Trailers – Speech & Debate (2017), The Bad Batch (2016) and Unlocked (2017)

14 Tuesday Feb 2017

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Ana Lily Amarpour, Drama, Horror, Jason Momoa, Michael Apted, Noomi Rapace, Previews, Thriller, Trailers

Based on the off-Broadway play by Stephen Karam (who also provides the screenplay), Speech & Debate concerns a trio of troubled teenagers who are all struggling to find their places in life, and most urgently, their school. Held back from expressing themselves by the repressive, hypocritical dictates of their school heirarchy, the trio – played by Liam James, Sarah Steele and Austin P. McKenzie – decide to resurrect the school debate club, and by doing so, attempt to challenge and overcome the rigid strictures they encounter on a daily basis. Steele was in the original stage production, and from the trailer it looks as if she’ll steal the movie – that last excerpt is a killer – but the rest of the cast appear on form as well, and if the use of Mika’s We Are Golden is anything to go by, then the movie’s likely to have a killer soundtrack as well. It’s been a while since we’ve had a decent teen-themed movie; maybe Speech & Debate will be the movie to rekindle our appreciation for them.

For her follow up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), writer/director Ana Lily Amarpour changes locations from the Iranian ghost town Bad City, to a Texas wasteland inhabited – not by vampires – but by cannibals. Amarpour has a distinct, vivid visual style (as can be seen in the trailer), and she isn’t afraid to depict violence in all its hideous glory, but she’s just as interested in ideas and the development of her characters as she is any bloodshed. The presence of Jason Momoa will no doubt attract a number of fans looking forward to another movie he’s in this year (Braven – obviously), but with the likes of Jim Carrey, Giovanni Ribisi and Keanu Reeves on board, the chances that Amarpour’s odd love story set against an equally odd backdrop will cement her growing reputation as an indie movie maker to watch out for.

And so it’s Noomi Rapace’s turn to kick ass and take names later as a modern day action heroine in Michael Apted’s by-the-numbers Unlocked. Twists and turns and betrayals every five minutes appear to be the order of the day, and the casting of John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Orlando Bloom, and Michael Douglas in lead roles is a strong nod to the level of credibility the movie is aiming for. But despite all this, Unlocked could still turn out to be quite respectful in its ambitions, and worth more of your time than you’d expect. Director Apted isn’t exactly inexperienced, and he certainly doesn’t need to make a generic action movie any more than he needs to, but his presence behind the camera is encouraging, and though the trailer doesn’t have the “wow” factor it needs to stand out from the crowd, it could still surprise us all… possibly.

Mini-Review: The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016)

11 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Aaron Paul, Aiden Longworth, Alexandre Aja, Coma, Drama, Jamie Dornan, Literary adaptation, Mystery, Oliver Platt, Review, Sarah Gadon, Therapy, Thriller

D: Alexandre Aja / 108m

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Aiden Longworth, Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul, Oliver Platt, Molly Parker, Terry Chen, Julian Wadham, Barbara Hershey

Narrated by the title character, The 9th Life of Louis Drax introduces us to a nine year old boy who is always having near-fatal accidents. His ninth involves a cliff-top fall into the sea while on a picnic with his parents, Natalie (Gadon) and Peter (Paul). While Louis (Longworth) is rescued but trapped in a coma, mystery surrounds his father, who is missing, and his mother, who may or may not be telling the truth about what happened. While the police (Parker, Chen) investigate, Louis’s care falls under the remit of pediatric coma specialist Dr Allan Pascal (Dornan). He believes that Louis can recover in time, even though there are no signs to support this, Louis having been diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state.

Over time, Pascal finds himself growing closer to Natalie, while also delving into Louis’s past medical history, including his visits to a psychiatrist, Dr Perez (Platt). It soon becomes clear that there is a mystery surrounding Louis’s accidents, and letters begin appearing that seem to have been written by Louis – which is impossible. Meanwhile, in his coma, Louis is discovering truths about his life that he has been aware of but has suppressed. As the mystery begins to unravel, both Pascal and Louis come to realise that strange forces are at work, and that neither will remain unaffected by them.

If you know nothing about The 9th Life of Louis Drax before settling down to watch it, then the direction that it takes in telling its story may baffle you or seem inexplicably weird. This will be due to the dreamlike fantasy world that Louis inhabits inside his coma, a place where a gravel-voiced sea creature acts as a guide in allowing Louis to understand his past, and what it means for the present. It’s these scenes which are both fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, though, as Max Minghella’s adaptation of the novel by Liz Jensen uses these scenes to explain – at length – what has been going on, and why. While they are necessary in terms of the plot, their presence does, however, make the movie a more sluggish beast (much like the sea creature itself) than it needs to be.

Indeed, the pacing is a problem throughout, with a rapid compendium of Louis’s previous eight “lives” given a Jeunet-esque run-through, before the movie settles down to tell a (mostly) more conventional story. But it only ever really convinces in terms of the relationship between Louis and Peter, while Pascal’s attraction to Natalie feels very much like a tired, hoary old plot device that’s never going to go anywhere (and despite a last-minute reveal that will either have you groaning or grinning – or both). Likewise, Louis is another of those precocious pre-teens whose grasp of human dynamics and adult language only occurs in the movies. The performances are adequate – Gadon’s Natalie though, looks culpable right from the start – but the movie itself is a pedestrian affair that lacks pace and energy, and struggles to make you care about Louis or the people around him.

Rating: 5/10 – some arresting visuals aside, The 9th Life of Louis Drax is a slow, unengaging movie that tries to present its story as a puzzle-box mystery, but fails to make it anything more than a run-of-the-mill thriller; with Aja seemingly unable to elevate the material to the level it needs to reach to be effective, this has to go down as a missed opportunity, and yet another movie that doesn’t do its source material any justice.

Brotherhood (2016)

09 Thursday Feb 2017

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Arnold Oceng, Cornell John, Drama, Jason Maza, Noel Clarke, Revenge, Review, Sequel, The Hood Trilogy, Thriller

D: Noel Clarke / 104m

Cast: Noel Clarke, Arnold Oceng, Jason Maza, Cornell John, Shanika Warren-Markland, Tonia Sotiropoulou, Leeshon Alexander, Lashana Lynch, David Ajala, Nick Nevern, Jack McMullen, Michael “Stormzy” Omari, Daniel Anthony, Adjoa Andoh, Red Madrell

And this year’s award for worst second sequel of a British movie goes to…

It’s a category you’re not likely to see at the BAFTAs this year (or any year for that matter), but if you did then Brotherhood would be the odds-on, hands-down winner. A broad mix of revenge drama, juvenile comedy, awkward social commentary, and baffling thriller, Noel Clarke’s conclusion to The Hood Trilogy – following Kidulthood (2006) and Adulthood (2008) – sees him return to the character of Sam Peel and provide fans of the previous entries with a disjointed, exploitation-heavy, credibility-free movie that is let down by Clarke most of all.

Which is a huge shame, as Clarke has consistently fought to make British movies on his own terms and for British audiences first and foremost. When Kidulthood was released, it was the kind of movie that audiences were unfamiliar with. Its gritty, though exaggerated look at a South London teenage sub-culture, was challenging, and a bold statement of intent from Clarke himself, who wrote the script. As well as Clarke, it contained roles for the likes of Adam Deacon, Nicholas Hoult and Rafe Spall, and grabbed enough attention that it spawned a slew of similar, like-minded movies over the next few years. Two years later, Adulthood cemented Clarke’s reputation as an indie movie maker, retaining the original’s gritty, challenging demeanour while exploring themes of revenge and personal responsibility that attempted to add depth to the events of the movie.

The same themes are explored even further in Brotherhood, but as with most second sequels, the law of diminishing returns hits hard, and sees Clarke struggle to piece together a storyline that makes any sense. Ten years on from the events seen in Kidulthood, Sam is holding down four jobs in his efforts to keep his family – partner Kayla (Warren-Markland), and their two young children – together, but it means he doesn’t see as much of them as he needs to. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Royston (Anthony), an up-and-coming singer, is shot and wounded at a gig; the gunman leaves a note “For Sam Peel”.

When Sam learns of the note through one of Royston’s friends, Henry (Oceng), it leads him to an East End gangster called Daley (Maza). Daley explains that Sam, and his family, has been targeted for “past sins”, sins that can be erased if he takes a job working for him. Sam refuses, and is then confronted by Curtis (John), the uncle of Trife, a young man Sam killed ten years before. He wants revenge, and wants Sam to know what it’s like to have nothing. Matters are made worse when a stupid mistake on Sam’s part causes Kayla to leave with the children, and a sudden death pushes Sam over the edge and seeking his own revenge on both Curtis and Daley.

Brotherhood is a mess, both in terms of its plot and storyline, and its overall approach. Clarke can’t seem to connect things in an organic, natural manner, and there are too many scenes that bump up against each other like strangers. Whether or not this was intended from the start – and it’s unlikely that it was – what it means for the movie as a whole is it becomes a succession of unlikely situations and confrontations connected by the thinnest of motivations or a variety of ill-considered choices. Chief among these is the note left for Sam by Royston’s assailant: Henry takes the note home, leaves it there for a day or two (the movie’s timeline is hazy at the best of times), runs into Sam by accident, and only then tells him about it. It’s one of several occasions when the movie prompts disbelief in the viewer, and makes you wonder if Clarke was in too much of a rush to get the movie made, and was forced to cut several corners in the process.

If so, it still doesn’t excuse just how clumsily the plot has been assembled, or how badly it’s been executed. Clarke the writer and Clarke the director often seem at odds with each other, offering contradictions in scene after scene and never meshing together in a way that allows the tortured narrative to make any sense. Early on, Sam catches on that one of Daley’s gang is following him. Sam attacks him, beating him to the ground and injuring his leg, but in the very next minute, Hugs (Alexander), Daley’s enforcer, arrives on the scene and Sam immediately backs down and behaves like a scared child. It’s such an about-face that it’s actually shocking to see Clarke the screenwriter and Clarke the director expose Clarke the actor in such a terrible way, and make what should be a tense, memorable moment one that encourages laughter and further disbelief.

As a result of Clarke’s poorly constructed script, and his equally poor directorial choices, the rest of the cast fare just as badly, and are as poorly served as Clarke himself. Maza gives a mannered performance that’s meant to be menacing, but he’s about as scary as the villain in a Scooby-Doo! movie. John, who’s appeared in all three movies, plays the vengeful Curtis with all the subtlety of a tank crushing roses, while Oceng is the comic relief whose performance is surprisingly enjoyable, but whose character, and his involvement, is at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie.

But worst of all is the callous streak of misogyny that runs throughout the movie, with several scenes that feature “European prostitutes” being paraded completely naked or wearing the kind of lingerie that makes no difference. Their inclusion provides a sour taste that the movie never overcomes (or makes any apology for), and Clarke makes sure that he has sex scenes with Warren-Markland and Sotiropoulou that fail to add to the plot or advance it in any way. The movie seems happier when it’s being violent, and there’s a particularly nasty – and yet, cathartic – scene where Sam takes a nail gun to one of Daley’s goons. But it doesn’t rescue the movie from the tonal and narrative disasters it propagates throughout its running time, and despite everyone’s best efforts, Brotherhood proves to be an unfortunate conclusion to a saga that has never really escaped its rough and ready appearance, or its raw, ill-defined acting.

Rating: 3/10 – low-budget, British “meh”; an unfortunate conclusion to a trilogy of movies that have always been well regarded (though against the odds), Brotherhood is unlikely to be thought of in the same way as either of its predecessors, and is let down by an amateurish sheen that is the responsibility of all concerned, and not just its overstretched writer/director/actor.

The Infiltrator (2016)

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Benjamin Bratt, Brad Furman, Bryan Cranston, Diane Kruger, Drama, Drug cartel, John Leguizamo, Literary adaptation, Money laundering, Review, Robert Mazur, Thriller, True story

D: Brad Furman / 127m

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Kruger, John Leguizamo, Benjamin Bratt, Juliet Aubrey, Yul Vazquez, Elena Anaya, Rubén Ochandiano, Simón Andreu, Joseph Gilgun, Juan Cely, Art Malik, Saïd Taghmaoui, Amy Ryan, Jason Isaacs, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Paré

Number four hundred and twenty-nine in what feels like 2016’s never-ending list of true stories – or movies based on true stories – The Infiltrator is a throwback to the kind of crime dramas made in the Seventies, with the main character going undercover and putting their life on the line in order to expose the mob boss/cartel leader/fiendish criminal mastermind who has so far remained untouchable. Here the main character is Robert ‘Bobby’ Mazur, a veteran US Customs special agent nearing retirement, but who takes on one more undercover case when another agent, Emir Abreu (Leguizamo), asks for his help. Abreu’s case involves an informant (Cely) with ties to a Colombian drug cartel, and the aim, at first, is to follow the drug trail from America back to Colombia and catch the cartel leaders red-handed. But Mazur has a better idea: instead of following the drugs, why not follow the money?

Assuming an alias, Bob Musella, Mazur poses as a businessman who can launder the cartel’s money through the companies he owns, effectively making it clean and untraceable. He and Abreu are put in contact with a couple of the cartel’s men (Ochandiano, Andreu), who in turn introduce them to Javier Espina (Vazquez), a high-level enforcer whose job it is is to assess whether or not Musella can be trusted, and his claims for the cartel’s money are true. Reassured that they are, Espina gives the go ahead for Musella to start laundering the cartel’s money, but when Mazur is put in a compromising situation with a lap dancer – he’s happily married with two children – he invents a fiancée to get himself out of it. Mazur’s boss, Bonni Tischler (Ryan), is less than happy with this, but arranges for a female agent, Kathy Ertz (Kruger), to step into the role.

With his “credentials” proving satisfactory, Mazur cites a problem with the way the cartel currently moves its money as an excuse for meeting with the person who runs it all. This leads him to both the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which will help him launder larger quantities of the cartel’s money than he can make look legal, and the acquaintance of Roberto Alcaino (Bratt), whose role is to facilitate both the movement of the cartel’s money and the distribution of its drug shipments through an entry point in Miami. Alcaino welcomes Mazur and Ertz into his home, and they become friendly with both him and his wife, Gloria (Anaya). Using a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase, Mazur is able to gain evidence on all the parties concerned, but needs just one more thing to happen before he can have everyone arrested: the release of funds belonging to Pablo Escobar which the US government has frozen. Without these funds, Escobar, who is the head of the cartel, will not commit to using Mazur exclusively, and the undercover work he’s done will only cause so much damage.

In the hands of director Brad Furman and screenwriter Ellen Sue Brown (Furman’s wife), Robert Mazur’s tale of deception and intrigue becomes a tale of patience and deferment for the audience, as any likely tension or nail-biting moments are kept to a minimum, and Mazur’s scam on the cartel moves along slowly and relentlessly to its expected denouement. Along the way, there are lots of scenes where Mazur as Musella insists on doing things his way and the cartel almost meekly agrees. His cover remains intact throughout, as does Ertz’s, and only Espina suspects they’re not who they say they are. At this point, the viewer will be grateful for something going wrong, as up til now it’s all gone along too smoothly (it may well have been this way, but it doesn’t make for compelling viewing). But not for long; Espina’s potential threat is removed before it’s even had time to get going, and the viewer is left wondering if anything is ever going to upset Mazur’s carefully balanced apple cart.

The movie also struggles to maintain a consistent focus, with subplots that come and go without advancing the main narrative, and scenes surrounding Mazur’s home life that feel tacked on and derivative. His wife, Evelyn (Aubrey), is supportive of his work even though she wishes he’d retired when he could have, but is inexplicably jealous of Ertz and their fake relationship (she even asks Ertz if she’s sleeping with him). Elsewhere, Mazur is followed by someone who turns out to be a CIA agent, but you have to be paying attention to the end credits to learn why. And both Mazur and Ertz appear to bond with Alcaino and his wife to the point where they feel sympathy for them. These and other aspects of what should be a fairly straightforward storyline may well be meant to add depth and complexity to proceedings, but instead they only show just how bland that storyline really is.

As for the performances, Cranston plays Mazur with a great deal of charm (and a quite impressive wig), but we never really get to know him as a person. He’s good at his job, but we don’t know what motivates him to be so good, or what makes him so effective as an undercover agent. Kruger comes on board halfway through and her character’s (quickly ignored) inexperience proves a good foil for Cranston’s taciturn dedication, though viewers may well be surprised by the number of times they hug. Leguizamo offers good value for the viewer’s time (as always), portraying Abreu as a thrill-hungry agent with an attitude to match; whenever he’s on screen the movie livens up a little. As a second tier kingpin, Bratt exudes a glossy menace that is much more effective for being delivered with a reluctance born out of long experience of the life he leads, while from the supporting cast, Dukakis has a ball as Mazur’s aunt, Vazquez is unnerving as the camp yet deadly Espina, and Aubrey expresses more in a look than seems entirely feasible.

