2:22 (2017)

24 Friday Nov 2017

Tags

Cosmic event, Drama, Grand Central Station, Michiel Huisman, Murder, Paul Currie, Review, Sam Reid, Sci-fi, Teresa Palmer, Thriller

D: Paul Currie / 99m

Cast: Teresa Palmer, Michiel Huisman, Sam Reid, Maeve Dermody, Remy Hii, Simone Kessell, John Waters, Richard Davies, Kerry Armstrong

When a movie provides the viewer with an intriguing concept (and does so early on) it sets itself something of a problem: namely, how to maintain that sense of intrigue the longer the movie goes on, and the more that has to be explained. There are plenty of movies where that intriguing concept flounders soon after being introduced, and plenty more where it doesn’t go anywhere at all. And then there are the movies that keep that concept evolving and expanding, and in doing so, keep the viewer engaged and entertained throughout. But these movies aren’t as prevalent as we might like, and though it does its best to join that elusive and elite group, 2:22 has a basic flaw that stops it from gaining a place at the table: it never decides to settle for one cause out of three or four for the events that take place.

Dylan Branson (Huisman) is an air traffic controller living in New York. He has the ability to see patterns in all things, which makes it easy for him to make predictions out of what appear to be random variables. It also means that some of the flights under his control can sometimes take off and land within yards of each other, something that, frighteningly, his boss and his colleagues treat as more of a trick to be bet on than as an inappropriate way of dealing with hundreds of lives each time. But when a cosmic event – the shock waves from the collapse of a star in space from thirty years before – has an effect on the Earth, Dylan’s attention becomes focused on the patterns that are revealed through the waves, and he is lucky to avoid the deaths of around nine hundred people when this occurs. Rightly suspended, Dylan still goes about his daily routine, but soon begins to notice that the same things keep happening each day, and at the same times. However, it’s a fascination with Grand Central Station, and the time of 2:22pm, that he’s unable to shake.

As the patterns and repetitions become more and more ingrained, Dylan finds himself drawn into the story of three deaths that occurred thirty years before on the concourse at Grand Central. A love triangle that ended in tragedy, it saw a singer and her boyfriend, and a cop, all shot and killed. Dylan becomes obsessed with finding out why he’s seeing all this within the patterns, and why from so long ago. And when he meets Sarah (Palmer), an art gallery manager, he begins to realise that their relationship is in some way connected to the events of the past. What this all means is what Dylan feels compelled to work out, but at first it frightens Sarah, and she distances herself from him, but as their story begins to dovetail with the story from 1985, and too many coincidences occur to dispute what seems to be happening, Dylan tries to ensure that there isn’t a repeat of the concourse tragedy, and that he and Sarah can make it past 2:22pm.

There’s not exactly a glut of intelligent, well thought out science fiction movies available to audiences these days, and 2:22 clearly has ambitions to fulfill that particular requirement, but while it begins well – and with a couple of airport runway scenes that should have even the most blasé of frequent fliers gripping their upright tray tables – it’s not long before it gets bogged down in an unwieldy narrative, and it starts tripping over itself in its attempts to provide a coherent, viable framework for the mystery of thirty years ago and its relevance to what’s happening around Dylan today. At first, it’s clever, but then the movie tries to be too clever, and before long it has Dylan sounding like he’s in need of some serious medication. Sarah avoids him because he sounds crazy, the truth of the past reveals itself piece by piece, and it’s all done in such a way that makes it confusing as to whether or not it’s all in Dylan’s head, or the result of this strange cosmic event, or some kind of reincarnation version of history repeating itself. As to which one of those is the actual reason for Dylan’s visions of the past, the viewer is free to take a guess.

It may be that there is one true answer, but the screenplay by Todd Stein and Nathan Parker (from a story by Stein) is too respectful of its muddled internal logic to settle for a definitive solution. Instead it piles erratic images and mismatched scenes on top of one another, and as if it needs to add a sense of confusion to proceedings, when it does attempt to explain matters, it falls just shy of being convincing (which unfortunately leaves Michiel Huisman holding the exposition bag quite awkwardly a lot of the time). It’s obvious that the movie doesn’t want to come across as a sci-fi variation of Groundhog Day (1993), and so it throws too many extra elements into the mix, but without testing first to see if they match the level of intrigue required, and/or the details. Currie orchestrates matters with an eye for a compelling image at times, but on other occasions, there’s a pedestrian vibe to many of the scenes early on that aren’t exactly involving; thankfully, as the narrative speeds up, Currie’s confidence in his handling of the material increases also.

