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Triple Frontier (2019)

16 Saturday Mar 2019

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D: J.C. Chandor / 125m

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal, Adria Arjona, Sheila Vand, Reynaldo Gallegos, Maddy Wary, Juan Camilo Castillo

While working as a private military advisor combating a drug cartel in Colombia, Santiago “Pope” Garcia (Isaac) learns that the head of the cartel, Lorea (Gallegos), keeps all his money at a safe house in the middle of the jungle. Instead of passing on this information to the authorities, Pope returns to the US to recruit four friends, all ex-Special Forces, for a mission to grab the money for themselves. Each of his friends has a reason for going: Tom “Redfly” Davis (Affleck) is a realtor with financial problems; William “Ironhead” Miller (Hunnam) is a motivational speaker who misses being a part of the military; his brother, Ben (Hedlund), is an MMA fighter who’ll follow wherever Ironhead goes; and Francisco “Catfish” Morales (Pascal) is a pilot whose licence has been withdrawn. They reconnoitre Lorea’s jungle hideout, and determine to raid the place on a Sunday morning when his family and most of his men will be at church. Although Ironhead is wounded, the raid is a success, and they get away with around $250 million in cash. Now all they have to do is stay alive long enough to make it back home…

Triple Frontier‘s production history is in some ways more interesting than the finished movie. Originally set to star Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, and with Kathryn Bigelow directing, delays since 2010 meant that it wasn’t until 2015 that Chandor came aboard and added his own input to Mark Boal’s original screenplay. With Channing Tatum and Tom Hardy having replaced Hanks and Depp at that stage, Mahershala Ali was added to the cast before all three dropped out, and Affleck et al signed on (Affleck even quit the project himself for a while before shooting began). With all this in mind, it’s interesting to re-imagine the movie with those actors in the main roles – and realise that the right choices were made in the end. For though Triple Frontier is ultimately an uneven movie that puts itself in danger of losing its audience’s interest in the final third, its the strength of its final casting that makes the movie so effective. With impressive performances from all concerned – Affleck is particularly good as the morally ambiguous Redfly – the movie plays well when it’s concerned with issues of camaraderie and masculinity (both supportive and toxic), and in showing the levels of trust these men have in each other, even when things are going wrong and blaming each other is a natural response.

The relationships the five men have form the core of the movie, and give it an emotional resonance that most action thrillers never attempt let alone achieve. And Chandor ensures that it’s not all about the money, but more about how all of them except Pope miss being a part of the action. These are men who’ve lost their sense of purpose, their identities now they’re back in the real world, and when the movie focuses on this, it does so perceptively and persuasively. But this is also an action thriller, and for the first two thirds a very accomplished one, with Chandor staging an opening attack on a cartel building with verve and skill, and the raid on Lorea’s house like a chess match with rifles instead of pieces. But then comes the getaway, and though there’s already the sense that it won’t be as smooth and well planned as hoped for, where Chandor and Boal take Redfly and the others leads to a number of surprisingly flat scenes that lack energy and pace, and which feel like the dictionary definition of padding. As a result, a moment of tragedy lacks the impact it should have, and the movie struggles through to an ending that doesn’t carry the dramatic weight that’s expected. Still, it’s a good movie, for the most part, and Chandor continues to show why he’s one of the best directors working today, but this has to be regarded as something of a disappointment.

Rating: 7/10 – as a three-act narrative with both prologue and epilogue, Triple Frontier is only effective up until the end of the second act, when different forces come into play and the focus shifts from being about five men regaining their sense of purpose in the world, and becomes a generic tale of survival against low odds; with ambitions beyond the standard heist movie, it’s a shame then that those ambitions weren’t as well thought out and worked through as they needed to be.