With its slow but steady pacing and attention to period detail, the movie doesn’t lack for sincerity, but it doesn’t quite know how to pick up the pace when it’s needed. Furman concentrates on explaining how the cartel’s money can be laundered, but it’s exposition that only needs confirming once, whereas it’s explained on at least four separate occasions. There are twists and turns here and there, some entirely predictable, others less so but lacking in impact. And there’s one scene, in a restaurant involving an unlucky waiter and an anniversary – no, birthday – cake that appears out of nowhere (and context) and tries to make Mazur something he’s not: a hardass.

With so many angles to cover, and not all of them as effective as needed, The Infiltrator relies more and more on Cranston to pull it through the weeds, but it’s an uphill struggle even for him. With Leguizamo given less and less to do thanks to Kruger’s involvement, and her role almost entirely (and deliberately) superficial at times, it’s only Bratt’s urbane take on Alcaino that keeps the final third interesting. It’s all given a rosy patina of sophistication by DoP Joshua Reis, though, and the movie benefits greatly from the way in which Furman uses composition to establish mood. But this particular tale eschews mood too often for it to work as a tense, engaging thriller, and in doing so, manages to downplay the enormity of Mazur’s achievement. And when it comes, it comes at a wedding that looks like it’s been put together for a reality TV show rather than a Customs Office sting operation.

Rating: 6/10 – moderately absorbing, yet banal in execution, The Infiltrator suffers from being too much on an even keel, and not loosening up in its approach at telling Robert Mazur’s amazing story; Cranston is a pleasure to watch, even if you think Mazur was inordinately lucky in what he did, and he keeps things from disintegrating too quickly, leaving a movie that wants to be topical (despite being set in the late Eighties), but lacks the modern day relevance that could be assigned to it.

Equity (2016)

02 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alysia Reiner, Anna Gunn, Cachet, Drama, Investment banking, IPOs, James Purefoy, Meera Menon, Review, Sarah Megan Thomas, Thriller

D: Meera Menon / 100m

Cast: Anna Gunn, James Purefoy, Sarah Megan Thomas, Alysia Reiner, Samuel Roukin, Craig Bierko, Nate Corddry, Nick Gehlfuss, Carrie Preston, Tracie Thoms, Lee Tergesen, James Naughton

When an Initial Public Offering (IPO) (or stock market launch) that she’s brokering goes badly wrong, investment banker Naomi Bishop (Gunn) finds herself within touching distance of the glass ceiling. Passed over for promotion because of the launch’s failure, Naomi is further rankled by her boss’s assertion that the deal didn’t work out because she ruffled a few feathers. Given another project to work on – the launch of a privacy company called Cachet – she finds her rapport with the company’s owner, Ed (Roukin), tested early on, and the project is saved from potential disaster by the timely intervention of Naomi’s assistant, Erin Manning (Thomas). Realising what an asset she has, Naomi uses Erin to keep Ed happy.

Meanwhile, Naomi’s boyfriend, broker Michael Connor (Purefoy), is in need of an insider tip that he can pass on to old friend and businessman Benji Akers (Bierko). When he learns about Cachet, Michael tries to find out what he can about the company, but Naomi is tight-lipped about it. Later he tries to look around on her phone but her password defeats him. Also at this time, Naomi runs into an old friend, Samantha Ryan (Reiner). What seems to be an unexpected but pleasant reunion is soon revealed to be a ploy on Samantha’s part: she’s part of a government team investigating both Michael and Benji. When Naomi realises this, she refuses to cooperate.

As the day of the IPO approaches, Naomi learns that Cachet, far from being the heavily firewalled company that Ed brags it is, is at risk from hackers. This leads to Ed questioning Naomi’s confidence in the IPO, and beginning to have second thoughts about working with her. Erin is told to keep him “sweet”, and she manages to do so, keeping the deal alive. When Erin learns that the person who warned Naomi about the risk of Cachet being hacked has been fired, she tries to get hold of Naomi to tell her. Unable to, she ends up at Michael’s apartment, where she makes a decision that will have far-reaching consequences not just for Naomi, but for Michael, for Samantha, for Cachet, and for Erin herself.

A movie created, developed and assembled by women, and which features women in almost every role you can think of, Equity is a movie that, thanks to its female-centric provenance, comes loaded down with anticipation and a lot to prove. The world of investment banking has a male-dominated heirarchy that makes it difficult for a woman to succeed in the same way that a man does. As Naomi discovers, one mistake, one project that doesn’t go as planned, and the knives are out, with even colleagues adopting a “dead (wo)man walking” approach to their interactions with her. Using this as the backdrop for a tale riddled with deceit, backstabbing and betrayal, the movie attempts to make Naomi the heroine – unfairly treated, a little naïve despite her position and experience, and working within a personal ethical framework that her colleagues don’t seem to share or understand. It’s the age-old question: can a woman succeed in a man’s world?

For a movie that sings the praises of female empowerment, and presents us with a trio of female characters, each with their own individual sense of entitlement, Equity can’t seem to make up its mind what to do with them. When we first meet Naomi she’s a strong, charismatic woman who’s close to the top of her profession, but it’s not long before the cracks begin to show and she’s running just to stand still. Similarly, Samantha’s determination to bring a case against Benji and Michael sees her chase down leads using guile and no small amount of ingenuity, but as soon as she gets bogged down and her investigation grinds to a halt, she doesn’t know what to do next. Only Erin seems to have a game plan that works, and where she ends up is perhaps indicative of the answer the movie itself is plumping for: yes, women can succeed in a man’s world, but they have to behave like men in order to do so.

Ultimately, Amy Fox’s screenplay – from a story by Fox, Thomas and Reiner – lacks focus and contains some astonishingly lame dialogue, particularly the scene where Samantha “seduces” Benji’s right-hand man, Cory (Corddry) (you will cringe; seriously, you will cringe). There’s also no one in the movie who is even remotely sympathetic, making it difficult to care about anyone, even Naomi, who by the movie’s end should have won over the audience thanks to the predicament she ends up in, but who remains a character you can easily forget about five minutes after the movie’s over. From all this it’s unclear just what message the movie is trying to get across, or even how important it is. Is it asking us to consider whether women should compete with men in the land of IPO’s, or is it that the movie believes women should compete, just as long as they leave their feminine principles at home?

Gender issues aside, there are efforts to make this into a thriller, but these aren’t very convincing, as it all boils down to whether or not the knowledge that Cachet is hackable will affect the share price on the first day of trading (it’s that exciting). But as we already know what’s happened up to this point, and the script has conveniently spelled it all out for us, the issue of the share price becomes just another glum moment in an overly glum movie. Thanks to the script, the performances lack depth, and for the most part, any appreciable energy. In the last third, Gunn defaults to a perplexed expression that apparently explains how Naomi is feeling in every scene she’s in, while Reiner falls back on dismay at every opportunity (as well she might). But it’s Thomas who really lets the side down, adopting a wide-eyed, “who me?” approach to Erin that makes her look like she’s either on drugs, or is just a few seconds behind everyone else. As for Purefoy, he could have phoned in his performance and it wouldn’t have looked or sounded any different, such is his obvious boredom in the role.

In the director’s chair, Meera Menon does what she can to make the movie look and feel more important than it is, but the material works against her too often for her to make much out of it at all. Scenes come and go with no great acclaim, and the various “twists and turns” can be seen coming from a mile off. The movie also struggles to find its own rhythm, with Andrew Hafitz’ editing making the movie look as if it’s been pared down from a longer cut. There’s the germ of a good idea here, but the execution of it leaves much to be desired, from Erin’s pregnancy which has no bearing on anything, to Samantha’s already discussed “seduction” scene, to Naomi yelling at her boss, “When is it going to be my year?” Sadly for Naomi, and the movie, it’s not 2016.

Rating: 5/10 – moderately engaging but increasingly mired in mediocrity overlaid with a bland sensibility that it can’t overcome, Equity isn’t the gender equality triumph its makers were perhaps hoping for; dramatically flaccid for long stretches but still watchable, the movie struggles most with its trio of central female characters, a mistake that the makers appear to have made no effort to curtail, leaving the audience with no one to care about, or root for.

Mini-Review: Split (2016)

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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23 identities, Abduction, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Drama, James McAvoy, M. Night Shyamalan, Multiple personalities, Review, The Beast, Thriller

D: M. Night Shyamalan / 117m

Cast: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, Brad William Henke, Sebastian Arcelus, Izzie Coffey

After a party at their local mall, birthday girl Claire (Richardson) and her friend Marcia (Sula) offer withdrawn classmate and pity invite Casey (Taylor-Joy), a ride home. But in the car park, a stranger (McAvoy) gets in the car instead of Claire’s father, and he uses a spray to render the three girls unconscious. When they wake, they find themselves in a locked basement room, but otherwise unhurt. Their abductor, Dennis, tells them that they’ll be perfectly safe, as long as they don’t try to escape; they’ve been taken because “someone” is coming. Meanwhile, Dennis attends therapy sessions with Dr Karen Fletcher (Buckley), but when he does he’s called Barry, and he’s a different personality altogether. And this is the point: Dennis and Barry are just two of twenty-three personalities living in the body of the man known as Kevin Wendell Crumb.

With one of the personalities sending urgent e-mails to Dr Fletcher on a regular basis, but Barry assuring her everything is okay, she suspects something has happened that has prompted this cry for help. As she attempts to work out just what that something might be, the girls make an attempt at escaping. Claire manages to get out of the room they’re in but she’s soon captured and locked in a separate room; the same fate eventually befalls Marcia. Casey tries to strike up a relationship with another of Kevin’s multiple personalities, a nine year old boy called Hedwig. He warns her that the “someone” who is coming is actually known as the Beast, and as Hedwig adds quite cheerfully, “He’s done awful things to people and he’ll do awful things things to you.” With Casey and Dr Fletcher arriving at the truth of things from different angles, it’s still down to the three girls to find a way out and back to safety before the Beast arrives.

With each new M. Night Shyamalan movie, it seems everyone is in agreement: he’s making better movies now from when he used to make absolute tosh like The Happening (2008) and The Last Airbender (2010). But while that may be true (and to make movies worse than either of those mentioned would be a feat in itself), it’s also true that he’s still not anywhere near to making movies as accomplished as The Sixth Sense (1999), or fan favourite, Unbreakable (2000). But while he’s still got a way to go, Split is certainly a good indication that he’s getting there. He’s helped in no small part by McAvoy’s incredibly detailed and nuanced performances as seven of Wendell’s multiple personalities, and Taylor-Joy’s practical captive with a relevant back story.

But while his cast go to great lengths to make his story at least halfway credible, and Shyamalan himself directs with great skill, as a writer he still manages to stumble too often for comfort, and the script fails to answer several important questions, the main one being, why is Hedwig’s drawing of the Beast not even remotely like the version we see towards the end – and especially after Dr Fletcher asserts that “an individual with multiple personalities can change their body chemistry with their thoughts”? (Oh, really?) It’s about time that Shyamalan let somebody else write the script because it’s the one area in which he consistently lets himself, and his movies, down. In the end, it’s all nonsense, but it could have been much more enjoyable nonsense, and McAvoy’s dexterous performances could have been part of a better showcase for his talents.

Rating: 6/10 – let down by a script that starts off strong then slowly but surely runs out of steam and ideas by the halfway mark, Split still qualifies as a stepping stone on the path of Shyamalan’s rehabilitation as a quality movie maker; McAvoy is terrific, the eerie nature of the basement rooms makes for a good mise en scène, and then there’s that final scene, which, depending on your love for a certain movie, will either have you whooping with joy, or wailing in despair.

Mini-Review: Underworld: Blood Wars (2016)

22 Sunday Jan 2017

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Action, Anna Foerster, Charles Dance, Drama, Fantasy, Kate Beckinsale, Lara Pulver, Lycans, Review, Selene, Sequel, Theo James, Thriller, Tobias Menzies, Vampires

D: Anna Foerster / 91m

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Theo James, Tobias Menzies, Lara Pulver, Charles Dance, James Faulkner, Peter Andersson, Clementine Nicholson, Bradley James, Daisy Head, Oliver Stark

Seconds out… round five! Yes, four years after the resoundingly awful Underworld: Awakening (2012), the world is treated to yet another unwanted, unneeded, unnecessary, and unwatchable Underworld movie. Nothing has changed. The Vampires and the Lycans are still at war with each other (though the Lycans appear to have the upper hand), Selene is still an outcast from her fellow bloodsuckers for killing Victor way, way back in Underworld (2003), blood is still the most important commodity on both sides, Kate Beckinsale still looks great in skin-tight black leather, and the plot makes about as much sense as building a dam from ten packs of waffles. It’s complete and utter tosh, and you get the sense that no one was really taking this seriously; not one person.

What plot there is concerns the Lycans reducing Vampire numbers by the coven load, thanks to the inspired leadership of Marius (Menzies), who appears to be a kind of enhanced werewolf. On the Vampire side, Elder Thomas (Dance) is supported by Vampire Council member Semira (Pulver) in bringing Selene (Beckinsale) back into the fold in order for her to use her unique skills in fending off/killing the Lycans. Selene relcutantly accepts but is soon betrayed by the scheming Semira, and flees to the Nordic Coven, where a Lycan attack led by Marius leaves her dead beneath the ice. With Semira further emboldened by news of Selene’s death, she allows the Lycans access to the Eastern Coven, and soon the place is overrun by werewolves. With only Thomas’s son David (James) to lead them – which is handy as he’s the true heir to the Vampire leadership – the Vampires are in danger of being wiped out once and for all…

By now, any movies in the Underworld franchise that find a release (and Alexander Corvinus help us, there’s another one in the works), are purely for the fans only. They will make a certain amount of money – so far Blood Wars has made over $75 million, more than double its production budget – and they’ll gain a respectable (new) lease of life on home video. For the makers, it’s a win-win situation, and to some degree, it’s the same for the fans. Kate Beckinsale as Selene + warring Vampires and Lycans + shoddy CGI effects + incomprehensible storylines and dialogue + the same steel blue lighting effects in each movie + poorly edited action sequences = the franchise that good taste can’t kill.

Like the Resident Evil series, which also foists a movie on us every few years, the Underworld movies feature a strong-minded, invincible heroine, and the merest interest in logic or credibility. As long as there’s a fight scene every ten minutes, and the villains are appropriately nasty and conniving and amoral, then nothing else is really needed. Well, except for an establishing shot to set up the next instalment, that is. That these movies continue to attract the likes of Beckinsale and Dance is possibly the only thing that’s impressive about them, but not even Beckinsale can do anything with lines such as, “There is no beginning, there is no end. There is only the coming.” That’ll be Underworld: Dead Poor then.

Rating: 3/10 – the first truly “meh” movie of 2017, Underworld: Blood Wars has all the attraction of root canal work and a rectal exam put together; unfailingly predictable, and trite on almost every level, the directorial debut of TV helmer Foerster readily shows that the producers are firmly in charge and there’s no room for originality – at all.

Patriots Day (2016)

22 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bombing, Boston Marathon, Boston Strong, Drama, J.K. Simmons, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon, Literary adaptation, Manhunt, Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Berg, Review, Thriller, True story

D: Peter Berg / 133m

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, J.K. Simmons, Michelle Monaghan, Alex Wolff, Themo Melikidze, James Colby, Michael Beach, Rachel Brosnahan, Christopher O’Shea, Jake Picking, Jimmy O. Yang, Vincent Curatola, Melissa Benoist, Khandi Alexander, Adam Trese, Dustin Tucker

At 2:48pm on 15 April 2013, the 117th annual Boston Marathon was taking place, and was proceeding as smoothly as in previous years. It was already nearly three hours since the winner had crossed the finish line, and the remainder of the runners – some 5,700 – were still to complete the course. A minute later, at 2:49pm, a bomb exploded in the crowd of onlookers near the finish line; approximately thirteen seconds after, a second bomb exploded one block further away. Between them, the blasts claimed the lives of three people, and injured hundreds of others, including sixteen people who lost limbs. It was a terrorist attack that no one saw coming, and such was the confusion at the time of the blasts that runners still crossed the finish line for another eight minutes.

This is the core event of Patriots Day, a recreation of the bombings that occurred that fateful day, and the subsequent manhunt that took place over the next four days. It begins with Boston Police Department Sergeant Tommy Saunders (Wahlberg) and moves on to introduce a variety of individuals whose lives will be affected by the bombing and subsequent events. These include Tommy’s wife, Carol (Monaghan), Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis (Goodman), young couple Jessica Kensky (Brosnahan) and Patrick Downes (O’Shea), Chinese student Dun Meng (Yang), MIT police officer Sean Collier (Picking), district of Watertown police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (Simmons), Boston Police Superintendent Billy Evans (Colby), naturalised U.S. citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Wolff), his brother Tamerlan (Melikidze), and Tamerlan’s American-born wife, Katherine (Benoist).

By the time the race starts we know that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar will be the people who place the bombs. And as the race begins, and we see them moving amongst the crowds, what has been a fairly straightforward, and somewhat leisurely approach to the events of 15 April 2013 begins to become something altogether more focused, and darker. When the bombs do go off – and we know they will – the explosions, and the devastation they cause, are still shocking. And it’s as this point that Patriots Day, which could have so easily been a tale of jingoistic heroism sprinkled with Hollywood-ised action beats, becomes something even richer and more surprising: a movie based on true events that incorporates an incredible level of detail, and better still, includes actual footage from the time. It’s this aspect of the movie, the mixture of real and realised that impresses the most, as it makes the verisimilitude that much more potent.