The well chosen cast do as well as can be expected with some of Stein and Parker’s more utilitarian dialogue, and overall Huisman and Palmer make for an interesting pairing, their characters not quite the star-crossed lovers they’re made out to be, but competently played nevertheless. By the end though, the sci-fi elements have been shoved aside so that the thriller elements can be pushed to the fore, and there’s a stretch where the familiarity of the narrative – or the obvious nature of it – casts a pall over proceedings as the screenplay manipulates the story into getting Dylan and Sarah, and her jealous ex-boyfriend, Jonas (Reid), to the station on time for the 2:22 deadline. Faced with these strong-arm tactics, the movie has no choice but to go along for the ride and hope that the drily philosophical dictum quoted at the end, “A star shines brightest right before it dies”, strikes the viewer as poignant instead of ironic.

Rating: 6/10 – narrative trips and tumbles aside, 2:22 is a modest sci-fi thriller with modest ambitions, but ones that should be applauded nevertheless; that it doesn’t work entirely is down to the lack of focus in the storyline, and some occasionally lazy “hey, kids, let’s connect the dots for the viewer” decision making, but though it’s very rough around the edges, you could do a lot worse, sci-fi wise, than to give this “out of its comfort zone” movie a chance.

The Limehouse Golem (2016)

15 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Bill Nighy, Dan Leno, Daniel Mays, Douglas Booth, George Gissing, Horror, Juan Carlos Medina, Karl Marx, Limehouse, Literary adaptation, Murders, Music Hall, Olivia Cooke, Sam Reid, Thriller

D: Juan Carlos Medina / 109m

Cast: Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Douglas Booth, Daniel Mays, Sam Reid, María Valverde, Eddie Marsan, Henry Goodman, Morgan Watkins

A music hall comedian and musical theatre actor. A Prussian-born philosopher. An English novelist. And an aspiring playwright. All four of them men, and all four suspected of being the infamous Limehouse Golem, a murderer whose latest outrage has claimed the lives of an entire family and their maid. Which of these four men – Dan Leno (Booth), Karl Marx (Goodman), George Gissing (Watkins), and John Cree (Reid) – is the crazed, psychopathic killer, and why?

It’s a measure of the confidence that screenwriter Jane Goldman (adapting Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem) has in the material that she keeps this central conceit ticking along for so long, because if you stopped to think about it for more than a cursory second, then said conceit would crumble to dust before your eyes. Ackroyd may have presented his story in better ways on the page, but Goldman is hampered by the requirements of a movie interpretation, and the scenes where the murders are re-enacted from the viewpoint of each suspect in turn leads to some very awkward moments indeed. The sight of Karl Marx – a bushy bearded Goodman – acting violently makes for one of the most inappropriately amusing murder scenes in recent cinema history. And the same can be said of Gissing’s turn behind the knife. Leno fares slightly better but that’s mostly thanks to Booth’s florid turn as the theatrical maestro, while Cree, this movie’s Most Likely does mentally unbalanced with too much glee to be even considered as the Golem. So with each of the suspects lacking that certain murderous je ne sais quoi, what’s a mystery thriller meant to do?

The answer is to focus instead on Cree’s wife, Lizzie (Cooke), a member of Leno’s troupe, and soon on trial for poisoning her husband. Cree’s death doesn’t immediately rule him out of being the Golem, but it does prompt Inspector John Kildare (Nighy) to attempt to kill two birds with one stone: to prove that Cree was the Golem, and in doing so, provide his wife with a motive for killing him that would make her a heroine and see her avoid the gallows. Aided by Constable George Flood (Mays), Kildare follows a clue left by the Golem at a murder scene to the British Library and a book by Thomas de Quincey that contains a diary written by the Golem within its pages. With only the four men mentioned above having had access to the book on the day of its last entry, Kildare sets about obtaining samples of the men’s handwriting in an effort to eliminate/incriminate them. Leno, Marx and Gissing are soon ruled out, but Cree’s death remains an obstacle to the truth: before he died he burnt all his personal papers.

