music itself? As created by Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg), the original songs are the movie’s best feature, an apropos mix of Nineties indie vitality and modern day stylings, anthemic when necessary, and completely free of any relevance to the story or the plot. You could take each tune and play it in a club or music venue and attract people’s attention. It’s the same here, and leads the viewer to wonder if there’s a cut of the movie where every scene takes place in a club or at a concert. But anyone paying attention will appreciate the dichotomy of what the movie is saying, that the music isn’t important, that it’s the last element of the deal that’s taken into consideration, but thanks to Mr Holkenborg and his “killer” tunes, it’s a boast that Kill Your Friends gets spectacularly wrong.

Rating: 4/10 – if you’re going to make a movie about the cutthroat nature of the music industry, then it’s important that your characters are at least halfway relatable – a point that Kill Your Friends ignores deliberately – otherwise it will look and sound like the naïve fantasy of a teenager; with thematic nods to American Psycho (2000) that are awkward and misjudged, this is a movie that skimps on the pleasantries and drags the viewer through a mire of its own choosing, and without ever offering said viewer any reward for the experience.

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Dark Places (2015)

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

1985, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christina Hendricks, Corey Stoll, Crime, Drama, Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Gillian Flynn, Kansas, Literary adaptation, Murder, Nicholas Hoult, Review, Satanism, The Kill Club

Dark Places

D: Gilles Paquet-Brenner / 113m

Cast: Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Christina Hendricks, Tye Sheridan, Chloë Grace Moretz, Corey Stoll, Sterling Jerins, Sean Bridgers, Andrea Roth, Shannon Kook, Drea de Matteo

In 1985, in a small rural community in Kansas, a single mother and two of her daughters are all killed one night at their farmhouse; later, the surviving daughter, Libby (Jerins), tells the police her brother Ben (Sheridan) did it. After his arrest and during his trial, Ben offers no defence and he’s sent to prison for the rest of his life.

In 2015, the adult Libby (Theron) is down on her luck and counting on her minor celebrity status to keep her afloat. When she’s contacted by Lyle Wirth (Hoult) with the offer of $500 for a speaking engagement, she arranges to meet with him first. Lyle tells her he belongs to a group called The Kill Club, an organisation of volunteers who look into old unsolved murders, or cases where they believe an innocent person has been put in jail. She attends one of their meetings and finds that several members believe Ben didn’t commit the murders, and Libby finds herself challenged over her version of events that night. Angry at first, Libby agrees to help the group look into the  case, and begins her own investigation alongside theirs.

Lyle convinces her to visit her brother, something she’s never done. Ben (Stoll) is happy to see her, but Libby’s resentment of him means the visit goes badly. Back in her hometown she tries to find her father, Runner (Bridgers), who abandoned them when she was much younger. She also looks into the possibility of Ben having been part of a Satanic cult at the time, and why a young girl named Krissi Cates is relevant to what happened. As she learns more and more, she discovers Ben had a girlfriend called Diondra (Moretz). With Lyle’s help, Libby begins to put all the pieces together, and finds that what she believed happened all those years ago is far more complicated than she could ever imagined – and the repercussions of those events are still being played out in the present.

Dark Places - scene

Adapted from the novel by Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl, Dark Places is a murder mystery where what appears to be a simple, unexplainable crime proves to be something a lot more complicated and strange, and with a bewildering set of coincidences that make up the solution to the murders. Paquet-Brenner’s adaptation keeps the narrative skipping backwards and forwards between 1985 and 2015, showing us the events that led to the murders in 1985, and linking these scenes to the discoveries Libby makes in the present. As the story gradually unfolds, and we see the drama that played out in the past, we gain a greater understanding of the whys and hows that govern the actions of Libby and those people who were involved.

It’s a delicate balancing act at times, with the structure dictating that there be some degree of repetition throughout, as what we see in the past is explained in the future. Thankfully, Paquet-Brenner avoids such a hazard by making each new discovery as confusing as the last, and by throwing in so many suspects it almost seems as if the entire community could have done it. As Libby’s investigation leads to some unsavoury truths and revelations, the director makes it clear that her memories of that night have always been tainted, but to what degree she and the audience have to find out for themselves.

The dark places of the title are the ones we go to in our minds when we contemplate issues of murder and perceived guilt. The movie explores these avenues via the adult Libby’s increasingly fractured certainty that Ben killed his mother and sisters. And while the script plants a very big clue early on as to what really happened, it’s more concerned with the various ways in which we, through Libby, justify our actions and sense of culpability. Libby is tormented by having not been able to do anything to stop Ben, but as his innocence becomes more and more likely, her own assertions (the ones that have carried her through all these years) begin to crumble and she’s faced with the daunting prospect that her testimony condemned her brother to prison for the rest of his life.