Monthly Roundup – August 2018

31 Friday Aug 2018

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Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016) / D: Mandie Fletcher / 91m

Cast: Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, Jane Horrocks, June Whitfield, Kathy Burke, Celia Imrie, Robert Webb, Lulu, Emma Bunton, Rebel Wilson, Barry Humphries, Wanda Ventham, Kate Moss

Rating: 3/10 – fashionistas Edina (Saunders) and Patsy (Lumley) flee to the south of France after thinking they’ve killed supermodel Kate Moss; making this yet another British TV comedy success story that goes badly, horribly wrong when transferred to the big screen, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is another reminder that humour needs context in which to work, and rehashing the same old jokes over and over is less about giving fans what they want and more about lazy screenwriting.

Revenge (2017) / D: Coralie Fargeat / 108m

Cast: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchéde

Rating: 7/10 – a married CEO (Janssens) takes his mistress (Lutz) along with him on a hunting weekend with two friends (Colombe, Bouchéde), but things go badly wrong, and all three men find themselves being hunted instead; a visceral and very, very bloody thriller, Revenge is relentlessly nihilistic, and with characters so broadly drawn they might as well be archetypes, but Fargeat makes good use of the desert landscapes, and Lutz is a resourceful and unapologetically violent heroine.

Incredibles 2 (2018) / D: Brad Bird / 118m

Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Huck Milner, Bob Odenkirk, Catherine Keener, Samuel L. Jackson, Brad Bird, Isabella Rossellini, Jonathan Banks, John Ratzenberger

Rating: 9/10 – when a successful businessman (Odenkirk) approaches the Parr family with a plan to have Supers allowed to use their super powers again, it proves to be good timing as a new super villain, the Screenslaver, makes himself known; following directly on from the original, Incredibles 2 retains the Sixties vibe, visual ingenuity, and genuine laughs from before, and continues to focus on the Parr family first and foremost, making this a hugely entertaining sequel – even if the villain (as in a lot of superhero movies) is the movie’s weakest link.

Sicario 2: Soldado (2018) / D: Stefano Sollima / 122m

Original title: Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner, Jeffrey Donovan, Catherine Keener, Manuel Garcia-Ruffo, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham, Elijah Rodriguez

Rating: 7/10 – Federal agent Matt Graver (Brolin) is tasked with taking the fight to the Mexican drug cartels when evidence points to their helping terrorists get into the US; an odd sequel that goes off in an unexpected direction partway through (and which sets up what’s likely to be a banal third chapter), Sicario 2: Soldado is still head and shoulders above most action thrillers thanks to returning scribe Taylor Sheridan’s taut screenplay, Del Toro’s singular performance as the Sicario of the title, and a handful of well choreographed action scenes.

Terrifier (2017) / D: Damien Leone / 84m

Cast: Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, David Howard Thornton, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister, Katie Maguire

Rating: 4/10 – one night, two young women (Kanell, Scaffidi) find themselves being pursued by a killer clown (Thornton) intent on murdering them and anyone they come into contact with – and as gruesomely as possible; old school practical gore effects are the order of the day here, with Terrifier using every trick in the book to make viewers wince or look away, while building a fair amount of tension, but it’s let down by the usual non-investment in credible characters, lacklustre direction, and making its villain indestructible.

Tomb Raider (2018) / D: Roar Uthaug / 118m

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Kristen Scott Thomas, Derek Jacobi, Hannah John-Kamen

Rating: 6/10 – Lara Croft (Vikander) sets off in search of her missing father (West) when she discovers a clue to where he went missing, while looking for an ancient artefact that could have devastating consequences for the modern world; another unnecessary reboot, Tomb Raider tries hard – sometimes too hard – to make its by-the-numbers storyline exciting, but too many perfunctory action sequences, allied to so-so performances and Uthaug’s corporate directing style makes this an unlikely contender as the opener for a whole new franchise.

Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) / D: Steven S. DeKnight / 111m

Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Callee Spaeny, Burn Gorman, Charlie Day, Tian Jing, Jin Zhang, Adria Arjona, Rinko Kikuchi

Rating: 5/10 – a new threat to Earth’s defences brings the Jaeger force back into operation, but they soon find themselves fighting against a foe whose plans don’t just involve the Jaeger force’s destruction, but the return of the Kaiju as well; there’s an element of dumb fun about Pacific Rim: Uprising that keeps things ticking over, but though DeKnight is able to provide a decent amount of energy to proceedings, the looming threat to Earth lacks the first movie’s effectiveness, and the Kaiju arrive too late to improve things.