In adapting the book, Boston Strong by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge, director Peter Berg has made his most accomplished and impactful movie to date. Reuniting with Mark Wahlberg for the third time after Lone Survivor (2013) and Deepwater Horizon (2016) – also true stories – Berg has finally crafted a movie that resonates on more than one level, and which doesn’t rely on the jingoistic heroism mentioned above. It does celebrate the way in which the residents of Boston came together in the wake of a terrorist attack, but Sergeant Pugliese’s incredibly brave confrontation with Tamerlan Tsarnaev aside, there aren’t any moments of gung ho courage, just an acknowledgment of how determined everyone – law enforcement and public alike – were in making sure the bombers were captured. It’s not often that a movie gives you a true sense of a community coming together in such a way, but this is definitely one of them, and it does so powerfully and succinctly.

The various storylines are cleverly interwoven as well, with each character given a relevant amount of screen time, and their lives, even Wahlberg’s composite policeman, explored with a tremendous surety of touch. Admittedly, some of the investigators – Bacon’s overly experienced FBI agent Richard DesLauriers, Goodman’s shocked and angry Police Commissioner – fare less well in this respect due to the nature of their involvement, but otherwise, people such as Downes and Kensky, who had reached the finish line when the first bomb went off, are afforded due recognition because of what happened to them not only then but subsequently. The same is true of Steve Woolfenden (Tucker), who was injured and separated from his young son, Leo. Away from the injured, the fates of people such as Dun Meng and MIT police officer Sean Collier are played out with sincerity and a lack of sensationalism, or the kind of made-for-TV banality that offsets any strived-for veracity.

Once the manhunt is under way and an initial identification of the suspects has been made (one of the movie’s cleverest moments), the movie steps up a gear, and becomes intensely exciting. The scenes involving Dun and the Tsarnaevs are mini-masterclasses in how to keep an audience on the edge of their seat, and all this is achieved by precision editing (courtesy of Gabriel Fleming and Colby Parker Jr) and an emotional undercurrent that permeates the movie as a whole. Berg makes you care about the people in this movie, these people who experienced so much and came out the other side so much stronger (albeit not all of them). The same can be said of the shootout on Watertown’s Laurel Street, a literally explosive confrontation between the police and the Tsarnaevs that stands head and shoulders above most movie shootouts, and which again, thanks to Fleming and Parker Jr, leaves the viewer gasping at how insane it all was, and how frightening it must have been to be a part of it all.

Berg’s commitment to telling this story as honestly and passionately as possible, while not sensationalising it in any way, is the reason why it works so well, and why it deserves every possible accolade. He’s helped tremendously by a cast so committed to meeting his vision of the story that there’s not one performance that’s out of place or not operating in service of the material. Wahlberg, who always seems to feel more comfortable playing blue collar workers, puts in his best work since The Fighter (2010), while the likes of Goodman, Bacon, Monaghan and Simmons all deliver solid, credible supporting performances that enhance the narrative whenever they’re on screen. As the Tsarnaevs, Wolff and Melikidze are an impressive teaming, establishing both the bonds and the boundaries between the two brothers with almost nonchalant ease; it’s an adversarial relationship in many ways (as with so many brothers), but you never once question their commitment to their cause and each other. But if there has to be one actor or actress who stands out for any reason, then that is unquestionably Melissa Benoist, TV’s current Supergirl. Watch the scene where Katherine is interrogated by a nameless “spook”: it’s an exemplary display of a character’s doubt, fear, loathing, and blinkered self-assurance, and is as surprising for its conclusion as it is for the iciness of the scene as a whole.

The movie ends as most movies attempting to tell a true story often do: with an update on some of the people whose lives were affected on that terrible day in April 2013. And then it goes one step further, and you hear the voice of the real Patrick Downes, and then you see both him and Jessica Kensky as they talk about that day and what it’s meant to them since. You see officials such as Ed Davis and Richard DesLauriers, and as they talk about the notion of Boston Strong, the unifying concept that sprang up in the wake of the bombings, the idea that Boston and its people would not be intimidated by acts of terrorism – listening to them you understand just why Berg and his team were so determined not to make this an exercise in hyperbole or the cinematic equivalent of yellow journalism. Because if they had, then the movie’s final image – its message if you like – would have meant nothing. It would have lacked context, and it would have lacked the emotional jolt that the movie leaves you with. And what was that image? Ah, now that would be telling…

Rating: 9/10 – a superb retelling of the Boston Marathon bombings and the manhunt that followed over the next one hundred and five hours, Patriots Day is a movie devoid of frills, unnecessary plot devices, or political finger-pointing; a tribute to all those who survived the bombings, and the extraordinary levels of cooperation between a city and its law enforcement – a de facto curfew was in place following the shootout in Watertown – the movie focuses on telling its story matter-of-factly and audaciously, and by concentrating on the people who were caught up in it all, an approach that many other movies “based on real events” should try adopting as well.

Mini-Review: Live by Night (2016)

21 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Ben Affleck, Brendan Gleeson, Crime, Dennis Lehane, Drama, Elle Fanning, Gangsters, Ku Klux Klan, Literary adaptation, Prohibition, Review, Sienna Miller, Thriller, Ybor City, Zoe Saldana

D: Ben Affleck / 128m

Cast: Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Remo Girone, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina, Matthew Maher, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, Robert Glenister, Chris Cooper, Miguel J. Pimentel, Titus Welliver, Max Casella

Undermined by a leaden script, Live by Night is writer/director/actor Ben Affleck’s third movie as a multi-hyphenate, but after the successes of Argo (2012) and The Town (2010), his latest project is a plodding affair that looks good thanks to Robert Richardson’s usual exemplary cinematography, but otherwise remains remote and uninvolving. The tale of a small-time Boston crook, Joe Coughlin (Affleck), who finds himself at odds with Irish gangster Albert White (Glenister) through his relationship with White’s girlfriend, Emma Gould (Miller), this adaptation of the novel by Dennis Lehane starts off well but soon gets bogged down by messy plotting and too many characters who randomly come and go.

Coughlin’s romance with Emma ends badly, leading him to offer his “services” to White’s rival, Maso Pescatore (Girone). Pescatore sends Coughlin down to Florida, to Ybor City, with instructions to take control of his rum-running operation and ensure that White’s activities in the area are curtailed. Once there, Coughlin, aided by trusted friend Dion (Messina), soon streamlines Pescatore’s operation and squeezes out all the competition. In the process he establishes a business relationship with a Cuban family, and begins an affair with the sister, Graciela (Saldana). Things run smoothly until Coughlin’s working with the Cubans as well as a group of local Negroes, attracts the ire of the Ku Klux Klan. Coughlin tries to come to an amicable arrangement with them, but the Klan’s leader, RD Pruitt (Maher) refuses to play ball, leading Coughlin to make an arrangement with Pruitt’s brother-in-law, Chief Figgis (Cooper) that has unforeseen consequences.

The Chief’s daughter, Loretta (Fanning), begins making evangelical protests against a casino that Coughlin is building in anticipation of Prohibition being repealed. Her protests lead to the project stalling, which makes Pescatore angry enough to forget all the money Coughlin has made for him, and travel down to Florida to oversee matters for himself, a development that leaves Coughlin vulnerable, and his future in doubt.

For all the convincing period detail and the impressive production design, Live by Night is let down by Affleck’s inability to craft a cohesive screenplay from Lehane’s novel. While Coughlin’s story is told against a backdrop of violence and betrayal, the movie remains a staid, pedestrian affair that moves at a steady pace despite Affleck’s best efforts to inject some energy and verve into proceedings. Part of the problem is the number of characters that appear for a short time then disappear or pop up again for another short period. Despite the cast’s best efforts, they’re let down by Affleck’s script, which uses each character to advance the narrative, but without investing in them to any great degree. This leaves actors of the calibre of Gleeson, Saldana and Glenister stranded for the most part, with only Miller and Fanning making much of an impression. It doesn’t help that Affleck’s portrayal of Coughlin also lacks range or depth, leaving the viewer hoping that things will improve over time, and that a way in to the material with eventually arise, something that, unfortunately, never happens.

Rating: 6/10 – curiously turgid and flat, Live by Night has clear aspirations to be a crime drama with operatic overtones, but instead, remains resolutely commonplace; with too many strands that make for a stop-start narrative, and characters that aren’t allowed to make much of an impact, the movie keeps its audience at a distance, and never looks as if it will close the gap at any point throughout.

Elle (2016)

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Anne Consigny, Charles Berling, Drama, Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Literary adaptation, Paul Verhoeven, Philippe Djian, Rape, Revenge, Review, Thriller, Video games

D: Paul Verhoeven / 131m

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny, Charles Berling, Virginie Efira, Judith Magre, Christian Berkel, Jonas Bloquet, Alice Isaaz, Vimala Pons, Raphaël Lenglet, Arthur Mazet, Lucas Prisor

“She” of the title is Michèle Leblanc (Huppert). Michèle is divorced – from Richard (Berling) – has one adult son, Vincent (Bloquet), runs a video games company with her best friend, Anna (Consigny), is having an affair with Anna’s husband, Robert (Beckel), and lives alone with her cat. She is independent, self-assured, and a little reserved around others. And then, one day, a masked intruder breaks into her home and rapes her. But Michèle’s response to this isn’t typical. She cleans up the mess made during the attack, and carries on with her life as if – outwardly at least – nothing has happened.

Inwardly, though, Michèle begins to wonder if her attacker is someone she knows. At first she thinks it might be one of the designers at the company, some of whom don’t like her for her abrasive, no-nonsense attitude. She buys some pepper spray, and a small axe that she takes to sleeping with. But all the while she tells no one what’s happened, not even her mother, Iréne (Magre). She and her mother, though, have other issues. Iréne wants Michèle to visit her father, who is prison for mass murder, but Michèle wants nothing to do with him. The murders occurred when she was ten, and afterwards, her father involved her in the aftermath, something she has never forgiven him for.

Because of this, Michèle refuses to involve the police, as it will also stir up memories of the past and she will again be the subject of press attention. When it becomes clear that her attacker isn’t one of her male employees, it seems as if it could be anyone. But when she is attacked again by the same masked intruder, she is able to defend herself and pull off his mask. Her attacker proves to be someone she knows, but again, she doesn’t report it to the police, and she resumes her life, again as if nothing has happened. Instead, she develops a closer relationship with the man, gaining his trust and encouraging him and his sexual desires. Believing her to be something of a kindred spirit, he also believes their relationship will continue, but Michèle has another plan entirely…

It’s entirely likely that, if you’re a feminist, you’re not going to like Elle. It’s main character is raped, but doesn’t report it; in fact, she gets on with her life as if nothing has happened. And later, when she knows the identity of her attacker, she begins a complicit relationship with him where his raping her gives him sexual satisfaction (while she doesn’t even get any masochistic pleasure out of it). And when she does admit to her friends that she’s been raped, she’s so matter-of-fact about it, and so dismissive of their concerns, she might as well not have told them for all the difference it makes. In short, she’s not reacting in the way that a woman who’s been raped should react; she’s not behaving in the way that she should behave.

At Cannes last year, where the movie was first shown, Elle was branded a “rape comedy”, an invidious term that was trying to be clever but which does have some relation to Elle’s complex, unflinching narrative. While the rape itself is sufficiently horrible (even when it’s only heard at the movie’s beginning, it’s still disturbing), it’s not the whole movie. As we begin to learn more about Michèle, humour begins to creep into the material, and largely from the way in which she interacts with her family and friends and colleagues. She’s caustic when she feels it’s necessary, and this leads to us smiling at her behaviour, and appreciating her all the more. She’s not letting being raped define her, or hold any power over her; and when she suspects one of her staff, she takes charge and does her best to find out who it could be. Like it or not, Michèle is being proactive, but in a way that we don’t often see in movies, even in so-called rape-revenge flicks.

Of course, there’s a strong psychological element to all this that drives the movie forward, with Michèle’s past informing and determining her present, and the feelings that she’s not quite in touch with. Part of the strength of the movie is the way in which it refuses to confirm or deny just what Michèle is doing, or how she’s feeling. It’s left to the viewer to decide for themselves what her mindset is – but be warned, for the most part you’re likely to get it wrong. This is also due to an absolutely magnificent performance by Huppert that is a masterpiece in delicate emotional shading. Verhoeven has praised Huppert for bringing things to the character of Michèle that he would never have thought of, and the actress – as ever – is fearless in the role, and endlessly inventive. It’s an hypnotic portrayal, fascinating and complex, and she doesn’t miss one single emotional beat throughout the entire movie. If there really is such a thing as “being true to the character”, then Huppert achieves that, and does it with consummate skill.

But while Huppert gives a stunning, tour-de-force performance, she’s matched in directorial terms by Verhoeven, here making what many regard as his best movie. (Away from his fantasy and sci-fi movies they’re right; otherwise an equal number of people will say that RoboCop (1987) is his best movie.) The Dutch director effortlessly weaves together the main storyline and its various subplots with the same consummate skill that Huppert brings to the role of Michèle. Thanks to Verhoeven’s sureness of touch, Elle remains endlessly provocative as a psychological drama, and equally riveting as a daring thriller. He also treads a fine line between the aforesaid drama and the movie’s humour, expertly blending the two elements into an unforgettable whole. As the story unfolds, and Michèle’s actions become clearer, the veteran director still manages to use the material at hand to wrongfoot the audience and keep them guessing – a neat trick in this day and age of Internet transparency.

There will be some who will write this off as just another revenge movie, but that isn’t the movie’s raison d’etre. Instead it’s about a woman taking a courageous and difficult route to self-empowerment; and she does it all on her own terms. This is to be applauded, whatever the circumstances, and in the hands of the masterful Huppert and the on-form Verhoeven, Elle paints a vivid portrait of how one woman strives for and maintains her own unique place in both a grossly misogynist workplace, and in the wider world at large. It’s often uncomfortable to watch – after Michèle is raped she has a bath, and blood rises to the water line, a terrible indication of just how violent the attack was – and it offers no easy answers, either in terms of whether or not Michèle’s reaction to being raped is the right one (whatever that is), or whether her search for her attacker is motivated by revenge or curiosity or a mixture of both. It’s a movie that is likely to provoke intense debate for some time to come, but even if it does, one thing is for sure: this is a movie that won’t be forgotten too easily by anyone who sees it.

Rating: 9/10 – a superb thriller unjustly snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as an entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, Elle is a brilliant, elaborate movie that doesn’t pull any of its punches, and makes a virtue out of being uncompromising; with a daring, exceptional performance by Huppert, and Verhoeven fully in command of the material, the movie deserves every bit of praise it’s received so far, and should be on many people’s Top 10 lists come the end of the year.

Monthly Roundup – December 2016

31 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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50's sci-fi movie, A Perfect Man, Action, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Ana Girardot, Barry Sonnenfeld, Cameron Mitchell, Cat, Cell, Chandler Riggs, Christopher Walken, Comedy, David Tomlinson, Devil's Crag, Diana Dors, Drama, Edward Kemmer, Eliminators (2016), Flight to Mars, Frances O'Connor, Giant from the Unknown, Hard Target 2, Horror, Hostile takeover, Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary, James Bobin, James Nunn, Jennifer Garner, John Cusack, Johnny Depp, Kevin Spacey, Lesley Selander, Literary adaptation, Marguerite Chapman, Mars, Maurice Elvey, Mercy (2014), Mia Wasikowska, Murder, Myanmar, Nine Lives, Peter Cornwell, Pierre Niney, Reviews, Rhona Mitra, Richard E. Cunha, Robert Knepper, Roel Reiné, Sally Fraser, Samuel L. Jackson, Scott Adkins, Sequel, Shirley Knight, Stephen King, The Mad Hatter, The Red Queen, Thriller, Tod Williams, Vargas, Wade Barrett, Wonderland, WWE Films, Yann Gozlan

Cell (2016) / D: Tod Williams / 98m

Cast: John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Clark Sarullo, Ethan Andrew Casto, Owen Teague, Stacy Keach, Joshua Mikel

Rating: 4/10 – a mysterious cell phone signal turns people into crazed, zombie-like creatures, but one man (Cusack) is determined to find his son while society disintegrates around him; a Stephen King adaptation (and co-scripted by him), Cell is another reminder that his work rarely translates well to the screen, and this is no exception, being dramatically incoherent, a waste of its talented cast, and lumbered with an ending that makes absolutely no sense at all.

A Perfect Man (2015) / D: Yann Gozlan / 104m

Original title: Un homme idéal

Cast: Pierre Niney, Ana Girardot, André Marcon, Valéria Cavalli, Thibault Vinçon, Marc Barbé, Sacha Mijovic

Rating: 7/10 – aspiring author Mathieu Vasseur (Niney) isn’t getting anywhere until he finds an unpublished novel and claims it as his own, a move that leads to fame, fortune, blackmail, and ultimately, murder; a clever, twisty thriller that benefits from a splendidly nervous, anxious performance from Niney, A Perfect Man may have many familiar elements, but it’s a movie with a great deal of style, and it holds the attention in such a way that there are times when you won’t realise you’re holding your breath.

Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary (1953) / D: Maurice Elvey / 80m

Cast: David Tomlinson, Diana Dors, Bonar Colleano, Sidney James, Diana Decker, Audrey Freeman, MacDonald Parke

Rating: 5/10 – returning to the UK with his new bride (Decker), US soldier Laurie Vining (Colleano) is horrified to learn that he may still be married to his first wife, glamour girl Candy (Dors), a situation that leads to his desperately trying to avoid his new bride – or anyone else – from finding out; a bedroom farce based on a successful stage play, Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary has dated somewhat, but for fans of the cast and this type of Fifties UK comedy, there’s much to enjoy, from the frantic mugging of Colleano and Tomlinson, Elvey’s efficient direction, and a surprisingly nuanced performance from Dors.

Eliminators (2016) / D: James Nunn / 94m

Cast: Scott Adkins, Wade Barrett, Daniel Caltagirone, James Cosmo, Ty Glaser, Olivia Mace, Lily Ann Stubbs

Rating: 3/10 – when a home invasion means his Witness Protection identity is compromised, ex-Federal Agent Martin Parker (Adkins) finds himself the target of a hitman (Barrett) and forced to go on the run; a WWE Films production shot on location in and around London, Eliminators is a bog-standard actioner that stretches credulity, invites disbelief, and warrants avoidance as it does its best to cram in as many dull action scenes as it can in ninety minutes, and serves as yet another reminder that being a WWE superstar doesn’t mean you can act.

Giant from the Unknown (1958) / D: Richard E. Cunha / 77m

aka The Diablo Giant; Giant from Devil’s Crag; Giant from Diablo Point

Cast: Edward Kemmer, Sally Fraser, Bob Steele, Morris Ankrum, Buddy Baer, Jolene Brand, Gary Crutcher, Billy Dix

Rating: 4/10 – animal mutilations and murder plague a small town – and that’s before a giant Spanish conquistador is released from suspended animation by a lightning bolt, and threatens both the town’s inhabitants and the research team trying to ascertain if the legend about him is true; not the best example of a Fifties “creature feature”, Giant from the Unknown takes so long to get going that it’s nearly over before it’s begun, features a raft of irritating performances, and is so flatly directed by Cunha that once the Giant is awakened, you can’t help but pray that he’s the first victim.

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) / D: James Bobin / 113m

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Rhys Ifans, Matt Lucas, Lindsay Duncan, Leo Bill, Ed Speelers, Geraldine James, Andrew Scott, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Barbara Windsor, Timothy Spall, Matt Vogel, Paul Whitehouse

Rating: 5/10 – Alice (Wasikowska) returns to Wonderland to save the Mad Hatter (Depp) from suicidal depression(!) and the attentions of Time (Cohen) and the Red Queen (Carter) who are working in tandem and holding the Hatter’s family hostage for no convincing reason you can think of; another sequel no one asked for (and nowhere near as successful as its predecessor), Alice Through the Looking Glass is ravishing to look at, boasts some fine visual effects, and a great performance by Cohen, but everything else is a mess: bloated, derivative, witless, and with yet another wasteful performance from Depp (who clearly can’t be bothered).

Hard Target 2 (2016) / D: Roel Reiné / 104m

Cast: Scott Adkins, Robert Knepper, Rhona Mitra, Temuera Morrison, Ann Truong, Adam Saunders, Jamie Timony, Peter Hardy

Rating: 4/10 – ex-MMA fighter Wes Baylor (Adkins) finds himself in Myanmar with one simple objective: reach the Thai border while he’s pursued by a motley group of “hunters” who are out to kill him; a movie that definitely comes under the heading of “another sequel no one asked for”, Hard Target 2 is betrayed by its low budget origins, a script that lurches from one unmemorable action scene to another, and Knepper’s one-note portrayal of the villain.

Nine Lives (2016) / D: Barry Sonnenfeld / 87m

Cast: Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Garner, Christopher Walken, Robbie Amell, Malina Weissman, Cheryl Hines, Mark Consuelos, Talitha Bateman

Rating: 3/10 – businessman Tom Brand (Spacey) has no time for his wife (Garner) and daughter (Weissman), so what better way for him to learn the value of family (and some humility in the process) than by stranding his mind in the body of a cat?; the kind of inane, superficial comedy that Hollywood churns out with mindless regularity, Nine Lives gives Garfield 2 (2006) a run for its money in the stupid stakes, and hammers another nail into the coffin of Barry Sonnenfeld’s once-glorious career.

Flight to Mars (1951) / D: Lesley Selander / 72m

Cast: Marguerite Chapman, Cameron Mitchell, Arthur Franz, Virginia Huston, John Litel, Morris Ankrum, Richard Gaines, Lucille Barkley, Robert Barrat

Rating: 5/10 – the first manned flight to Mars gets there safely only to learn that the planet is inhabited, and by a human-like race that may or may not have an ulterior motive for helping them return to Earth; early-Fifties sci-fi hokum that throws in a tepid romance and some very, very short skirts for the female cast, Flight to Mars retains an odd charm – perhaps because of its naïve approach – that helps alleviate some of the more daffy moments the script insists on doling out.

Mercy (2014) / D: Peter Cornwell / 79m

Cast: Frances O’Connor, Shirley Knight, Chandler Riggs, Joel Courtney, Mark Duplass, Dylan McDermott, Amanda Walsh, Hana Hayes, Pepper Binkley

Rating: 4/10 – after a spell in a nursing home, Grandma Mercy (Knight) comes home to be looked after by her family – daughter Rebecca (O’Connor) and grandsons George (Riggs) and Buddy (Courtney) – but soon exhibits strange behaviour, behaviour that includes warning George that a supernatural force is coming to get him; adapted from the short story Gramma by Stephen King (yes, him again), Mercy aims for creepy and menacing, yet succeeds instead in being confused and uninspired, and with laboured direction and performances, a situation that devotees of King adaptations will appreciate, having been there many times before.

Poster of the Week – Julie (1956)

28 Wednesday Dec 2016

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Doris Day, Louis Jourdan, Mystery, Poster of the week, Thriller

At first glance, the poster for Julie appears to lack anything that would make the movie a must-see, but that would be doing it a disservice, because while it does seem like it’s not even trying, there’s much more going on than you might be aware of.

A thriller where Day’s terrified wife tries to escape the murderous clutches of her husband (played by Louis Jourdan), the poster adopts a psychological approach to the plot that actually makes the movie a more enticing prospect than it actually is. First, there’s the image of Julie and husband Lyle shown in the top left hand corner. There’s a possibility that they’re enjoying a romantic clinch, but upon closer inspection it’s clear that Day is trying to resist Jourdan’s “advances”. It’s all you need to realise that something’s not quite right between them, and it acts as a kind of shorthand for the central dynamic that the movie will expand on.

But where the poster really excels is with its depiction of Day running – for her life – along the zigzag line that dominates the poster (even more so than Day’s shocked face). With her efforts to escape Jourdan precipitated by that dangerous embrace, the poster shows her running away from him, and getting further and further away, but it also highlights her fear and distress at the situation she’s found herself in. Her body language makes it all too obvious. This is the crux of the movie: Julie’s attempt to escape from Lyle, to save herself, and the poster and its kinetic imagery perfectly encapsulates the urgency of the character’s need to find safety.

Less successful – or necessary – is the inclusion of Day’s face and its shocked expression. There’s a phrase: “over-egging the pudding” that applies perfectly here, as Day’s head takes up too much room on the poster as a whole, and almost takes attention away from the clever inclusion of the fleeing Julie and her descent of the zigzag line. She looks like she’s just been told something so shocking that she doesn’t know quite how to respond to it, and while it’s easy to understand the image’s inclusion, it dampens the carefully constructed impact of the rest of the poster.

For the rest of the poster, it’s business as usual, with the four main cast members listed on the left and Day’s name given a slight twist to differentiate her from everyone else (black lettering not green). The title is given a pleasing orange tone to temper the awkward font used, and there’s the unsurprising highlighting of Arwin Productions, Doris Day’s own production company. And only then do writer/director Andrew L. Stone and producer Martin Melcher get a look in.

Lastly, there’s the tagline, a question designed to pique the potential audience’s interest, and one whose answer can be construed as “something bad” (as though the images of Day running for her life weren’t a big enough clue). It’s the kind of question that will always get people thinking, and hopefully intrigued enough to watch the movie. Overall it’s a poster that successfully advertises the movie it’s been tasked with promoting, and it does so in a far more subtle, and impressive way than this one:

The Hollow Point (2016)

22 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bullets, Cartel, Drama, Gonzalo López-Gallego, Ian McShane, Jim Belushi, John Leguizamo, Mexico, Patrick Wilson, Review, Thriller

D: Gonzalo López-Gallego / 97m

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Lynn Collins, Jim Belushi, David H. Stevens, Karli Hall, Derek Boone, Nathan Stevens

In a small, dusty town near the US-Mexico border there’s a new sheriff about to settle in. He’s a replacement for the current sheriff, Leland Kilbaught (McShane) who’s been suspended pending an investigation into his shooting and killing a young man, Clive Mercy (Nathan Stevens), attempting to smuggle bullets across the US-Mexico border. The new sheriff, Wallace (Wilson), brings with him some emotional baggage, thanks to an old relationship with Marla (Collins) that still prompts some animosity on her part. While Wallace attempts to fit back into his hometown, Clive’s brother Ken (David H. Stevens) waits in Mexico for him to arrive. When his contact from the Mexican cartel threatens him with death if his brother doesn’t turn up, Ken figures he’s got nothing to lose. He kills the contact and steals a load of money in the process.

Ken’s actions have a knock-on effect he couldn’t have predicted. Wallace begins to look into his brother’s case and starts to put two and two together. Figuring out Ken’s involvement, Wallace begins to look for him, unaware that the cartel have tasked a killer called Atticus (Leguizamo) with getting to him first. Wallace and Atticus find Ken at the same time; in the ensuing fight, Atticus cuts off Wallace’s right hand. Wallace escapes and manages to reach Kilbaught’s home. While his successor recovers, Kilbaught discovers that a local businessman, a car dealer called Shep Diaz (Belushi), is behind the runs the Mercy brothers have been making. With his dealership on the rocks, Diaz has been using the smuggling operation to prop it up. But the cartel aren’t satisfied that he wasn’t involved in Ken’s actions, especially when the money he stole isn’t found straight away. With Wallace determined to bring Diaz to justice, and protect Marla who becomes unfortunately involved in it all, Atticus is sent once more to clean up all the loose ends…

Fans of slow-burn, violent crime thrillers set in the American Southwest will find much to enjoy in López-Gallego’s latest feature. Assembling a great cast and setting them to work on a script that doesn’t provide anything new in the way the story pans out, but which nevertheless is admirable for its simplicity, López-Gallego has made a movie that resonates far beyond anything you might expect. One of the main reasons for this, is that well assembled cast. Wilson – a last-minute replacement for Timothy Olyphant – excels as the new sheriff who’s tested by the loss of his hand, but who won’t give up protecting the love of his life – even if she doesn’t want anything to do with him. Wilson has a knack for playing the everyday hero, and he uses that knack to provide an unexpectedly riveting performance, and one that makes the viewer wish he’d make more of these kinds of movies instead of any more Conjuring or Insidious sequels.

He’s more than ably supported by the likes of McShane – all grizzled disregard for the law and its finer distinctions – and Leguizamo as the hired killer who just won’t stop. Both are fine actors, and they inhabit their roles like second skins, with Leguizamo in particular, reminding us what a dangerous presence he can be. But both men are upstaged by a resurgent Jim Belushi, his performance as the duplicitous car dealer, Diaz, a shot in the arm for a career that has seen him take on too many undemanding minor roles in recent years. Diaz is as amoral as they come, and Belushi plays him to perfection, highlighting the sweaty, greedy machinations that will ultimately betray him.

The script – by newcomer Nils Lyew – plays with relative notions of revenge and karma, property and theft, and sneaks in a thin line of religiosity via Atticus’s relationship with Lilly. He further grounds the various relationships – criminal and otherwise – through keen observation and how each character deals with a variety of physical pain and emotional distress. The self-contained nature of events, and the way in which Lyew isolates the characters against the bleached desert backdrop, adds further to the sense of tragedy that percolates through the narrative once Kilbaught fires his gun. And that last scene? Justice or revenge? Actually, it’s both, and completely understandable as both, thanks to the previous interaction of the characters involved.

It’s a very violent movie in places, and López-Gallego doesn’t shy away from showing both the violence and the often bloody aftermath (though one character does appear to cheat death very conveniently at one point). Consequences are the order of the day, for everyone, and no matter how hard they try to avoid them, those consequences have a way of catching up with them and adding an extra layer on top. Even Wallace, who becomes the anti-hero of the story, insists on taking a path that will lead to more and more pain, but he’s a fatalistic anti-hero, and in his own way, just as stubbornly recidivist as Kilbaught.

Set against a pitiless desert backdrop, The Hollow Point has enough tension and undiluted malice for two movies, but López-Gallego is more than up to the task of maintaining that tension and then stretching it further, making some scenes feel hyper-realistic in the process. This isn’t a bad thing, as it all adds to the grim sense of inevitability that powers each confrontation and showdown, and each twist and turn in the narrative. As a result, the viewer is never too sure just how things will turn out, or even if the (relatively) good guys will triumph in the end. López-Gallego is also the movie’s editor, and he adopts an initially measured approach that develops over the course of the movie into a more rapid, insistent rhythm. It also helps that he has the assistance of regular DoP José David Montero, whose lensing brings out the rugged beauty of the desert surroundings, and the rundown, seen-better-days façades of the town and its buildings.

Rating: 8/10 – an underrated gem that could all too easily fail to atrract the attention it deserves, The Hollow Point benefits from a clutch of great performances, a tough, uncompromising script, and the careful ministrations of its director; it’s rare to see such a moderately budgeted project achieve so much and with such apparent ease, but this really is a movie that deserves a wider audience.

Allied (2016)

16 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Brad Pitt, Drama, French Morocco, Jared Harris, Marion Cotillard, Review, Robert Zemeckis, Spy, Thriller, World War II

D: Robert Zemeckis / 124m

Cast: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Betts, Camille Cottin, August Diehl, Matthew Goode, Thierry Frémont, Anton Lesser

French Morocco, 1940. Max Vatan (Pitt), a Canadian officer attached to the British army, is on a mission to assassinate a Nazi ambassador. He rendezvous’s with a French resistance fighter called Marianne Beauséjour (Cotillard). Posing as a married couple, they obtain an invitation to a party that will be attended by the ambassador and several other high-ranking Nazi officials. In the meantime, their posing as a married couple begins to awaken in each of them feelings for the other. When the mission is over, Max and Marianne realise they have fallen in love; he asks her to come to London so they can marry. After a few months waiting for the red tape to be worked through, Marianne is allowed to join Max, and when she does she reveals that she’s expecting their child.

With their child, a girl, born during an air raid, Max and Marianne’s life begins to settle down into a more sedate existence. With Max rumoured to be in the running for a promotion, he’s called in one day by his superior officer, Frank Heslop (Harris). Frank introduces him to an S.O.E. operative (McBurney) who wastes no time in telling Max that they suspect Marianne is a German spy. Max refuses to believe it, but he’s charged with aiding the S.O.E. in their investigation. He has to receive a telephone call later that night, write down the details of the call and leave them where Marianne will see them, and then wait forty-eight hours until the S.O.E. will know one way or the other if the details have been transmitted to Germany. And there’s a further catch: if Marianne is revealed to be a German spy, then Max has to be the one to kill her.

Despite being told not to, the next day Max decides to launch his own investigation. Aiming to prove Marianne’s innocence, he tracks down a British officer (Goode) who knew her before Max did. But the officer is unable to help him. At a party they’re hosting that night, Max sees Marianne talking to an old man (Lesser) he doesn’t recognise; the man turns out to be a jeweller, but Max’s suspicions are increased. With time running out, Max has no option but to travel to Occupied France and seek out the one man he’s certain can tell him if Marianne is who she says she is, a resistance fighter named Paul Delamare (Frémont). He finds the man in gaol, and learns something about Marianne that will answer the question of her guilt or innocence once and for all.

Some directors – many, in fact – have careers that initially show a lot of promise, are very successful once they’ve made four or five movies and have become internationally well-known, but then find their later projects failing to attract both the same audience levels and continuing critical acclaim. Robert Zemeckis is just such a director. Used Cars (1980) is a great, largely unsung comedy that features one of Kurt Russell’s best performances. The Back to the Future trilogy cemented his place in movie history, and Forrest Gump (1994) reinforced his stature as a mainstream director. But since then, and with the possible exception of Cast Away (2000), Zemeckis’ output – including three excursions into the world of performance motion capture – has been less than stellar, and The Walk (2015), a movie that looked as if it could arrest the slow decline in Zemeckis’ career, proved not to be up to the task.