But it proves not to be so simple. Ben has his own reasons for staying quiet, and so we, like Libby, have to seek answers in those dark places mentioned already. Thanks to a tight, focused script, and a clutch of telling performances, the movie shifts and turns with every passing minute, making it more and more difficult to work out what actually happened. Theron is impressive as the outwardly angry but internally uncomfortable Libby, her strained features and abrasive attitude in keeping with a survivor who only has her celebrity to keep her going; without it she’d be aimless (another reason why she agrees to help the Kill Club). As Lyle, Hoult brings a determined optimism to the role that offsets and complements Libby’s antagonistic approach, while Hendricks stands out as the harried mother struggling to keep her home and family together in the face of impending financial ruin. With more than able support from the likes of Sheridan, Moretz and de Matteo as the older Krissi, Dark Places succeeds in making each character credible, even when they’re sometimes asked to behave in ways that don’t make sense until the final reveal.

To add to the effectiveness of the script, the acting and Paquet-Brenner’s solid, unshowy direction, the movie is filmed in a gloomy, downlit style by DoP Barry Ackroyd, his compositions and framing illustrating proceedings with confidence and giving scenes an eerie quality that makes it seem that there’s other, stranger stuff we should know about happening just out of frame. With a running time that allows more than sufficient time to detailing events in both time periods, and a score by Gregory Tripi that subtly adds a level of foreboding to the material, Dark Places is an intelligent thriller that holds the attention and makes for avid viewing.

Rating: 8/10 – riveting in a sombre, calculated way, Dark Places maintains its gloomy, oppressive mise en scene to good effect throughout, and makes its audience work hard to solve the mystery; a better than average adaptation that showcases another fine performance from Theron, and flits between the past and the present with assured clarity and focus.

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Mini-Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

18 Monday May 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Action, Australia, Charlize Theron, Chase, Drama, George Miller, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Immortan Joe, Imperator Furiosa, Max Rockatansky, Nicholas Hoult, Nux, Review, Sequel, Thriller, Tom Hardy, Water

Mad Max Fury Road

D: George Miller / 120m

Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Josh Helman, Nathan Jones, Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton, John Howard, Richard Carter

Captured by men under the command of Outback warlord Immortan Joe (Keays-Byrne), Max Rockatansky (Hardy) is held prisoner in the Citadel, Joe’s fortress hideout. When one of Joe’s lieutenants, Imperator Furiosa (Theron), helps five of Joe’s “brides” escape, Joe sends everyone after her, including Nux (Hoult), a war boy with little experience and who’s been given Max as a “blood bag”. Forced to take Max with him in the pursuit, Nux catches up to Furiosa, who is driving a large petrol tanker. He and some of the other war boys attempt to stop Furiosa, but are unsuccessful. And in the melee, Max – who was chained to the front of Nux’s vehicle – frees himself and joins the fleeing women.

Quickly earning their trust, and still being pursued by Immortan Joe, Max learns that they are heading for the “Green Place”, where Furiosa was born; there they will be safe and able to live freely. Joe succeeds in catching up to them and in their efforts to elude him, one of the brides is killed. They manage to get away from him and further along the way, they meet up with a band of women called the Vuvalini. The women plan to carry on across a vast salt flat but with no guarantee that they’ll reach the other side alive. Instead, Max convinces them to go back the way they came, through Joe’s forces, and take the Citadel from him while it’s undefended.

Mad Max Fury Road - scene

Let’s get the superlatives out of the way, shall we? Thrilling, exciting, stirring, incredible, jaw-dropping, amazing, breathtaking, magnificent, gripping, mind-blowing, superb… the list goes on and on. Thirty years on from the frankly disappointing Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), George Miller has returned to the barren future world inhabited by Max Rockatansky, and he’s come up with one of the best action movies you’ll see for some time to come. Mad Max: Fury Road is simply stunning, from John Seale’s exquisite cinematography, to Jason Ballantine and Margaret Sixel’s impressive editing techniques, to Jenny Beavan’s wonderfully expressive costume design, the movie has all this and more going for it, and in a year with so many action thrillers coming our way, will prove very hard to beat.

It’s a major triumph for Miller, hewing to a simple formula: don’t let up on the pace and don’t let up on the mayhem. There are some astonishing stunts performed in this movie, and they leave the viewer open mouthed in admiration for the various stunt teams who put all this together, and also for the sensational vehicles that have been designed and created (and endlessly destroyed). The cast are impressive as well, and if Theron steals the movie it’s mainly because Miller has amped up Max’s taciturn nature and made him more of a physical presence than an intellectual one. But everyone’s a winner, not least the audience, and this is one movie that deserves every plaudit coming its way.

Rating: 9/10 – with not an animated penguin in sight, George Miller returns to doing what he’s always done best: providing the kind of over-the-top, automobile anarchy that has the viewer watching with undisguised awe; filmed with undeniable passion – and with a lovely nod to Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) – Mad Max: Fury Road is a cause for joy and exultation, and is possibly the only time a fourth movie in a franchise has proven to be the best of the series.

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