The Death Cure (2018) / D: Wes Ball / 141m

aka Maze Runner: The Death Cure

Cast: Dylan O’Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ki Hong Lee, Dexter Darden, Will Poulter, Jacob Lofland, Rosa Salazar, Giancarlo Esposito, Patricia Clarkson, Aidan Gillen, Barry Pepper, Walton Goggins

Rating: 8/10 – with their friends imprisoned in the Last City, a WCKD stronghold, Thomas (O’Brien) and his fellow Gladers must find a way of freeing them, and of finding a cure for the Flare, before it’s too late; the final part of the Maze Runner trilogy, The Death Cure ensures the series goes out with a bang, with high octane action sequences, a strong emotional undercurrent to proceedings, and though it’s a little bit too long, it does provide each of the main characters with a suitable and satisfactory conclusion to their story arcs, and doesn’t leave things hanging on the possibility of there being any further chapters.

The Angry Birds Movie (2016) / D: Clay Kaytis, Fergal Reilly / 97m

Original title: Angry Birds

Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, Peter Dinklage, Sean Penn, Keegan Michael-Key, Kate McKinnon, Tony Hale, Hannibal Buress, Ike Barinholtz, Tituss Burgess

Rating: 6/10 – trouble comes to an island of (mostly) happy birds in the form of green pigs who aren’t quite as friendly as they seem, leaving the unlikely trio of Red (Sudeikis), Chuck (Gad), and Bomb (McBride) to save the day; a brightly animated game adaptation that will appeal to children far more than adults, The Angry Birds Movie is acceptable fun within the confines of its basic storyline, but the humour is inconsistent, the plot developments seem designed to pad things out instead of feeling organic, and the whole thing becomes less interesting as it goes on.

The Equalizer 2 (2018) / D: Antoine Fuqua / 121m

Cast: Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Orson Bean, Bill Pullman, Melissa Leo

Rating: 6/10 – ex-spy Robert McCall (Washington) goes after the people responsible for the murder of his ex-boss (Leo), and finds himself up against a cadre of mercenaries with a similar skill-set; Washington’s first sequel, The Equalizer 2 is unremarkable at best and unnecessary at worst, with a banal storyline and cookie cutter character motivations that are offset by Fuqua’s authoritative direction, Washington’s commanding performance, and several very effective fight sequences.

Selfie from Hell (2018) / D: Erdal Ceylan / 76m

Cast: Alyson Walker, Tony Giroux, Meelah Adams, Ian Butcher

Rating: 3/10 – strange paranormal events that have a connection to the Dark Web begin to affect a young woman (Walker) when her cousin (Adams) comes to visit; even for its modest running time, Selfie from Hell soon outwears its welcome, thanks to its confused plotting, wayward acting, leaden direction, and meaningless frights, all of which add up to yet another horror movie where things happen because they can instead of because they make sense within the terms of the story.

Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost (2018) / D: Doug Murphy / 77m

Cast: Frank Welker, Grey Griffin, Matthew Lillard, Kate Micucci, Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis, Marcus Samuelsson, David Kaye, Dana Snyder, Jason Spisak

Rating: 7/10 – the Mystery Gang travel to Bar Harbour to help Fred’s Uncle Bobby deal with a ghost that’s jeopardising the opening of a culinary resort; the format and the jokes are all present and correct, making Scooby-Doo! and the Gourmet Ghost another satisfying entry in the series, but it’s also one that highlights just how predictable these movies are becoming.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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D: Matthew Vaughn / 141m

Cast: Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Taron Egerton, Mark Strong, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, Edward Holcroft, Hanna Alström, Bruce Greenwood, Emily Watson, Elton John, Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges, Poppy Delevingne, Sophie Cookson, Michael Gambon