With all this investigative work going on, and grisly accountings of the murders punctuating the narrative to boot, the movie recounts Lizzie’s life from sexually abused pre-teen to orphan to theatrical protegé to music hall star. It feels like a soap opera tale given a grim Victorian veneer, and takes up too much of the movie’s run time. For long stretches it’s Lizzie’s back story at the forefront of the material, and the search for the Golem is left feeling as if it’s been relegated to second place, a position that doesn’t feel right for the story or the overall structure. Allied with a number of scenes that see Kildare visiting Lizzie in prison and reassuring her all will be well, the mystery elements are forced to take a back seat as Kildare pursues his twin aims, all of which is likely to lead some viewers into construing that his visits are indicative of some burgeoning romance (Kildare is conscientious it’s true, but nothing fully explains his obsessive determination to save Lizzie from certain death). But wait, Kildare isn’t “interested” in women, he follows another persuasion, a detail the script brings up every now and then in a misguided attempt at adding depth to the character, and which only prompts Flood to reveal his own “interests” in a scene that is as awkwardly written as it is played out.

Lizzie’s theatrical experiences are used as a backdrop for the rise of the Golem, and there are plenty of clues dropped along the way as to the murderer’s identity (fans of this sort of thing will have no problem working out the whodunnit aspect of things). Along the way there are also several music hall interludes, and back stage confrontations, that help to throw suspicion on Leno and Cree respectively, but in an effort to stretch the material even further, there are minor sub-plots that add little to the larger storyline, and by the time the murderer’s identity is revealed, a certain amount of ennui has settled in as scenes are recycled or repeated without adding anything new or relevant to the proceedings. Even the murders themselves, touted as grisly and shocking, prove unambitious in their execution (excuse the pun), and a number of incidental deaths prove equally uninspired (and more than a little predictable).

That said, there are some good performances to be had, with Nighy putting aside all the tics and pauses that usually make up one of his portrayals (and subbing for a too ill to take part Alan Rickman), while Booth (who just keeps getting better and better) is on formidable form as Leno, imbuing the character with a melancholy nature off stage that is at odds with his more ebullient and public persona on stage. Marsan is good value as always as a senior member of Leno’s troupe, Reid plays the anger-driven Cree with a fierce passion, but Mays looks out of place, and Cooke does her best with a role that should be more sympathetic than it actually is, and which suffers from having too much attention focused on it. Medina organises everything in a frustratingly direct manner, with too many scenes and developments lacking the necessary impact, and though he has fine support from the likes of cinematographer Simon Dennis, production designer Grant Montgomery, and costume designer Claire Anderson, it’s not enough for the movie to look good when it doesn’t always feel right.

Rating: 6/10 – a mixed bag overall, The Limehouse Golem captures the squalid nature of the Victorian era with aplomb and sets up its central storyline well, but dials down on the melodrama and the lurid nature of the Golem’s activities; perfectly acceptable then in a “what to watch on a Sunday evening” kind of way, but not quite as formidable in its approach as it needed to be.

Despite the Falling Snow (2016)

08 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Antje Traue, Charles Dance, Cold War, Defection, Drama, Espionage, Literary adaptation, Moscow, Rebecca Ferguson, Review, Romance, Russia, Sam Reid, Shamim Sarif, Spying

D: Shamim Sarif / 93m

Cast: Rebecca Ferguson, Sam Reid, Charles Dance, Antje Traue, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Thure Lindhardt, Anthony Head

One of the things that never happened in the Golden Age of Cinema was an author being given the opportunity to make a movie of one of their novels or stories. Some were employed to adapt their novels and stories, but none were ever allowed to step behind the camera as well and actually direct the movie. Nowadays, this isn’t so unusual, but it’s also still not very prevalent. So step forward Shamim Sarif, author and movie maker, who has been making movies from her novels from the very beginning. She is possibly unique in this way, and has gained a very good reputation from working on both sides of the creative arena. Despite the Falling Snow is the third movie she’s made from one of her novels, and while she may be well regarded in some quarters as the perfect person to adapt her work – after all, who knows it better than she? – the finished product here isn’t quite the testament to her talents as a director.

The movie begins in New York in 1961 with the defection of a Russian government official called Sasha (Reid). As he’s helped to escape from his Russian handlers, he asks about his wife, Katya (Ferguson). She’s back in Moscow, but his new, US handlers have no idea where she is or what has happened to her. Fast forward thirty years and Sasha (Dance) is a successful restaurateur who has a niece, Lauren (also Ferguson) who is the spitting image of Katya, and who wants to travel to Moscow to try and find out what happened to her aunt. Sasha refuses to go with her, though, so Lauren, who’s lucky enough to be an artist who’s been asked to mount an exhibition in Moscow, heads off by herself.