And sadly, with Allied, Zemeckis has still to reverse that decline. Working from a tired, ineffective screenplay by perennial under-performer Steven Knight, Zemeckis has tried to make an old-fashioned romantic drama that harks back to classic wartime movies such as Casablanca (1942), while also presenting said drama with a more modern visual sheen. The mix, though, doesn’t aid a movie that is difficult to engage with, and which never does enough to make you care about either Max or Marianne. With no one to root for, Knight’s screenplay becomes a matter of pushing the basic storyline through to an incredibly unsatisfactory ending, one that will have audiences shaking their heads in disbelief (though there are plenty of other occasions where they’ll be doing this as well). And Zemeckis, a director whose visual acuity shouldn’t be in doubt, doesn’t seem able to enhance the narrative in any meaningful way, leaving Don Burgess’s cinematography to look and feel as tired as everything else – which is an incredible thing to realise, as Burgess is Zemeckis’ usual DoP, and has lensed non-Zemeckis movies such as Enchanted (2007) and The Book of Eli (2010).

Against this surprisingly dour visual backdrop, Pitt and Cotillard are left “holding the bag” as they try to inject a sense of immediacy into proceedings, and also try to convince the audience that they’re involved in a great love affair. Thanks to Knight’s script, though, neither star has a chance, as they’re hampered by some awful dialogue – “There’s a thing called the soul. I’ve looked into her soul.” – and the kind of motivations that don’t sound credible once they’ve been said out loud. Cotillard fares better than Pitt, but that’s only because she has less to do. Left stranded by virtue of having to carry the movie’s second half on his own, Pitt looks pained and unhappy, and though this could be attributed to his character’s state of mind, it always seems more likely that it’s a reflection of the star’s awareness that the movie isn’t turning out as well as it should.

The rest of the cast pop in and out of the narrative, often for one or two scenes, and fail to make any impact. Harris is the kind of gruff, good-natured senior officer we’d all like to think existed at the Ministry of Defense, McBurney plays an historical predecessor of the role he portrayed in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), and Caplan is tucked away at the back of a few scenes as Max’s (apparently) openly lesbian sister, Bridget. While some of these characters are important in terms of moving the story forward, none of them have any depth, and again, thanks to Knight’s tortuous way with dialogue, none of them sound convincing (check out the dialogue Harris is stuck with in the movie’s denouement).

With Zemeckis bringing very little to the project other than his name and an occasional flash of the visual style that he’s most famous for, it’s difficult to work out what attracted him to the project, and very seriously, why he completed it. Coming so soon after The Walk, perhaps he didn’t have as much prep time as he’s used to. Perhaps the initial concept became altered and irretrievably lost during production, leaving Zemeckis stuck with seeing it through. Perhaps he did, genuinely feel that this was a project that he could make an entertaining, thrilling, exciting movie out of. Whatever the reason for his participation, this leaden, dreary, unappealing movie is the result, and it does the man and his career no favours at all.

Rating: 5/10 – yet to recoup its $85 million budget at the international box office, Allied is a movie that tests its audience’s patience, and gives it very little to care about; a dismal experience overall, and a reminder that the combination of a big name director and big name stars doesn’t always guarantee good value or an entertaining couple of hours.

Morgan (2016)

10 Saturday Dec 2016

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Anya Taylor-Joy, Boyd Holbrook, Drama, Experiment, Kate Mara, L9, Luke Scott, Michelle Yeoh, Paul Giamatti, Review, Sci-fi, Thriller, Toby Jones

D: Luke Scott / 92m

Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Boyd Holbrook, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Michael Yare, Chris Sullivan, Vinette Robinson, Brian Cox

As the song has it, “If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…” Not once you see Kate Mara’s risk assessment consultant, Lee Weathers, driving to a facility hidden deep in the woods where a science experiment, codenamed L9, is going badly wrong. The experiment in question is the creation of a human/nano technology hybrid. The hybrid (Taylor-Joy) looks like a young woman, is called Morgan, is actually five years old, and has recently stabbed one of the team, Kathy (Leigh), repeatedly in the face and blinded them in their left eye. With a psych evaluation planned to take place that will determine whether or not the project continues, Lee’s role is to make the final decision, either to continue the work or to shut it down.

For everyone’s safety, Morgan is confined to a room that has toughened glass from wall to wall, and floor to ceiling. She appears to understand the need for this, but the team are overly apologetic about the incident with Kathy. They all state that it was their fault and not Morgan’s; they should have known better, should have been paying better attention to her current mental state. Lee takes none of this for granted, but does accept that they treat Morgan more as a human being than as a thing. When the psychiatrist, Dr Alan Shapiro (Giamatti), arrives the next day to conduct his assessment, his approach goads Morgan to anger, and a violent outburst means that Lee has no option but to shut down the project.

She’s stopped, though, by the team. Rendered unconscious, she awakes in Morgan’s safe room, while the team’s own efforts to control the situation – and Morgan – start to unravel at an alarming rate. By the time Lee finds a way out of the room, Morgan’s determination to be free from the confines of the facility has proven disastrous for the team, and she makes her escape, taking along Amy (Leslie), who is the one member of the team that Morgan considers is her friend. But Lee is equally determined to find Morgan and make sure that the project is shut down once and for all.

Morgan is director Luke Scott’s first feature, a step up in terms of money and opportunity following his clever and impressive short movie, Loom (2012). That movie augured well for the future, but with Morgan it seems that Ridley Scott’s son has been let down by a poorly realised script, and the faint whiff of post-production interference. There’s little about the movie that works as well as it should, and long-time fans of this type of speculative sci-fi will be dismayed by the many ways in which the narrative shies away from making any kind of moral statement.

Another screenplay picked out from the Black List (this time 2014’s), Morgan begins with a shocking act of violence, and continues with not one character reacting or behaving normally in its wake. Everyone carries on as if it was a minor incident, one that’s hardly worth bothering about. Morgan behaving strangely is to be expected, but when the team behave even more strangely than she does, and right from the start, then it only serves to undermine the drama that follows. Only Michelle Yeoh’s mother figure acts as if she has any idea of the consequences to Morgan’s actions, but she’s allotted so little screen time that she becomes the occasional, and token, voice of reason, trotted out to offer a limited balance to everyone else’s strange behaviour.

Things are further hampered by the character of Lee, played with stony-faced antipathy by Mara. It’s a role that’s difficult to talk about without revealing too much of why the character is at the facility in the first place, but while she’s an outsider given over to remaining so, Mara provides a better performance than expected, giving Lee an unexpected likeability even though she’s pretty much there to conduct a corporate hatchet job if necessary. As the movie progresses, her minimal social skills are stripped away, and Mara again strikes a careful balance between “assassin for hire” and consultant doing her job. She’s matched by Taylor-Joy, whose bleached looks and unnerving stare never quite manage to morph into the features of someone you could trust implicitly. Though her motivation becomes more and more strained as the movie continues, her performance highlights the emotions that Morgan has managed to express, even though she can’t understand them properly.

Alas, the rest of the cast aren’t given nearly enough to make their roles worthwhile, and as you might expect, some are just waiting around until Morgan decides that everyone is surplus to requirements. The final half hour ups the ante in terms of action, and Mara and Taylor-Joy enjoy some well-choreographed fight scenes, but even then there’s a distinct lack of tension or energy. Scott seems unable to inject the necessary spark to make things that much more exciting, and the movie suffers as a result. As it heads towards an inevitable conclusion, one that it’s set up right from the moment we first see Lee in her car, Morgan begins to look and sound and feel like another great idea for a movie given the least amount of commitment by all involved. That’s not entirely true, but there are large stretches where the viewer won’t be able to shake off that feeling at all.

Watching Morgan, there’s an obvious correlation with Ex Machina (2015), but this is a different movie with a different agenda, and nowhere near as complex. The script by Seth W. Owen isn’t as fully rounded or well thought out as it needs to be, and Scott never really finds a way to avoid the pitfalls that Owen has left in situ. And watching the movie unfold, and the speed with which it changes direction from a somewhat intriguing sci-fi thriller to all-out action drama, it does smack a little of interference in the post-production stages, as if the producers had realised that the movie was in danger of losing its audience altogether if it didn’t change tack. On the plus side, the movie does have a decent score courtesy of Max Richter, and Tom McCullagh’s production design does help to anchor the movie in a more realistic fashion than the script does.

Rating: 4/10 – what could have been an intriguing, thought-provoking movie is scuppered by poor narrative choices, a lack of credible characterisations, and a shift in tone two thirds in that alters the movie’s trajectory as if no one would notice; a good idea given a lacklustre presentation, Morgan will only satisfy those viewers who don’t expect much from sci-fi thrillers, or are comfortable looking at things only on a superficial level.

Hell or High Water (2016)

05 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bank robbers, Ben Foster, Brothers, Chris Pine, David Mackenzie, Drama, Jeff Bridges, Review, Texas, Thriller, Western

D: David Mackenzie / 102m

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham, Marin Ireland, John-Paul Howard, Kristin Berg, Katy Mixon, Dale Dickey, Kevin Rankin

Toby and Tanner Howard (Pine, Foster) are brothers who carry out bank robberies. They target branches of the Texas Midlands Bank, hitting two of them in the same morning. They are working to a plan of Toby’s devising, and they cover their tracks to the extent of burying the cars they use in the robberies, and taking the money across the state line into Oklahoma and laundering it at an Indian casino. Once the money has been laundered, they then get the casino to issue their “winnings” in the form of a cheque… which is made out to Texas Midlands Bank. Why? Because thanks to a reverse mortgage provided by the bank to the brothers’ recently deceased mother, their ranch will suffer foreclosure if the outstanding mortgage isn’t paid. And that’s without the oil that’s been found on their ranch as well…

The police investigation is headed up by Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Bridges) and his long-suffering partner, Alberto Parker (Birmingham). Hamilton is near to retirement, and his experience tells him that the bank robbers have a specific sum they’re aiming for; once they’ve got it they’ll stop – even though Tanner carries out an impromptu robbery on another bank. Realising that they’ve got a beef with Texas Midlands Bank, Hamilton persuades Parker to stake out one of the bank’s other branches, and they wait for the robbers to show up. With only one more robbery needed to net them the rest of the money they need, Toby and Tanner arrive at another branch altogether, only to find it’s been closed down. They decide to rob another branch in a bigger town, which also means a bigger risk.

The robbery is not a complete success. The brothers get the money they need but find themselves pursued by gun-toting locals. They manage to split up, and soon Tanner finds himself followed by the police. As he heads into the nearby hills in an attempt to escape, Toby takes the money and tries to get across the border and return to the Indian casino. But first there’s the small matter of a police checkpoint…

A modern day Western set in West Texas (but shot mostly in Eastern New Mexico), Hell or High Water‘s sombre screenplay used to be known as Comancheria. Neither title really does justice to a story that revolves around money and the way in which its importance is felt keenly by those who don’t have it, or how casually it’s regarded by those that do have it. This part of West Texas is peppered with roadside signs offering both financial and religious solutions for dealing with personal debt, but none of these signs have been put there by the banks or the loan companies that are deemed responsible for so much of the debt and deprivation that the average West Texan endures as part of their daily life.

But Toby Howard isn’t going to accept the loss of his family’s ranch (or the oil found below it). He’s not going to become another victim of the financial institutions that plague the area with their fire-sale mentality and lack of humanity. Along with his brother, Tanner, he’s going to fight back, he’s going to make Texas Midlands Bank accountable to him. It’s a classic David vs Goliath tale, except that in this case, Goliath doesn’t even know he’s in a fight. Taylor Sheridan’s perceptive, yet harsh screenplay makes it clear who the villain of the piece is, and it’s not the brothers, even if Hamilton and Parker firmly believe they are. And it adds to the harshness of the story that Hamilton never stops viewing the Howards as villains, even when he begins to work out why they’re robbing banks in the first place. Where the viewer can have a large degree of sympathy for their plight and their solution, Hamilton has only one judgment to give: they’re criminals, pure and simple.

Mackenzie keeps things this simple throughout, and does so against a backdrop of financial ruin and macho posturing that serves as a vindication for Tanner and Hamilton’s behaviour. Tanner’s a hothead, unpredictable and rash; you never know if he’s going to jeopardise Toby’s plan or see it through without incident. Foster has played this kind of role before, but here he injects a sense of melancholy that makes Tanner more tragic than perhaps he has a right to be. It makes his performance all the more impressive: Foster knows that Tanner is as close to a stereotype as this movie gets, but he ignores that and makes the character as intriguing and beguiling in an off-kilter way as he can.

Bridges is equally impressive, his brooding, jowly features looking out and around from behind his sunglasses, his massively non-PC comments about his partner’s racial background funny, but only in a “long-time married couple” sense. But Sheridan’s script doesn’t let Hamilton have it all his own way. When he says, proudly, “This is what they call white man’s intuition,” Alberto is quick to respond, and in a perfectly deadpan manner: “Sometimes a blind pig finds a truffle.” All humour aside, though, Bridges projects a stern, authoritarian personality for Hamilton; he’s a man caught at the end of a career that has seen so many changes it’s almost overwhelming, so much so that once his retirement arrives, he can’t rest or leave the past behind.

These two roles, and the complexity that both actors bring to them, threaten to leave Pine way behind in the acting stakes, but he’s more than a match as the mastermind behind it all, his downtrodden, put-upon character finally taking a chance on himself in a desperate time of need. Pine isn’t exactly the most intuitive of actors – you can see the wheels turning in most of his performances – but here he does something quite remarkable: he imparts a stillness to the role that makes Toby all the more worthy of our time and attention. Foster may have the flashier role, but it’s Pine who provides the moral and emotional compass for the movie to navigate by.

All this is set against some stunning desert landscapes, perfectly lensed and lit by DoP Giles Nuttgens, and acting as unconcerned characters occasionally drafted into the story for effect. Those wide open expanses, with their unending vistas and rippling heat hazes speak of a far-off country where the promise of a better life is just over the horizon – if only the brothers could get there. But Toby’s plan is much more prosaic than that, and Mackenzie uses the character’s yearning for a better life for his children to highlight Toby’s innate nobility. Mackenzie and Nuttgens are aided by exceptional editing by Jake Roberts – the movie has an elegiac feel throughout that lends itself so well to the movie’s internal rhythm – and there’s a wonderfully melancholy, rueful score courtesy of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Rating: 9/10 – a movie that rewards the viewer on so many levels, Hell or High Water takes its financial vigilante characters down a hard road indeed, but makes the prize as compelling and profound as possible, and without dumbing down the narrative; the three leads are magnificent, and the whole mise-en-scene is handled with care and confidence by all concerned, leading to a movie that is by turns haunting, complex, thrilling, and emotionally draining.

Come and Find Me (2016)

02 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aaron Paul, Annabelle Wallis, Disappearance, Drama, Garret Dillahunt, Mystery, Review, Romance, Thriller, Zack Whedon

D: Zack Whedon / 112m

Cast: Aaron Paul, Annabelle Wallis, Garret Dillahunt, Dean Redman, Zachary Knighton, Enver Gjokaj, Terry Chen, Michael Kopsa

The Black List is an annual survey of the “most liked” motion picture screenplays not yet produced. 2012 was a pretty good year, with screenplays for the likes of Arrival, John Wick, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Hell or High Water all making the list. But so did the screenplay for Come and Find Me, which just goes to show that the Black List doesn’t always get it right.

Written by Zack Whedon (brother of Josh), the script aims for being several things at once: a romantic drama, a thriller, and a mystery. In addition, it seeks to include meditations on what it is to really know someone, and the permanence of love. It’s an ambitious script, and one that has clear intentions to be more than just another run-of-the-mill why-has-my-girlfriend-suddenly-disappeared-when-we-were-so-happy-together? style of movie. Signs of these intentions can be seen throughout Come and Find Me’s drawn-out running time, but however effective these elements may have been on the page, it’s Whedon the director who sabotages any chances they had of being just as effective on the screen.

At the beginning, Aaron Paul’s graphic web designer, David, gets on a bus where he spots an attractive blonde (Wallis). When she gets off the bus, so does he. He follows her. Eventually she turns and asks him bluntly if he’s following her. David looks appalled, says no, and carries on past her. Soon, she is following him until they reach a house that they both claim is where they live. David opens the door, the woman goes in without being invited. Inside they find a photograph that shows they know each other… Now, at this point, viewers who have seen way too many movies will know exactly what happens next. But for anyone who hasn’t seen way too many movies, this is an exciting start: how can two people live in the same house and apparently not know each other? Is this going to be some kind of variation on The Lake House (2006)?

Well, no, it isn’t. If Whedon had written a mystery drama that evolved from this opening sequence, and had kept the mystery unfolding piece by tantalising piece then Come and Find Me would have been an entertaining, enjoyable movie. But instead, he explains away this early “mystery” and goes in a different direction altogether – but one we’ve seen in the movies, and on television, and in books and plays, time and time again. And he doesn’t bring anything new to the table, or find a way of presenting his tale with any kind of visual flair or panache.

After watching Come and Find Me for a while – say, twenty minutes – the average viewer will be wondering if the bland shooting style, with its dour lighting scheme and flat imagery, is going to continue throughout. Well, it does. Whedon’s framing is a major letdown (which makes you wonder if DoP Sean Steigemeier had any say in the matter), and he constantly shoots from a low angle, as if this will add to the drama unfolding on screen. But all it does is prove annoying and distracting, and make the average viewer wonder if Steigemeier’s back was okay, what with all this low level camera work. With its drab interior design adding to the movie’s visual problems, even when it heads out into the countryside, Whedon and his crew do their best to downplay any of Nature’s beauty. A shot from the top of a hillside looking toward a row of other hills should be a jaw-dropper; instead it’s literally, just a backdrop.

