Overlord (2018)

05 Monday Nov 2018

Tags

Action, Drama, Horror, Jovan Adepo, Julius Avery, Mathilde Ollivier, Nazis, Pilou Asbæk, Review, Thriller, World War II, Wyatt Russell

D: Julius Avery / 109m

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbæk, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Iain De Caestecker, Jacob Anderson, Dominic Applewhite, Gianny Taufer, Bokeem Woodbine

The night of 5 June 1944: a squad of paratroopers have been tasked with destroying a radio mast located in the tower of a church in a small Normandy village. When their plane is shot down before they can reach the drop zone, the survivors band together in order to complete their mission. Under the command of Corporal Ford (Russell), a demolitions expert, Privates Boyce (Adepo), Tibbet (Magaro), and Chase (De Caestecker), reach the outskirts of the village, where they encounter Chloe (Ollivier). Distrustful of them at first, Chloe agrees to help them once she realises what their mission is. But there’s a problem: the church has become part of a Nazi compound, and is heavily guarded. It soon becomes clear that there’s something strange going on in the compound, something that has seen the Nazis – under the command of Wafner (Asbæk) – abduct many of the villagers, who haven’t been seen again. A visit by Wafner to Chloe’s home, and Boyce unexpectedly finding himself inside the compound, ensures the mission becomes about more than just blowing up a radio mast…

Though the above synopsis is light on detail – and deliberately so – what you can gauge from the trailer for Overlord is that this is pretty much a big budget version of all those Outpost movies we’ve been “treated” to over the last ten years; it also bears a strong resemblance to Frankenstein’s Army (2013). Whatever the inspiration for its making, though, the key question is: is it any better than those movies? Fortunately, the answer is yes. However, the script – by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith – doesn’t push the basic storyline in any new directions, and runs out of dramatic steam once Boyce gets in and out of the compound with remarkable ease. From then on, the material plays out in entirely familiar fashion, and regular viewers of this kind of thing will be able to predict each narrative development with a minimum of effort. The characters are broadly drawn too, with Boyce at first showing fear at every turn before displaying true bravery (as we know he will), Ford the taciturn brute, Tibbet the mouthy sharpshooter, Chloe the plucky heroine, and Wafner the smarmy villain who gets a taste of his own medicine (literally). Sometimes these stereotypes can be reassuring, but here they stop the audience from engaging with anyone. Instead, they and the viewer, are stuck with going through the appropriate (e)motions.

The movie is loud and violent and glaringly obtuse at times, though punctuated by odd moments of quiet where the script attempts to provide some depth to the characters, even though it’s already too late. Avery, who provided his first feature, Son of a Gun (2014), with a rough around the edges energy that suited the material, here finds himself constrained by the demands of both the material and the requirements of making a more mainstream movie. The cast do what they can, but there’s no challenge to any of the roles, and Asbæk opts to portray Wafner as a pantomime villain almost from the off. Along the way, there’s some good practical effects work (though none of it is as shocking as might be hoped for), and one scene where a paratrooper – and then everyone else – gets a nasty “wake up” call, is splendidly staged and proves to be the movie’s highlight. But all in all it’s the movie’s lack of inventiveness that stops it from being as successful as its makers would have hoped, and which robs of it any appreciable thrills and spills.

Rating: 6/10 – despite being better than its low budget rivals, Overlord still falls into the same traps as those movies, and proves to be a modest diversion at best; once again we’re confronted with a mainstream horror movie that falls way short of its aims, and which serves as a reminder that money can’t buy everything.

Mini-Review: Ghost in the Shell (2017)

03 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Drama, Hanka, Juliette Binoche, Live action adaptation, Pilou Asbæk, Rupert Sanders, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-fi, Section 9, Takeshi Kitano

D: Rupert Sanders / 107m

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt, Peter Ferdinando, Anamaria Marinca, Chin Han, Kaori Momoi

While watching Ghost in the Shell, the latest animation to live action remake to reach our screens, it’s not too long before the question, Why? pops up. As in, why has this movie been made in the first place? Visually stunning but emotionally stagnant, this close proximity adaptation of the manga original (released in 1995) looks impressive, but soon reveals a heart that is as non-existent as its lead character’s. This is a sleek, shiny, superficial movie that in some ways has a very apt title: the movie is a ghost in its own shell, offering little in the way of a coherent or cohesive meaningful subtext about what it means to be synthetic of body and yet human of mind. This makes it very difficult to sympathise with Scarlett Johansson’s Major, despite her frowning a lot of the time as if she’s trying to work out a particularly difficult Sudoku puzzle.