When Kingsman: The Secret Service hit our screens back in 2014, its anarchic sense of fun and willingness to push the boundaries of good taste (exploding heads, anyone?) made it stand out from the crowd, and introduced us to Colin Firth the action hero. It was smart, it was savvy, it was funny, and its action sequences, especially that astounding sequence set in a Kentucky church, showed that well choreographed fight scenes could still impress and leave jaws dropped everywhere. A sequel may have been in some initial doubt – writer/director Vaughn wasn’t sure the first movie would be successful enough to warrant a second outing – but now it’s here, and it’s a very mixed bag indeed.

As a sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle adheres to the formula for a follow-up to an unexpectedly successful movie in that it goes bigger, brings back its original stars and gives them less to do, references its predecessor in some ways that are good and some ways that aren’t, introduces a group of new characters that the audience aren’t allowed to connect with, and extends the running time unnecessarily. It’s as if Vaughn and returning co-screenwriter Jane Goldman have heard the phrase, “Give ’em what they want, and then give ’em more” and taken it to heart. But there are too many elements that clash with each other, and the movie never maintains a consistent tone. Also, that anarchic sense of fun that the first movie carried off so well, here feels awkward and somewhat laboured, and we have yet another villain with a goofy personality who’s just plain misunderstood (Moore’s over-achieving cartel boss wants to be recognised for her “business acumen”).

Of course, any sequel that seeks to revive a character who appeared to be killed in the first movie, has to tread carefully in how it brings them back; this may be a world far removed from our own reality, but even in fantasy land, death means dead and gone. Vaughn and Goldman have come up with an ingenious idea that makes sense within the confines of the world that Kingsman operates within, but the fact that in terms of the plot a year has passed and Harry (Firth) is still suffering from amnesia and the Kingsmen haven’t been told he’s alive, is just one of the larger plot holes that pepper the script and make you think that while Vaughn has been reported as saying that “writing this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”, it soon becomes obvious that he needed to try a bit harder. Perhaps the biggest question that goes unanswered, is why villain of the piece Poppy Adams (Moore) takes out the Kingsmen in the first place. Without even a throwaway line to clear up the matter, viewers could be forgiven for thinking that it was important to the plot, and it is, but only as a way of introducing their American cousins, the Statesmen.

Cue a lot of cool new gadgets, the presence of franchise newbies Tatum, Berry, Pascal, and Bridges (seemingly the only people who work for Statesman – until the end, that is), a side trip to the Glastonbury Music Festival that actually includes a scene where Eggsy (Egerton) asks his girlfriend, Tilde (Alström), if she’s okay with him having sex with another woman (Delevingne), the sorry spectacle of Elton John having been persuaded to send up his image from the Seventies and encased in ever more ridiculous stage outfits (he’s been kidnapped by Poppy – of course), a physics defying stunt involving a cable car that at least has the benefit of a terrific one-liner as its pay-off, Harry being cured of his retrograde amnesia but still seeing butterflies (don’t ask), Poppy’s robot attack dogs Bennie and Jet (geddit?), and several plot threads that are left dangling like so much silly string.

There’s more, a lot more, but if there’s one area where the movie lets itself, and the audience, down, it’s with a disastrous sub-plot involving the US President (Greenwood) and his so-called “war on drugs”. Poppy’s plan is to infect the millions of addicts who use her drugs with a deadly chemical that will kill them. Unless the President agrees to her demand to make all drugs legal, then she’ll withhold the antidote. Publicly, the President appears to agree to her terms, but privately he has no intention of saving anyone, reasoning that if all the drug addicts in the world are dead, then illegal drugs will become a thing of the past because there’ll be no one around to take them. There is a twisted sense of logic there – barely – and it could have been made to sound semi-plausible, but the President’s flippant, couldn’t-care-less attitude seems more of a rebuke to the current real-life incumbent than any properly considered character design. And leading on from the President’s decision, the movie opts to provide audiences with the unsettling and seriously off-kilter sight of thousands of victims of Poppy’s plan being herded into cages and stacked on top of each other within the confines of a US football stadium (is there a message here?).