But even that isn’t the worst of the movie’s problems under Whedon’s stewardship. The central mystery, once it’s explained, proves to be underwhelming, but there’s still a long way to go as David engages in a less-than-riveting series of bluff and counter-bluff in his efforts to bring the bad guys to… to… well, actually, we never know if he’s looking for justice, revenge, a combination of the two, or something else entirely, as Whedon doesn’t think to tell us. Throughout, David has one motivation: to find out what happened to his girlfriend, Claire. But he does so in such a ham-fisted, you-won’t-believe-he-did-that kind of way that it’s a wonder he gets as far as he does. He’s a passive-aggressive victim who’s never as ahead of the game as he thinks he is, and as a result, and despite Paul’s best efforts, he remains unsympathetic throughout.

Paul is a good choice for the character of David, but like so much of the movie, is undermined by Whedon’s inexperience in the director’s chair. Everyone else is a supporting character, and though the likes of Dillahunt and Gjokaj do their best with less than challenging material, there’s no chance than anyone is going to stand out from the crowd. Even Wallis, whose role is largely seen through a variety of flashbacks, gets to be less than a fully fledged character and more of a cypher; or more awkwardly, a McGuffin.

When it comes to first-time writer/directors, Whedon is another in a long line of movie makers who believe they can get it right on their maiden attempt, but often the opposite is true. Such is the case with Come and Find Me. Perhaps there should be a moratorium on first-time writer/directors. Perhaps directors shouldn’t make their own scripts until they’ve been directing for a while, and have worked on other writers’ scripts. Perhaps then they’ll have a better understanding of how to assemble a movie without undermining it at the very same time. Who knows? It might lead to them making better movies.

Rating: 4/10 – leaden, and with an ending that will leave most viewers slack-jawed through disbelief, Come and Find Me is a misfire on almost every level; lacking a clear purpose, or any depth or subtext, the movie plods along, then stumbles along, then plods along again etc. in its quest to be an absorbing mystery thriller, when it’s plain to see that it’s so far from that ambition as to be in a different universe altogether.

Monthly Roundup – November 2016

01 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Adam Schindler, All'ultimo sangue, Andrew Stanton, Animation, Annalise Basso, Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies, Beth Riesgraf, Bury Them Deep, Colin Firth, Comedy, Craig Hill, Dominik Hartl, Drama, Elizabeth Reaser, Ellen DeGeneres, Ettore Manni, Felicity Jones, Finding Dory, Fort Osage, Gabriela Marcinková, Home invasion, Horror, Inferno (2016), Laurie Calvert, Lesley Selander, Literary adaptation, Mike Flanagan, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Paolo Moffa, Patrick Dempsey, Plague virus, Prequel, Renée Zellweger, Rod Cameron, Romance, Romantic comedy, Ron Howard, Rory Culkin, Sequel, Sharon Maguire, Shut In, Ski-ing, Thriller, Tom Hanks, Western

Bury Them Deep (1968) / D: Paolo Moffa (as John Byrd) / 109m

Original title: All’ultimo sangue

Cast: Craig Hill, Ettore Manni, Giovanni Cianfriglia (as Ken Wood), José Greci, Francesco Santovetti, Luciano Doria, Pino Patti (as Giuseppe Sorrentino), Ruggero Salvadori

Rating: 5/10 – when an Army payroll is stolen by notorious outlaw Billy Gun (Cianfriglia), expert tracker Clive Norton (Hill) is hired to get it back, but in the process he finds himself up against a variety of obstacles, not the least of which is Billy’s brother, El Chaleco (Manni); an average Spaghetti Western given a much needed dose of energy thanks to Manni’s muscular, spirited performance as the conniving El Chaleco, Bury Them Deep rarely rises above its perfunctory level, and despite cramming in several lengthy action sequences.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016) / D: Mike Flanagan / 99m

Cast: Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas, Parker Mack

Rating: 6/10 – it’s 1965, and the Zander family – single mother Alice (Reaser) and her two daughters, Lina (Basso) and Doris (Wilson) – become imperilled by an evil spirit thanks to the misguided use of a ouija board; a prequel to the events seen in Ouija (2014), this does nothing new in terms of scares and special effects, but thanks to the involvement of Flanagan, at least gives you characters you can actually relate to and care about, and which is a rare and valuable thing indeed.

Finding Dory (2016) / D: Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane / 97m

Cast: Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Ed O’Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Hayden Rolence, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Sloane Murray, Idris Elba, Dominic West, Bob Peterson, Kate McKinnon, Bill Hader, Sigourney Weaver

Rating: 7/10 – Dory the blue tang fish (DeGeneres) starts having flashbacks to when she was younger and lived with her parents, and these in turn prompt her to try and find them, much to the continuing consternation of clown fish Marlin (Brooks) and his more positive son Nemo (Rolence); a sequel to one of Pixar’s most cherished movies, and one of this year’s most anticipated releases, Finding Dory lacks the original movie’s winning charm, and settles instead for being a guilty pleasure retread of Finding Nemo, while being saved from a lower score thanks to DeGeneres wonderful, and still inspired, vocal performance.

Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) / D: Sharon Maguire / 123m

Cast: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Sarah Solemani, Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Neil Pearson, Joanna Scanlan, Kate O’Flynn, Celia Imrie, Ed Sheeran

Rating: 7/10 – at the dreadfully old age of forty-three, Bridget (Zellweger) feels like love is passing her by, until two one night stands – with old flame Mark Darcy (Firth) and new beau Jack Qwant (Dempsey) – lead to her being pregnant but unsure as to which one of them is the father; a welcome return for Bridget, and with much of the pizzazz and feelgood humour of the first movie, but the whole “who’s the father?” storyline is a poor conceit to hang a whole movie on, and it shows, leaving standout moments such as Bridget miming to House of Pain’s Jump Around, as a much better reason for splurging on this latest installment.

Shut In (2015) / D: Adam Schindler / 90m

aka Deadly Home; Intruders

Cast: Beth Riesgraf, Rory Culkin, Martin Starr, Jack Kesy, Joshua Mikel, Leticia Jiminez, Timothy T. McKinney

Rating: 5/10 – when Anna (Riesgraf), who’s agoraphobic, doesn’t attend her recently deceased brother’s funeral, the three men who arrive at her home to rob her soon find that Anna has a dark secret that will endanger them all; a brave attempt to do something different in the home invasion genre, Shut In nevertheless remains an intriguing idea that never coalesces into a completely successful whole, but does feature a terrific performance from Riesgraf.

Inferno (2016) / D: Ron Howard / 121m

Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ben Foster, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish

Rating: 6/10 – despite suffering from short term memory loss, symbologist Robert Langdon must endure a race against time in order to stop the release of a deadly toxin that will wipe out billions of people; another year, another Dan Brown adaptation, but this time it’s an adaptation that’s at least bearable, thanks to Tom Elkins’ and Daniel P. Hanley’s editing skills, an enjoyable, knowing performance from Khan, and a script that doesn’t hang around getting bogged down by endless exposition, which, considering Brown’s reliance on it in his novels, is a massive step forward should The Lost Symbol or any further novels be adapted for the screen.

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) / D: Dominik Hartl / 77m

Cast: Laurie Calvert, Gabriela Marcinková, Oscar Dyekjær Giese, Margarete Tiesel, Karl Fischer, Patricia Aulitzky, Kari Rakkola

Rating: 5/10 – a formula for producing snow proves extremely harmful if ingested, and soon the guests at a remote mountain top ski resort are knee deep in zombies, both human and animal; similar in tone to the Dead Snow movies, Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies combines daft humour with gross-out gore and flying body parts a-plenty, but as usual with this type of movie, it pays lip service to cohesive plotting, or credible characters, and focuses instead on providing a series of inventive zombie kills – which is pretty much the only aspect it gets right.

Fort Osage (1952) / D: Lesley Selander / 72m

Cast: Rod Cameron, Jane Nigh, Morris Ankrum, Douglas Kennedy, John Ridgely

Rating: 6/10 – homesteaders looking to head west through Indian country are exploited by a crooked businessman (Ankrum) and have their lives put at risk by his decision to cheat said Indians out of the rewards of a peace treaty, leaving would-be wagonmaster Tom Clay (Cameron) to get the bottom of all the corruption; an enjoyable way to spend seventy-two minutes thanks to Selander’s typically intuitive direction, Cameron’s no-nonsense approach to dialogue, and the joy of watching so many standard Western tropes being trotted out and given such a good airing.

Snowden (2016)

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

CIA, Drama, Eavesdropping, Edward Snowden, Hong Kong, Joseph-Gordon-Levitt, Laura Poitras, Melissa Leo, NSA, Oliver Stone, Review, Rhys Ifans, Shailene Woodley, Thriller, Tom Wilkinson, True story, Whistleblower, Zachary Quinto

D: Oliver Stone / 134m

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifans, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Joely Richardson, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, Scott Eastwood, Lakeith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, Ben Chaplin, Nicolas Cage

By now, most of us have heard of Edward Joseph Snowden (Gordon-Levitt), the NSA whistleblower who revealed the extent of the US’s surveillance programme both at home and abroad. In June 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong to meet with documentary movie maker Laura Poitras (Leo), and Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald (Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Wilkinson). There, at the Hotel Mira, Snowden explained his reasons for disclosing the documents he appropriated from NSA data banks, and why he felt that the extent of the US’s “eavesdropping” was both inappropriate and damaging to the integrity of the US and its intelligence-gathering agencies. Following the publication of the files Snowden provided, he was charged with offences under the 1917 Espionage Act*, and though he tried to reach South America via Russia and Cuba, his passport was revoked while he was en route to Russia, and he was forced to remain in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. And Moscow – though not the airport – has been his home ever since.

Snowden’s story is one that seems tailor-made for an Oliver Stone movie. Anyone who’s seen his documentary series The Untold History of the United States (2012-13), or read the accompanying book, will know that Stone is largely unimpressed with the way in which his country has become a land run by self-serving neo-conservatives for whom “by any means necessary” is a proud motto. And while you could argue that this has been the status quo in America for a lot longer than the last fifty years, what is without doubt is the extent to which the intelligence agencies have abused their remits post-911 to eavesdrop not just on suspected terrorists but everyone. But with all this now out in the open, and Snowden’s place in history assured – and already explored in Laura Poitras’s excellent, Oscar-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR (2014) – what is there left for Stone to bring to the screen that hasn’t already been explored? Unfortunately, the answer is not much.

Watching Snowden is a somewhat dispiriting experience. Stone does what he does best over two and a quarter hours: exposing the clandestine activities of several branches of the US government, highlighting the insidious effects these activities are having on an individual’s human rights, and revealing how those same human rights aren’t even protected by the courts (who seem to be bypassed at every opportunity). But Stone’s usual passion and sense of outrage seems to be muted here. This is like watching a movie made by someone who’s intellectually aggrieved by what the NSA has been up to, but doesn’t quite feel the need to get emotional about it as well. This is Oliver Stone in restrained, almost reflective mode – and it doesn’t feel right.

What all this means is that Snowden feels like objective reportage for much of its running time, with scenes placed and set up to impart relevant information, allowing Stone and co-screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald to give audiences all they need to know about Snowden himself and the secret world he was a part of. But it’s this matter-of-fact way in which Stone has decided to present both the man and that world that curtails any tension, and thereby lessens the drama. The scene where Snowden downloads a mass of files right from the heart of the NSA’s base in Hawaii, a scene that many directors could have made into a nerve-shredding exercise in trepidation and anxiety, lacks all those elements and plays out with a minimum of fuss and bother.

Watching as Snowden becomes increasingly aware of the extent of his country’s malfeasance – and the ways in which he’s unwittingly contributed to that malfeasance – Stone shows Snowden’s baffled disbelief, and his somewhat naïve demeanour, but there’s a distance between the viewer and the beleaguered whistleblower that stops any real sympathy or connection from forming. As Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes about the process of making Snowden’s initial commitment to the NSA appear noble and necessary, he can’t quite overcome a lack of personality that keeps the man from registering as more than a name most people will recognise, but few outside the US will truly care about. This is partly due to the script, which, instead of showing the man behind the name through his commitment to the truth, attempts to do so through his relationship with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Woodley). Would that these scenes had more of an impact, but there’s a pedantic, going-through-the-motions feel to them that Stone can’t quite shake off. There are times where they also border on soap opera, as Mills’s frustration with Snowden’s work leads to several moments where she invokes the whole “it’s me or the job” ultimatum.

Elsewhere, the movie plods along, only occasionally engaging with the material in a way that appears earnest or committed, but doing enough to keep interested viewers interested, while not doing enough to keep viewers new to Snowden’s story on board for the duration. It’s not that Stone is doing anything particularly wrong – he still has a strong visual sense (bolstered by crisp, insistent cinematography from Anthony Dod Mantle), and the movie is expertly edited by Alex Marquez and Lee Percy – but somewhere along the way, any sense of urgency about the subject and its ramifications seems to have been lost. Perhaps it’s due to the time that’s passed since Snowden blew the whistle; in today’s need-to-know-now society is his story relevant anymore?

There are good performances all round, but mostly amongst the supporting turns, with Ifans a standout as Snowden’s mentor and über-spook Corbin O’Brien. Its also good to see Nicolas Cage, albeit in a minor role, deliver the kind of performance that we know he’s capable of. Spare a thought though for the trio of Leo, Quinto and Wilkinson, stranded in a hotel room in Hong Kong and not really given much to do except listen and look amazed/appalled/astounded as appropriate (it makes the scene where Greenwald barks orders at his editor (Richardson) all the more striking – and out of place). Woodley is hamstrung by a role that requires her to be unsupportive and selfish for the most part, and which is left hanging by a script that doesn’t explain why she’s now living with Snowden in Moscow. And as Snowden, Gordon-Levitt gives a diffident, constrained portrayal of a man who made a momentous personal and professional decision, and the actor carries the gravitas of that with aplomb. If only he didn’t sound like Keanu Reeves…

Rating: 6/10 – Stone adds another American life to his list of movie subjects, but in doing so seems more like a director for hire than the tirelessly challenging agent provocateur he usually is; what hampers Snowden is a sense that its story is no longer important, and that the movie is aware of this, which stops it from being the impassioned, thought-provoking movie it should be.

*The 1917 Espionage Act is a particularly apt (and predictable) piece of legislation for Snowden to be charged under. Such is the loose nature of the Act, if Snowden were to return to the US and be put on trial, he wouldn’t be able to use any information relating to the offence as evidence that he wasn’t guilty; because of the nature of the information he released, it would still be regarded as classified and therefore not admissible, and the jury wouldn’t be privy to it. And that’s without the cost of the defense itself: anywhere between $1 million and $3 million.

Mini-Review: Deepwater Horizon (2016)

21 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

BP, Disaster, Drama, Gina Rodriguez, Gulf of Mexico, John Malkovich, Kate Hudson, Kurt Russell, Mark Wahlberg, Mike Williams, Oil rig, Peter Berg, Review, Thriller, True story

D: Peter Berg / 107m

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez, Kate Hudson, Ethan Suplee, Dylan O’Brien

Arriving at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig site in the Gulf of Mexico to learn that certain safety checks haven’t been carried out, general operational supervisor “Mr Jimmy” Harrell (Russell) and chief electrical engineer Mike Williams (Wahlberg) find themselves at odds with BP executive Donald Vidrine (Malkovich) who is advocating that drilling continue despite the absence of these checks. With many more of the crew of the rig expressing their concerns, Vidrine pulls rank and the drilling resumes. Pressure begins to build in the pipeline, and further signs point to a dramatic, and likely, system failure. When it does, a massive blowout ensues, and the resulting explosion causes tremendous damage to the rig, threatening the lives of everyone on it.

As fires rage all around them, the workers’ attempt to evacuate the rig. Williams finds himself rescuing several of his colleagues, including “Mr Jimmy” who has been badly injured. With the Coast Guard racing to the rescue, and with no guarantee that the fires won’t cause the rig to sink, Williams et al must rely on their own ingenuity in order to get to safety, while the world looks on at what will become the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Watching Deepwater Horizon‘s first forty minutes, with its depictions of bubbling air pockets within the drill shaft, and the pipe itself shifting in protest against the pressure being exerted on it, it’s not hard to find a degree of anxiety about what’s going to happen creep up on you. It’s during this stretch that director Berg, aided by editors Gabriel Fleming and Colby Parker Jr, ratchets up the tension as he sets the scene for what we all know will be a nightmarish tale of survival. He also does a good job of introducing the main characters – along with principal supporting character, “Mr Jimmy”‘s moustache – and making us care about them. But once the oil hits the fan and fire takes a hold of the rig, the movie takes a strange left turn and becomes a standard men-in-peril movie where it’s hard to distinguish who’s doing what, where and how.