While Lauren’s story plays out in 1991, Katya’s story plays out in tandem from 1959 to 1961. Katya is a teaching assistant who’s also helping her friend and government official Misha (Jackson-Cohen) steal secrets and pass them on to the Americans. At a party she meets Sasha but is unimpressed by him. It’s only when Misha persuades her to get close to Sasha because of his position in the Kremlin that she finds herself falling in love with him. Meanwhile, in 1991, Lauren meets and befriends a journalist called Marina (Traue) who helps her in finding out about Katya. Marina learns that Misha (Head) is still alive, and they make plans to visit him. When they do they find he’s become an embittered, angry old man who wants nothing to do with them.

Back in 1961, Katya and Sasha wed, but she agonises over whether she should tell him she’s a spy. In 1991, Marina’s behaviour becomes suspicious, and the unexpected arrival of Sasha in Moscow prompts a revelation. Katya’s decision to tell Sasha leads to his agreeing to defect, but thirty years on only Misha holds the key to what happened to her.

A romantic drama set – partly – during a period of intense political and social upheaval, namely the early Sixties, Despite the Falling Snow has such a generic feel to it that it could have been made about any couple in any country at any time, and still have made the same kind of impact. This is thanks to Sarif’s uninspired, pedestrian direction, and a visual style that never rises above formulaic. It’s as if Sarif has forgotten to add the drama needed to make the narrative more than just a succession of events and scenes that show how two people came together and then were separated by fate in the form of expediency. Even when suspicion falls on the officials in the Kremlin, including Sasha and Misha, it’s a moment where real terror at being found out translates instead as a mild concern. Misha is almost fatalistic about the whole thing, a reaction that not even the talented Jackson-Cohen can make convincing; this man should be even more scared than he’s been already.

But if the steady stream of narrative downplaying that infuses the scenes in early Sixties Russia also makes those scenes feel awkward and inconsistent, then spare a thought for those set in 1991. Sarif makes reference to the Berlin Wall having come down two years earlier, but her new Moscow is an uneasy mix of contemporary US stylings and Russian forebearance, as evidenced by Marina’s designer clothing and old Misha’s tower block abode. The juxtaposition jars, and adds to the overall feeling that Sarif wants her characters to look glamorous against the concrete backdrop of post-Stalinist Russia (Katya seems never to be without her red lipstick). The visual conceit is highlighted by Sarif’s decision to have Katya and Sasha, and Lauren and Marina, walk along the same snow-laden stretch of riverside pavement at different times, but instead of creating an echo of past events, it appears to be more of a budgetary deference than a creative decision.

Elsewhere, narrative developments that appear out of nowhere are treated as if they are absolutely necessary to the overall plot, and that includes a left-field decision to have Lauren and Marina begin a sexual relationship. Old Sasha’s willingness to stay home out of harm’s way is overturned by the contents of a fax, while Old Misha’s decision to spill the beans about what happened to Katya is spurred on by feelings of guilt, and that old chestnut, a terminal illness. And when the viewer does find out what happened to Katya, Sarif handles it in such a hamfisted way that any emotional weight the scene might – or should – have engendered with said viewer, is lost before the scene’s even begun.

A lacklustre movie then, one that doesn’t even aim particularly high, but which does feature another of Charles Dance’s supporting roles (is he semi-retired now, is that what’s going on?) and a level of political naïvete that further dilutes the drama that isn’t really there. On the performance side, Ferguson is unable to make much of either role, as Sarif never allows the viewer to engage with them as anything other than under-developed non-characters. Reid is earnest but treading in a pool so shallow it’s practically evaporated, while Traue is allowed to look moody and resentful in equal measure even when she’s kissing Ferguson. Dance and Head bring a degree of old-time gravitas to the proceedings, but even they can’t avoid the pitfalls that are inherent in the script. On this showing, Sarif needs some more time to clarify her goals in making such a movie, and maybe next time, getting someone else to direct.

Rating: 4/10 – Sixties Moscow never looked cleaner, quieter, or more family friendly than it does in this movie, and that’s despite several efforts to make it look as if it’s not brand new; as a drama it never gets started, despite the best efforts of its cast, and by the end you’ll only want to know what happened to Katya just so that you can move on in (roughly) the same way everyone else does: without too much fuss.