This time around the comedy is muted in favour of a more serious approach, but it’s as haphazardly sewn into the fabric of the movie as everything else. The action sequences, particularly an opening display of vehicular mayhem on the streets of London, and the final showdown at Poppyland, have been shot and edited with a view to making the fight choreography flow as quickly as possible within the frame, but as a result, details are lost and much of what can be seen seems to involve as much posing as it does fighting. Against all this, the performances are adequate, though Strong and Berry are on better form than the rest, while there are odd instances – a bar fight that echoes the original’s pub brawl, but with Harry coming off worst; Merlin singing Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver at a crucial moment – where the viewer can see glimpses of what might have been, but overall there aren’t enough to warrant a better appreciation of a movie that’s slackly directed, confuses sentiment for depth in its treatment of the relationship between Harry and Eggsy, and which doesn’t try hard enough to match the style and energy of its predecessor.

Rating: 5/10 – with the prospect of a third movie just over the horizon, Kingsman: The Golden Circle is the point where the service should hang up its tailoring shingle and head off into early retirement; a disappointing sequel that shows a flare for inconsistency throughout, it offers shallow pleasures for those who want that sort of thing, but will prove a more difficult experience for those expecting a repeat of the giddy heights of the first movie.

The Great Wall (2016)

07 Tuesday Mar 2017

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D: Yimou Zhang / 103m

Cast: Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Tian Jing, Willem Dafoe, Andy Lau, Hanyu Zhang, Lu Han, Kenny Lin, Eddie Peng, Xuan Huang, Ryan Zheng, Karry Wang, Cheney Chen, Pilou Asbæk

On paper it must have sounded like a great idea. A US/China co-production directed by Yimou Zhang and starring Matt Damon, and telling one of the legends behind the creation of the Great Wall of China: that it was built to stop a species of monster called the Tao Tei from over-running the country. On paper it promised Zhang’s visionary skill as a director, Damon’s solid acting presence, and some of the most exciting battle scenes this side of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It would also be the most expensive movie in Chinese history, costing $135 million.

But somewhere along the way, what everyone – the production companies and the producers, Zhang and Damon, anyone else involved – forgot was that the movie was going to need a decent script. Or maybe they were aware it needed a decent script but decided to make do with the one they had (or maybe working with more than one hundred on-set translators didn’t help). However it was, The Great Wall reaches us with its goal to entertain its audience undermined almost from the word go. And it never recovers, offering lazy characterisations, even lazier motivations for its characters, plotting that goes beyond ridiculous, and the kind of moments that are meant to be, well, meaningful but just look and sound awkward. It’s only the well-mounted action sequences that provide any fun, but by the end, any credibility they’ve given the movie has run dry as well. So step forward Max Brooks, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz who came up with the story, and Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy who actually wrote the script. Give them all a hearty round of applause – and let that be the only acknowledgment they get for coming up with this farrago.

Now obviously, The Great Wall is a fantasy movie, and none of it ever happened for real, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be grounded as far as possible within its own fantastical world. Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal as mercenaries trying to steal black powder (gunpowder) from the Chinese? Okay, that one’s possible. The Great Wall built to stop a horde of monsters from over-running the country (and by extension, the world)? Ahh, hang on a minute. No, that’s not going to work. There are problems with that idea straight away, and these are problems the movie ignores, as if by ignoring them no one will stop and say, ahhh, hang on a minute… The problem lies with those pesky, awkward timescales, the ones the movie itself comes up with. Seventeen hundred years to build. Okay, but the Tao Tei attack every sixty years, and again according to the movie, have been doing so for two thousand years. So the obvious question is: how is it that the Tao Tei haven’t over-run the country already? There’s thousands upon thousands of the ugly creatures (which must mean their Queen is kept very busy).