Although this is a very faithful adaptation of Mamoru Oshii’s groundbreaking anime, somewhere along the way, the essence of Oshii’s work has been jettisoned in favour of a standard, by-the-numbers approach that keeps its characters firmly entrenched in a kind of personality-free limbo, and which struggles to provide equally standard motivations for their actions. Major’s dilemma: are the glitches she experiences part of a past that has been suppressed (for nefarious reasons), or merely issues with her current programming, is played out in such a way that there’s no emotional payoff or impact when – surprise! – the extent of those nefarious reasons are revealed.

Part of the problem here is the amount of time that’s passed since the original Ghost in the Shell was released. Twenty-two years on and the issues it raises around notions of self-identity and cyber-assisted body enhancement have become too commonplace in cinema for this incarnation to contain any resonance. With nothing new to offer, or even follow up on, the movie lacks the relevancy it could have had if it had been made twenty years ago. Instead, it makes a few spurious attempts at looking and sounding significant, and opts for a bland, uninspired standpoint that ensures the movie takes no real risks with the material (aside from the equally spurious idea that Johansson’s casting was a case of “whitewashing”).

With the script – credited to Jamie Moss, William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger – showing signs of ennui thanks to its long gestation process (the project was first announced in 2008), and Sanders unable to overcome the problems that hold it back from allowing its audience to engage with it, Ghost in the Shell ultimately – and ironically given how impressive it looks – suffers from a lack of vision that does it more harm than good. As a result, the cast are often left stranded by the banal nature of the material. Johansson tries her best, but is hamstrung by having to look deadly serious all the time, while Asbæk and Binoche have thankless secondary roles; only Kitano has the measure of his character, and he plays the head of Section 9 perfectly. In the end, the movie is only effective in its many well-choreographed action scenes, but even they’re not enough to offset the tedium that makes up the rest of its running time.

Rating: 6/10 – anyone looking for a live action anime with depth and something to say about the ethics of melding humans and machines should look elsewhere, as Ghost in the Shell has little to say about either; a remake that lacks purpose and drive, it’s a movie that disappoints on many levels, and which makes the cardinal sin of not being very interesting.

The Absent One (2014)

06 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Boarding school, Cold cases, Conspiracy, Crime, David Dencik, Denmark, Department Q, Drama, Fares Fares, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Literary adaptation, Mikkel Nørgaard, Murder, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Pilou Asbæk, Review, Sequel, Thriller

Original title: Fasandræberne

D: Mikkel Nørgaard / 119m

Cast Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Fares Fares, Pilou Asbæk, David Dencik, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, Danica Curcic, Nikolaj Groth, Søren Pilmark, Beate Bille, Marco Ilsø, Philip Stilling, Kristian Høgh Jeppesen, Johanne Louise Schmidt, Hans Henrik Clemensen, Peter Christoffersen, Katrine Rosenthal

At a police awards ceremony, cold case investigator Carl Mørck (Kaas) is accosted by a retired policeman who begs him to look into the case of his two children who were both killed in 1994. Mørck refuses, and later the man commits suicide, prompting Mørck, supported by his partner Assad (Fares) to look into the case. They learn that the siblings both attended the same boarding school, and that there was a call to the police – made by a young woman – alerting them to the crime. With this as their only clue, Mørck and Assad visit the school where they learn that the young woman was probably Kimmie Lassen (Boussnina); but unfortunately for them she hasn’t been seen in twenty years.