Inevitably, the movie regales us with moments of sacrifice, heroism and incredible fortitude, but it also features various stock elements, such as Hudson’s anxious wife stuck at home watching it all unfold on TV, and Malkovich’s suitably oleaginous BP executive looking sheepish as he gets in a lifeboat. While it’s easy to see why Berg has included these moments, it’s the way in which they help dissipate the tension established earlier on that proves problematical. It’s equally unhelpful that despite all the pyrotechnics and practical effects on display, Deepwater Horizon feels at times like an extreme, sea-based version of The Towering Inferno (1974). It makes for a distracting viewing experience (even if it wasn’t Berg’s intention). That said, the performances are uniformly good (though Malkovich’s accent is distracting), and the script manages to avoid too much foreshadowing (e.g. “I can’t wait to get home and see my newborn child”, from someone who’s clearly going to snuff it).

Rating: 7/10 – curiously uninvolving once things go from bad to staggeringly worse, Deepwater Horizon is a visually impressive retelling of an incident that BP would probably like to forget about completely; but spectacle without a human element to guide us through it is just that, spectacle, and the movie never finds an answer to the way in which it shifts down a gear after such an effective opening.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

16 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Amy Adams, Art gallery, Drama, Ex-husband, Isla Fisher, Jake Gyllenhaal, Literary adaptation, Michael Shannon, Murder, Novel, Review, Thriller, Tom Ford

D: Tom Ford / 117m

Cast: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber, Armie Hammer, Karl Glusman, Robert Aramayo, Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough, Michael Sheen, India Menuez, Graham Beckel, Jena Malone

Back in 2009, Tom Ford, once the creative director at Gucci between 1994 and 2004, made a movie called A Single Man. He produced it, he wrote it, and he directed it. In the process, he ensured Colin Firth received his first Oscar nomination as the single man of the title, a grief-stricken English professor who finds it difficult to deal with the death of his partner. It won a shedload of awards, and Ford was heralded as an exciting new voice in contemporary cinema. But even in amongst the sterling notices, reviewers and critics were largely in agreement: Firth’s performance saved the movie from being an empty exercise in style over content. Now, seven years later, he’s back with another adaptation, this time swapping Christopher Isherwood’s work for that of Austin Wright, and his novel, Tony and Susan. Should be good, eh?

Well, actually, no. This is a movie that can be admired for several reasons. For instance, there’s Seamus McGarvey’s often exquisite cinematography, whether he’s using the lens to amplify the sterile environments lead character Susan (Adams) spends her life inhabiting, or the tactile desert locations where the novel within the movie takes place. And then there’s Abel Korzeniowski’s string-driven score, which adds a delicious sense of impending doom to both storylines. But despite these solid, unassailable elements, what Ford attempts with the twin narratives doesn’t pan out quite as well.

With its performance art opening sequence, Nocturnal Animals wants to keep the viewer wrong-footed, and it wants to keep its secrets all to itself. As you’re confronted by several large, ultra-wobbly ladies who are gyrating in the nude, Ford has already placed the viewer on the back foot. What you’re seeing, he seems to be saying, will be explained; just not right away. And this is how the tone of the movie is set from the beginning: you’ll see a lot of things that won’t immediately make sense, but in time they will… except for the things Ford has no intention of making clear. So, the naked ladies are part of an art exhibition at the gallery Susan owns. But Susan doesn’t seem to be too impressed by this particular exhibit. She appears to be elsewhere, caught up in her own thoughts. But again – already – Ford isn’t about to tell you what those thoughts are, or what they’ll mean (if anything) going forward.

We soon learn that Susan is on her second marriage, to a diffident, disconnected lump of a man called Hutton (Hammer). It’s obvious he doesn’t love her anymore, and he’s likely having an affair, but Susan doesn’t seem interested either way. She makes an effort toward they’re going away together but Hutton is too busy, and Susan is too lethargic to insist or get him to clarify the dates they can go. And while the viewer wonders if this is going to be yet another mannered, “arthouse” examination of a marriage break up with plenty of wistful stares into the distance by the wife, while the husband is unable to talk in meaningful sentences, Ford changes tack and introduces Susan’s ex-husband, Edward (Gyllenhaal).

But not in person. No, instead, Edward is introduced to us through a novel he’s written, and one that he’s dedicated to Susan. Surprised – but more importantly so that the movie can proceed in a viable fashion, intrigued – Susan begins to read it. It’s not what she expects, though. But let’s think about that. What was she expecting? And why? Because, as we later discover, Susan had no faith in Edward’s abilities as a writer. So why does she even read it? Curiosity? To reinforce her opinion about his talent (or lack of it)? Because she’s bored? (At home, Susan doesn’t appear to do very much apart from drink the occasional glass of wine.) Actually, it doesn’t matter, as it’s one of the things Ford isn’t going to take the time to explain.

The story is a brutal one. Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal) is travelling through the desert with his wife, Laura (Fisher), and daughter India (Bamber). Run off the road by a trio of men led by the would-be charming Ray (Taylor-Johnson), the family is threatened and verbally abused until chance sees Ray and one of his cohorts take the Hastings’ car – with Laura and India in it – and drive off, leaving Tony at the mercy of remaining “drunk baby” Lou (Glasman). Tony is made to drive after them, but it soon becomes obvious that Lou is just stringing him along, and Lou eventually makes Tony stop the car and get out; and then he drives off. Ray makes it back to the highway and hitches a ride to the nearest town. There he meets Detective Bobby Andes (Shannon) who agrees to go back out into the desert and check for the whereabouts of Tony’s family. They find them, both dead, but no sign of Ray and his buddies.

At this point, viewers should notice one of two things: that the character of Bobby Andes is at once more interesting and vital than anyone else in the movie (even Taylor-Johnson, who’s menacing and feral in equal measure), and secondly, that Edward’s novel, while intended to act as an emotional counterpoint to Susan’s life up until then, does get less involving and more straightforward as it continues. This allows two other, distinct things to happen: one) for Susan to begin to rethink her tidily tucked away feelings toward Edward, and two) for Ford to indulge in the kind of macho Western-style movie making once epitomised by the likes of Nicholas Ray and Budd Boetticher. But by then it’s all too late. Tony’s story can only have one outcome (which it does in such a contrived way you can hardly credit Ford the director agreeing with Ford the writer that it’s even partway acceptable dramatically), and the resolution to Susan’s immediate tale hints at a new beginning that she won’t be able to grasp.

Throughout, Ford places great stock on having Adams stare off into space and think deep thoughts about her past with Edward and her present with Hutton, but it’s largely to little or no effect. Part of the problem is that Susan isn’t particularly likeable. In her time with Edward we witness what a horrible person she is beneath the surface veneer of respectability that she’s gained by being a gallery owner. This leaves her storyline feeling (and looking) like a succession of still-life paintings waiting to be given three-dimensional expression. But this isn’t on Ford’s agenda; more shots of Adams staring into space most definitely are though. Adams is a fine actress – see Arrival (2016) if you’re not sure – but here she’s wasted in a role that requires her to internalise her character’s feelings… and then leave them there. The actress is called upon to make so little of her role it’s almost insulting; why hire someone who’s capable of doing so much more than you’ll let them?

Fortunately, Shannon and Taylor-Johnson are on hand to breathe distinct and recognisable life into their respective roles, elevating the material through sheer force of skill, and making it difficult to look away from either of them, even if they’re in a scene together. Gyllenhaal, though, is a cypher, playing two roles and being made to appear as more of a supporting actor than someone given second billing and the responsibility of portraying two important characters. There are times when Gyllenhaal can only shine when the material challenges him in such a way that he has no choice but to commit himself wholly to the part. Movies such as Enemy (2013) and Nightcrawler (2014) show this, but here Ford makes the character of Tony a bystander in his own story, while Edward’s contribution to Susan’s tale is limited by the decision to focus on that particular story from Susan’s entirely subjective point of view (you can’t trust her memories).

Ultimately, Ford makes the mistake of believing that his adaptation carries the necessary weight and complexity to make each narrative work both against and for each other. And this leads to the viewer being unable to connect with any of the characters, or feel able to show any sympathy towards them (only Shannon’s ailing cop elicits any credible feeling in the audience). It’s as if Ford has decided he wants to make a movie where the idea of leading a self-contained life (Susan’s) is preferable to one where hazards and risks (Tony’s) are more likely to happen. Either way, the one-time Gucci guru has made something that plays to its strengths as the new Tom Ford movie, but which lacks a clear identity all of its own.

Rating: 5/10 – too much smoke and too many mirrors means Nocturnal Animals isn’t as effective as its writer/director would like you to believe – or as persuasive; it goes without saying that the movie has a tremendous visual sense, but it’s a shame that a similar level of effort wasn’t afforded the script or the characters.

The Tip of the Iceberg (2016)

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bárbara Goenaga, Bullying, Carmelo Gómez, David Cánovas, Drama, Fernando Cayo, Investigation, Maribel Verdú, Review, Spain, Suicides, Thriller

Original title: La punta del iceberg

D: David Cánovas / 96m

Cast: Maribel Verdú, Carmelo Gómez, Fernando Cayo, Bárbara Goenaga, Jesús Castejón, Carlo D’Ursi, Juan Fernández, Álex García, Ginés García Millán, Nieve de Medina

Why have three employees at the Tecnocentro offices committed suicide in the last few months? Is there a link between the three untimely deaths? And if there is, is their work the link? These and other questions, and any answers, become the responsibility of project manager Sofia Cuevas (Verdú). Tasked by her boss, Enzo (D’Ursi), with visiting the offices, speaking to the staff there, and compiling a report, Sofia isn’t too keen on the idea. Unable to get out of it, she arrives there and meets the head of the Tecnocentro division, Carlos Fresno (Cayo). He’s abrasive, abrupt, and won’t entertain the idea that there is any link between the three men other than that they were unable to deal with the pressures associated with their jobs.

Unimpressed by Fresno’s uncaring attitude, Sofia is further dismayed when she learns that the office she is allocated to work from, was the office of the last man to kill himself, Marcelo Miralles (Millán). She talks to Miralles’ secretary, Gabriela Benassar (Goenaga), and begins to get the feeling that not all is right at Tecnocentro. As she learns more about the demands made of the employees there, she begins to suspect that Fresno’s management skills leave something to be desired, and that he’s guilty of bullying people. But is it enough to link the three men, or even to explain why they took their own lives, and all at the Tecnocentro offices?

Sofia eventually learns far more than she expected about Fresno’s management style, and is provided with enough evidence to see him dismissed. With a further tragedy looming, and Fresno making it clear to Sofia that if she writes the correct report she can expect a promotion and the commensurate raise, she is faced with the possibility that her investigation is merely a matter of protocol. But if it is, how can she proceed, and how can she ensure that Fresno’s bullying isn’t ignored or swept under the carpet?

The answer to that final question is, in the end, quite an obvious one. The viewer is given advance warning of how The Tip of the Iceberg will end soon after Sofia arrives at Tecnocentro and she receives a certain phone call. Everything that happens between that particular call and the one that closes the movie is largely filler; the viewer doesn’t have to have seen many corporate thrillers to know that the company is up to no good, that it views its employees as entirely expendable, and that the bigwigs in charge have no intention of making any changes – and especially if it will affect the bottom line.

So the movie offers nothing new in terms of plot or storyline. It’s clear from the start that Sofia is regarded by her male bosses as dependable in a way that is also patronising. She doesn’t have much of a life outside the offices where she works, she says she’s still in a relationship with a botanist when anyone asks but later reveals that she isn’t, and her reputation as being tough and uncompromising precedes her to the Tecnocentro building. She’s a “safe pair of hands”, expected to go in there, do her job (as instructed), and come back. She’s not expected to rock the boat.

But while Sofia may be tough and uncompromising, she also has standards, and worse still for the company she works for – which is never named – she has principles too. When her investigation reveals levels of bullying for which there can be no justification, it’s Sofia’s quiet outrage that ensures this matter won’t be swept under the carpet, or left to wither and die for lack of attention. But despite all this, she’s still a woman in a predominantly man’s world, and the movie articulates this throughout, sometimes cleverly, though usually with a bluntness that is actually a little tarnished thanks to the way in which it’s driven home.

Elsewhere in the script, which is an adaptation of a play by Antonio Tabares, and was co-written by director Cánovas, José Amaro Carrillo, and Alberto García Martín, there are quite heavy doses of sexism, with Álex García’s super-confident Jaime Salas hitting on Sofia at every opportunity, and her role as investigator being undermined by almost everyone who she comes into contact with. This is meant to be a damning critique of the entrenched ideas at the heart of modern business ethics, but while it has some merit on that level, it’s laboured use within the movie doesn’t add anything to the basic storyline. The same goes for the way in which Goenaga’s exploited secretary, Gabriela, is treated by both Miralles and Fresno (and which leads you to wonder why she works at Tecnocentro in the first place).

But while the movie doesn’t offer very much in the way of originality, it does feature impressive – and expressive – art direction by Uxua Castelló that is admirably enhanced and emboldened by Juan Carlos Gómez’s chilly cinematography. The Tecnocentro offices are open-plan yet claustrophobic at the same time, and there’s a surface glamour to everything that belies the distress and desperation being experienced by most of the employees. Adding to the sense of unease and dismay that permeates the visuals is a quietly angry performance by Verdú that anchors the movie and provides the viewer with someone to eventually root for (such is our first impression of Sofia: that she has adopted the don’t care attitude of her male colleagues in an effort to fit in, that we don’t trust her to see or understand the problems going on at Tecnocentro).

Making his feature debut, director David Cánovas has created a dangerous world of expediency and mistrust that doesn’t allow Sofia to be herself until she’s faced with the logical, and tragic, extension of the management style – profits before employees – that she is a willing part of. As he explores this notion, Cánovas makes some salient points about modern technology’s demands on people’s time and effort, and the way in which large corporations or companies justify their constant chasing after profits as the only way they can validate themselves. It’s just a shame that these points are used in service of a largely pedestrian plot, and aren’t expanded on to make sure that the somewhat tepid thriller elements are allowed to have more of an impact.

Rating: 7/10 – some viewers may be wondering, “Is that it?” by the movie’s end, but The Tip of the Iceberg is a slow-burn drama that seems like it’s not trying too hard, but which has a steeliness to it that makes up for the lack of originality; Verdú is on fine form as usual, and strong supporting turns from the likes of Gómez (as an unreliable union rep) and Goenaga help bring a strong sense of humanity to a movie that points out how badly some employers can behave – and deliberately so.

The Accountant (2016)

11 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Anna Kendrick, Autism, Ben Affleck, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Drama, Gavin O'Connor, J.K. Simmons, John Lithgow, Jon Bernthal, Living Robotics, Review, Thriller, Treasury

D: Gavin O’Connor / 128m

Cast: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, John Lithgow, Jeffrey Tambor, Jean Smart, Andy Umberger, Robert C. Treveiler

To all intents and purposes, Christian Wolff (Affleck) is a public certified accountant who also happens to have high-functioning autism. He’s occasionally blunt to the point of rudeness, has trouble interacting with other people in certain situations, does his best to fit in, lives alone in a spartan apartment, and is the man to go to if you’re a big time criminal organisation and you want your “books” to look whiter than white. Over time he’s attracted the attention of the US Treasury Department, and in particular, soon-to-be-retired agent Ray King (Simmons), who wants to track Wolff down before he goes. To this end, he coerces Treasury analyst Marybeth Medina (Addai-Robinson) into helping him.

Meanwhile, Wolff is hired by a legitimate company, Living Robotics, to audit their accounts in full as one of their own analysts, Dana Cummings (Kendrick), has spotted what appears to be a huge, unaccounted loss. The company is owned by Lamar Blackburn (Lithgow), and it makes high-end prosthetic limbs. Wolff soon goes to work and it doesn’t take him long to identify just how much money has been stolen from the company – over $61m. But the apparent suicide of one of the company’s senior executives (and a lifelong friend of Blackburn’s) brings Wolff’s investigation to an abrupt halt. But Wolff is unable to leave it at that and intends to find out if the senior executive was responsible.

There follows an attempt on his life which he foils, and he learns that Dana is being targeted as well. He gets to her in time and going against his usual “mission parameters” he determines to keep her safe. In the meantime, Medina has managed to put a name to the face of the “Accountant” and has tracked him to where he lives, but with Wolff having gone to ground after the attempts on his and Dana’s lives, the Treasury Department is no nearer to catching him. Holed up in a fancy hotel, he and Dana develop a friendship, while Wolff figures out that Living Robotics hasn’t been stolen from, but that they’re operating a scam designed to inflate their share price when the company goes public. Now that he knows what’s been going on and why, Wolff decides to pay Lamar Blackburn a home visit… but Blackburn has a small, private army, led by The Assassin (Bernthal), in place to ensure that Wolff doesn’t get to “finish the job” he started.

On the surface, The Accountant is a slightly above average Hollywood action thriller with a good cast and good production values. Its decision to make its central character suffer from autism – even if it’s at the high end of the range – is different, and for the most part, works thanks to Affleck’s studied, and muted, performance (the script does, however, have to keep reminding itself that Wolff is indeed autistic, and should show some ritual behaviour from time to time). Also for the most part, it makes the usual unexplained narrative leaps that compromise the logic and flow of the story, and has many of its characters doing things in ways that are consistently at odds with their usual behaviour.