To be fair, the movie does try to provide an answer to this conundrum, by mentioning that the Tao Tei are evolving with each sixty year cycle, and becoming more and more intelligent. But then it shoots itself in the foot – again – by giving Damon’s character, William, a large chunk of magnetised rock (don’t ask; really, don’t). Magnets apparently have the ability to literally put the creatures to sleep, something the Chinese are aware of but which they’ve never put to the test. Cue a mission to capture one of the creatures. Once secured, the creature is then whisked off to the capital city of Bianliang where the magnet is removed far enough for the creature to wake up and transmit its location telepathically to its Queen (oh, yes, they’re telepathic as well). And just at the same moment, the Chinese, led by Commander Lin (Jing) and Strategist Wang (Lau) discover that the Tao Tei have been digging a massive tunnel through the Wall and are heading for Bianliang (and no one has noticed this, or spotted them heading for the capital; no, really, no one).

If after all this, you’re not convinced that The Great Wall has a really duff script then you’ll really have to see it for yourself. What was probably meant to be an effective melding of Western and Eastern movie making, or at the very least a Chinese tale adapted for a wider international audience, in the end becomes a collection of cinematic clichés, desultory character beats, and an ending that’s so rushed you get the feeling that maybe you’ve missed something (one minute the tunnel is discovered, the next, everyone’s climbing onto unstable hot-air balloons to reach Bianliang before the Tao Tei get there). It’s a movie that doesn’t seem to trust itself with any depth or nuance, as if audiences wouldn’t appreciate their inclusion. In its aim to be as entertaining as possible, it appears to have shed anything that might be thought-provoking, original, or ambitious.

During the movie’s production there was a lot of criticism surrounding Damon’s casting (as if no one realised this was an international co-production). Accusations of the movie using a white saviour narrative prevailed for a long while, and on watching the movie, it’s not hard to see why such accusations were made. Whether they’re well-founded or not will be down to the individual viewer, but as the Chinese have been fending off the Tao Tei for centuries, and only defeat them once Damon’s character turns up – well, you do the math. There’s also the inevitable attraction between Damon’s early medieval archer and Jing’s initially wary (but intrigued) commander. Their relationship remains entirely platonic throughout, with admiring glances appearing here and there, but the idea of an actual romance is firmly kept in its place. This may be an international co-production made for modern audiences, but let’s not get several centuries ahead of ourselves.

In the end, this is an American production that takes an ostensibly Chinese story (it was actually dreamed up by Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Tull and World War Z author Max Brooks), makes it on Chinese soil with a largely Chinese cast and crew, appropriates a Chinese national monument, and then jettisons anything that makes it truly, identifiably Chinese. (There’s also a corollary with World War Z as the Tao Tei climb up and over each other in their efforts to scale the Wall.) Should the Chinese feel insulted by this? That’s a difficult one to answer, their having been involved in this almost from the beginning, but if the white saviour narrative does apply then this is arguably one of  the most racially condescending movies made in a very long while.

But inevitably, with all the talent involved, there are some things that the movie gets right, it’s just that there aren’t enough of them to make up for when it goes wrong. The movie is often beautiful to look at, with a dazzling array of colours for the Chinese to wear and be seen against, and the overall production design by John Myhre is equally dazzling. The Wall’s defences are impressive too, with one unexpected, built-in feature proving particularly effective against the Tao Tei (though frustratingly it’s only used once). And one character’s death prompts a beautiful display of sky lanterns against the backdrop of the night sky. But as already mentioned, these aspects don’t make up for the clumsy, substance-free elements that are thrust centre-stage, from those awkward timescales, some truly awful dialogue, a subplot involving Dafoe’s captive mercenary and his plan to steal the black powder, and the inclusion of a young soldier who proves his bravery when everyone (except William) doubts him.

Rating: 4/10 – as dumb as dumb can be, The Great Wall is a terrible mis-step by Zhang, and by everyone else involved; big on spectacle but short on invention and lacking any internal logic, it’s a movie built out of nothing and unsurprisingly, is well on course to lose a lot of money for the studios who made it.