Learning also that Kimmie’s friends at the time included now reputable businessmen Ditlev Pram (Asbæk) and Ulrik Dybbøl (Dencik), and that the man who confessed to the crime, Bjarne Thøgersen (Jeppesen), was represented by the best criminal lawyer in Denmark, Bent Krum (Clemensen), and only served three years in prison, Mørck and Assad sense a conspiracy. They visit Thøgersen who alerts Pram to the new interest in the deaths. Pram hires a man named Albjerg (Christofferson) to look for Kimmie, while Mørck endeavours to find her first. But an older Kimmie (Curcic) is also a very wary Kimmie, and with the help of her friend, Tine (Rosenthal), she manages to stay one step ahead of everyone when she becomes aware that people are looking for her. But Albjerg tracks her down, and though she gets away, she also has a run in with Mørck that leaves him bruised and battered.

Meanwhile, Pram and Dybbøl use their political contacts to put pressure on senior police in an effort to get Mørck and Assad taken off the case. Furious, Mørck confronts his immediate boss (Pilmark) and makes enough of a case from the evidence that he’s amassed to show that it should be pursued further, and that Kimmie Lassen holds the key to what happened twenty years ago. When she is finally caught by the police, it seems that Pram and Dybbøl’s arrest is only a matter of time. But Kimmie has other ideas: she escapes and goes after them herself, as much to kill them first, and as much again to make up for her involvement in the deaths of the young brother and sister.

As much a riveting crime thriller as its predecessor, The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013), The Absent One is another triumphal adaptation of a novel by Jussi Adler-Olsen. With almost everyone involved in the first movie returning to make this one, the movie is like a seamless addition to what is an ongoing series. The tone, the feel, the pace, and the sensibility of The Absent One is such that anyone who has seen The Keeper of Lost Causes can slip into the series’ bleak, gloomy mise en scene with ease, sure in the knowledge that what follows will be of an equally high standard, and equally as satisfying (if not more so).

There are several reasons for this, not least the taut, gripping screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel and his writing partner Rasmus Heisterberg. In distilling Adler-Olsen’s novel they’ve kept the focus on the ripple effect the murders have had over the years, as well as Mørck’s inability to let something go once he’s got a grip on it. The detective’s persistence and dogged nature – which are pretty much all he has to keep him going – is beautifully expressed through Kaas’s beleaguered performance. This is a man who keeps his pain externalised to stop it from eating away at him inside, but the payoff is a lack of compassion and sympathy for others; he only takes on the case in the first place because he can’t deal with the guilt of refusing the retired policeman. Kaas gives a wonderfully fractured portrayal of Mørck, growing further into the character and inhabiting him completely.

Ably supported by Fares, whose Assad is never a foil for Mørck, Kaas heads up a cast that never puts a foot wrong, even in the smaller roles. The script supports them all the way, assembling the pieces of the plot with skill and precision, letting the viewer glimpse the events of twenty years ago without spoiling the true nature of the killings, and allowing the mystery surrounding those killings to remain in place almost until the very end. It’s a bold, confident approach, and allows the tension inherent in the story to build to a quietly devastating denouement (and which puts Mørck through the ringer once more – but then he probably wouldn’t have it any other way).

Retaining his place in the director’s chair, Nørgaard keeps things tightly focused and highlights the psychological toll felt by Kimmie over the course of twenty years (she has a terrible secret of her own that, when revealed, is the most upsetting thing seen in either movie). It’s to Nørgaard’s credit that Kimmie’s humanity is never downplayed, and in the hands of Curcic, she’s a character so far removed from her younger self (also extremely well played by Boussnina) that the sadness of her situation is almost palpable. (In a better world, she and Mørck would make for an interesting couple.)

While the villains of the piece aren’t as effectively drawn, their callous natures are given plenty of screen time, as well as the slow disintegration of their self-confidence and eventual hubris. Asbæk and Dencik are appropriately cold and uncaring in their roles, revealing the innate hostility towards others that privilege has bestowed on them, and providing strong counterpoints to Mørck’s own disdain for others. It’s all reflected in the somber, unforgiving violence and shadowy dangers that permeate the movie and which help to make it such a rewarding (if slightly downbeat) experience.

Rating: 9/10 – a sequel that is as equally good as its forerunner, The Absent One is a dark, atmospheric thriller that is as uncompromising as it is compelling; with two further movies in the pipeline, let’s hope that the makers can maintain the quality shown so far.