It’s also a movie that contains a number of scenes that are so redundant or unnecessary (and sometimes both) that you begin to wonder if a Director’s Cut due to be released on Blu-ray and DVD in six months’ time has been released to cinemas instead. When King coerces Medina into helping him track down Wolff, he does it by virtue of her having lied on her Treasury application form; she helps him or he’ll see that she’s prosecuted (forget that he appears to be the only one who’s vetted her properly since she applied). As the scene plays out, the viewer can only sit back and ask themselves, couldn’t he have just asked for her help, or used his seniority to get her working on the case? Wouldn’t that have been simpler? Of course it would, but the scene is there nevertheless, and the way it pans out it just doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, Wolff and Dana hit it off way too quickly, not only because her life is in danger and he’s yet another assassin who’s too good deep down to “walk away”, but because it’s an attempt to remind us that Wolff can connect when he tries, and the script seems to be saying, look, give the guy a break, he’s never had a girlfriend before. It’s the wrong kind of break, though, because Wolff gets close to Anna Kendrick in full on perky, quirky mode, the actress using all her standard comic traits and reactions in a role that is yet another too easy variation on the role she usually plays almost everywhere else. In their scenes together, Affleck doesn’t even have to try too hard: he’s inhabiting the role, she’s channelling the ghost of every eager-to-please young actress from the Sixties.

And then there’s the moment, around two thirds in, where the movie decides to grind to a halt and spend around ten minutes detailing a back story involving King that nearly kills the movie’s momentum. And then there’s the final showdown between Wolff and the Assassin, which veers off into left field territory – unless you’ve been paying attention – and ends on an emotional note you won’t have seen coming. All of which adds up to a movie which is, appropriately or not, somewhat schizophrenic in places, or perhaps put more plainly, deliberately uneven.

In the end, The Accountant is yet another example of action movie making that only takes risks with its central character, and only when it doesn’t get in the way of his being an extremely talented assassin. The scenes where we witness Wolff grow from easily agitated pre-teen to kick-ass teenager thanks to his tough-as-nails father are weirdly compelling (when they shouldn’t be), and the action sequences are imaginative and well choreographed for the most part, even if they also lack the necessary “wow” factor that should have viewers hoping for more. By the end it’s clear that the producers are hoping that further on down the line there’ll be more adventures for Christian Wolff as he goes about writing other wrongs with his pocket protector and his high-calibre arsenal.

Rating: 7/10 – worth seeing for another committed performance from Affleck that elevates the otherwise pedestrian nature of the material on offer, The Accountant does its best to be more than a standard Hollywood action thriller, but can’t quite pull it off; with O’Connor handling things well from behind the camera, but without injecting too much pizzazz into proceedings, the movie ends up being exactly the kind of Saturday night choice that goes perfectly with pizza and beer.

Arrival (2016)

10 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Aliens, Amy Adams, China, Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Forest Whitaker, Jeremy Renner, Literary adaptation, Michael Stuhlbarg, Montana, Mystery, Review, Sci-fi, Shells, Thriller, Translation

D: Denis Villeneuve / 116m

Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mark O’Brien, Tzi Ma

Louise Banks (Adams) is a linguistics professor whose private life has recently been shattered by the break up of her marriage and the death of her daughter from cancer. Getting by but still grieving, Louise is as unprepared as the rest of the world when twelve huge spaceships suddenly appear one day in different locations around the globe. Soon, though, she is approached by the US military – in the form of Colonel G.T. Weber (Whitaker) – to aid in communicating with the aliens on board the ship that hovers over American soil in Montana. The best in her field in terms of linguistics and translations, Louise joins Weber’s team along with mathematician and scientist Ian Donnelly (Renner).

In Montana, Louise and Ian are advised that the most important question is, What do they want? Later, they ascend into the ship – called a “shell” by the military – and have their first encounter with the aliens. A symbol is written on the screen that separates the aliens in their atmosphere from Louise and Ian et al in theirs. Using it as the basis of the aliens’ language, Louise soon deduces that the symbol doesn’t just translate into one word, but into many. From then on she is able to determine much more of how the aliens communicate. Meanwhile, at the other arrival sites, particularly in China, suspicion and distrust of the aliens’ intensions are leading to veiled threats of attack on the shells, while violent unrest occurs around the globe.

Louise begins to have visions of a little girl, who in various ways helps her to understand more of what the aliens are communicating. When she translates a symbol and the meaning is “Offer weapon”, it causes the CIA agent in charge of the whole operation in Montana, Halpern (Stuhlbarg), to order an evacuation. But Louise insists they should stay, to keep faith with the aliens, and to complete the mission to find out why they are here. She returns to the shell by herself, and by coming into direct contact with the aliens, Louise learns why they have arrived, and why she’s having visions of the little girl, a revelation that has a profound effect not just on her, but on her understanding of her marriage and also, her daughter’s death.

There’s a dearth of good, old-fashioned, serious sci-fi in the movies right now – in fact, it’s been that way for some time – but Arrival is here to redress the balance. Playing with notions of time and memory and the nature of happiness, the movie is a thought-provoking treatise on what it is to mourn a life while discovering at the same time that that life has much more to offer even though the person has passed away. It’s a bit of a mindbender at times, but Villeneuve confidently handles the narrative twists and turns of Eric Heisserer’s script – itself an adaptation of the short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang and heavily reworked by Villeneuve himself – so that the viewer can still grasp the subtleties of what’s happening and why.

Along the way, said viewer is treated to an intelligent story and plot that packs an unexpectedly emotional wallop towards the end, as the various strands of Louise’s life are brought into sharp relief, and the aliens’ reason for visiting Earth is revealed. Louise herself is brought to life by Adams in a performance that acts as a reminder that, away from the DC Extended Universe, she is still one of today’s finest actresses. As the emotionally distant Louise, Adams shows just how removed she is from everything going on around her – at first. But as Louise slowly begins to unravel the complex patterns of the aliens’ language, she begins to reconnect with herself and everyone around her; and particularly Ian. Adams is the movie’s chief ingredient for success, her succinct, subtle portrayal of Louise proving layered and intuitive, and deeply moving come the movie’s end.

But while Adams’ performance is the bedrock upon which the movie supports itself, there’s so much more to recommend it. Though she plays the central character, and the rest of the cast have essentially supporting roles, the likes of Renner and Whitaker still manage to contribute well-rounded and credible characters that are necessary to the plot, while even Stuhlbarg’s paranoid (and potentially one-note) CIA agent fits in to the overall set up without feeling extraneous or unnecessarily villainous. Villeneuve also allows each character to display their own fears and concerns, and a corresponding sense of wonder, at being in such close proximity to the aliens and their craft.

Visually, the movie is a gloomy-looking, though consistently well-thought out viewing experience, with Villeneuve choosing to dial down on any bright colours and in doing so, adding texture to the narrative. The aliens operate in a cloudy grey environment and “write” using appendages that produce a black inky substance that is surprisingly vibrant, while at the military base, the various comms rooms and private quarters also lack for vivid colours, with only computer screens providing any brightness to offset the gloom. Villeneuve is making a conscious choice here: the bleak, low-lit hive of activity reflecting the interior of the aliens’ ship, as if to insinuate that there is a greater level of connection between “us” and “them” than is immediately apparent.

The visuals are more than ably supported by a distinctive sound design that unnerves far more than it reassures, and which also includes a suitably eerie and mournful score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, Villeneuve’s go-to composer. Keeping the viewer on edge as Louise deconstructs the alien message, the visuals and the sound design combine to create a haunting, other-worldly feel that is not only entirely appropriate given the nature of the story, but also serves to highlight the idea that if we aren’t alone in the universe, then ideas of melody and tone may still hold but are likely to be interpreted in completely different ways.

Ultimately though, it’s Villeneuve’s confident handling of the material that impresses the most. He’s not afraid to take his time in telling the story, and doesn’t drip-feed all the relevant information at regular points in the narrative. Instead he lets the story unfold at its own pace, revealing key plot points quietly and without the usual fanfare required in other sci-fi movies, and the result is a measured, affecting tale that contains a major twist, one that perhaps for the first time, is allowed to play out over much of the movie’s running time, rather than just suddenly and without warning, and which in its simplicity and emotional effectiveness, elevates Arrival over and above any other sci-fi movie you’re likely to see this year (and probably for some time to come).

Rating: 9/10 – a beautifully constructed movie with a clever, intelligent script, superb cinematography from Bradford Young, an intense soundtrack, heartfelt performances and all held together by a director at the top of his game, Arrival is a must-see movie that is less about why the aliens are here, and more about why we are here; quite simply, one of this year’s best movies.

The Girl on the Train (2016)

07 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alcoholism, Drama, Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, Literary adaptation, Luke Evans, Murder, Paula Hawkins, Rebecca Ferguson, Review, Tate Taylor, Thriller

D:Tate Taylor / 112m

Cast: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson, Justin Theroux, Luke Evans, Edgar Ramírez, Laura Prepon, Allison Janney, Darren Goldstein, Lisa Kudrow

Whenever a novel becomes an unexpectedly massive success – such as Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train did in 2015 – then a movie adaptation is sure to follow. But what happens when the source material isn’t strong enough to support a movie version? What do the makers of such a movie do to combat this? The answer, when you watch the movie version of The Girl on the Train, becomes obvious quite quickly: they don’t do anything, they merely transcribe events and characters to the screen and do nothing to circumvent the problems in the novel. Oh – and they do so in the hope that no one will notice.

From the beginning of The Girl on the Train we have a clumsy voice over that introduces us to Rachel Watson, a thirty-two year old woman who rides the train to and from work every day, and who seems to have created a fantasy world built around another woman (Bennett) that she sees most days from the train. The woman in question piques Rachel’s interest, as she lives a few doors away from where Rachel’s ex-husband Tom (Theroux) lives with his new wife, Anna (Ferguson), and their baby daughter, Evie. Believing this woman to have a perfect marriage (but having no real reason to believe this at all), Rachel is shocked one morning to see her kissing a man who isn’t her husband.

Rachel is so disturbed by this that she decides to confront the woman. But Rachel is an alcoholic, and though she makes the attempt, she suffers a blackout and wakes the next morning with cuts and bruises and blood on her clothes – but no memory of how any of it happened. Things get worse when a detective (Janney) visits Rachel and asks her if she knows the woman, whose name is Megan. Megan has gone missing, and because Rachel was spotted in the area where Megan was last seen, the detective wonders if Rachel is involved in Megan’s disappearance in some way. Able to stall the detective’s questions, Rachel then makes a fateful decision.

Anyone who has read the book will know that Rachel’s decision is to involve herself in the life of Megan’s husband, Scott (Evans). And the movie follows this route as well – how could it not? – but as with the novel, the movie has the same problem: her decision makes no sense at all. It’s obvious from Rachel’s behaviour – when she’s not fantasizing about a complete stranger, she’s stalking her ex-husband – that she’s got what you’d politely call “issues”, but the only reason the movie has for this behaviour is the fact that Rachel is an alcoholic. It was a contributing factor in her divorce from Tom, and it leads to a couple of minor revelations later on, but it ends up being a catch-all for anything she does that seems a bit manic or ill-advised. The novel tries to make her appear vulnerable; here she just seems desperate.

But as her involvement with Scott is passed off as trying to help (and punish Megan if she stops being missing), Rachel abandons all sense of decency and respect for the ordeal Scott is going through, and pushes her own agenda, which is to find Megan’s abductor or killer – and hope that it isn’t her. This leads to a couple of major revelations, and a final denouement that will have female audiences cheering, and male audiences shaking their heads at the reverse misogyny on display. In essence, the problems in the novel have become the problems in the movie.

The main problem audiences will have is a lack of someone to even remotely care about. Despite a powerful and from time to time, deeply moving performance by Blunt, The Girl on the Train operates in an emotional vacuum. The trials and tribulations of the various characters are often on display, but it’s like watching a trio of strong-minded women who’ve all decided to give up on being independent, and who can only define themselves through their relationships with men. Rachel is the ex-wife who can’t deal with the fact that her marriage is over, Megan is the wife who needs affairs to feel some kind of connection with herself, and Anna is the ex-lover turned second wife whose chief function is being the mother of Tom’s child. Viewers may find themselves put off by the relentless undermining these characters experience, and the various ways the movie reinforces the ways in which said characters were undermined in the novel.

But beyond all the ersatz feminism, there remains the problem of the central mystery. Megan’s disappearance becomes a murder enquiry when her body is discovered in some nearby woods. But though Rachel wonders if she did kill Megan during her blackout, the likelihood of that actually having happened is so small it’s on a virtually sub-atomic level. So that leaves Anna, a character so gloriously one-dimensional that Ferguson’s talents as an actress are wasted; her husband Tom, whose outward calm and sincerity masks a need to control his environment; and tortured husband Scott, whose wild, angry outbursts could be a smokescreen for something much darker. And those are the only suspects, as the man Megan is seen kissing is her shrink, Dr Kamal Abdic (Ramírez), and despite the screenplay’s ham-fisted attempt to put him in the frame, he’s the classic red herring. This then makes it easy to work out who killed Megan, and also why.

For a thriller based on the novel “that shocked the world” – really? – The Girl on the Train is a bit of a damp squib, only showing signs of life when focusing on Blunt’s portrayal of Rachel. Blunt brings some much needed craft to her performance, ensuring that while everyone around her aims for competent, she’s proving capable of giving a layered, compassionate performance that elevates the material whenever her alcoholism is mentioned, or she’s on screen. In contrast, Taylor, who failed to find the motivation to make The Help (2011) as compelling as it should have been, leaves the viewer with the feeling he’s only semi-engaged with the project, and as a result, none of it resonates in the way that it should. It all leaves the movie looking and sounding like an uninspired echo of the original novel – and a less than engaging one at that.

Rating: 5/10 – slickly, professionally made, but as hollow as an Easter egg, The Girl on the Train delivers low rent thrills and annoying plot developments as it unfolds the mystery of Megan Hipwell’s disappearance; the non-linear approach of the novel is retained, and used to good effect, but this is still one literary adaptation that should have been more enticing and rewarding than it actually is.

Mini-Review: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

06 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

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Action, Cobie Smulders, Conspiracy, Danika Yarosh, Drama, Edward Zwick, Father/daughter relationship, Lee Child, Literary adaptation, Murder, New Orleans, Sequel, Thriller, Tom Cruise, US Military

D: Edward Zwick / 118m

Cast: Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Aldis Hodge, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger, Holt McCallany, Austin Hébert, Robert Knepper, Madalyn Horcher, Robert Catrini

After helping the US Military apprehend a crooked sheriff – it doesn’t matter why – Jack Reacher (Cruise) begins flirting by telephone with his contact, Major Susan Turner (Smulders). When he arrives back at his old military HQ to meet her for the first time, Reacher finds she’s been arrested on suspicion of treason. It’s all to do with an investigation she was overseeing in Afghanistan, and which involves the murder of two soldiers out there. Reacher is instantly suspicious himself, but when Turner’s attorney winds up murdered, he finds himself framed for the killing, and with only one option going forward: break Turner and himself out of military prison and go on the run while also trying to solve the conspiracy surrounding Turner’s arrest.

While all this is going on, Reacher also learns that he may have a daughter. Her name is Samantha (Yarosh), she’s fifteen years old, and she becomes involved when the mercenary assassin (Heusinger) charged with tracking down Reacher and Turner links her to her possible father. With the guilty party looking like defence contractor, Parasource, the trio travel to New Orleans and try to find the company’s middle man in Afghanistan, Daniel Prudhomme (Hébert). Frightened and in hiding, Prudhomme is eventually found, and what he tells them reveals a puzzling conspiracy involving the illegal smuggling of weaponry owned by Parasource itself, the rewards of which are outweighed by the potential worth of government contracts.

Jack Reacher (2012) made just enough money (if $218,340,595 can be considered “just enough”) to allow Jack Reacher: Never Go Back to be made. Making this only the second time that Cruise has reprised a character role, the movie again dispenses with any intention of following the sequence of Lee Child’s novels, and plumps for a more recent effort. Given that it provides Reacher with a potential daughter, you can see why Never Go Back was so attractive to the producers, including Cruise himself: let’s show the action man can be a big softie as well (though, actually, not too much of a big softie). But in the end, all this means is that the viewer is subjected to dozens of close ups of Cruise manipulating his facial expressions as if with strings, and a handful of awkward father-daughter moments that are played by rote. You can guess the outcome of this particular “mystery” from a mile away, but the movie goes through the motions with it, and never once makes it seem that Reacher and Samantha could achieve a really meaningful relationship.

This leaves the conspiracy story to lead the rest of the movie, but sadly, the movie never springs to life with it, leaving everything feeling flat and unnecessarily bland. Part of the problem is that you don’t really care what happens to anyone, even Samantha, and the mechanics of the villain’s deadly plot never catch on in the way that the writers and producers and Edward Zwick would like. None of it seems relevant, and all of it is coated with a thin layer of effort. Cruise looks determined, but often it’s difficult to work out if he’s in character or just trying to get through the filming stage. Smulders at least tries to inject some passion into things, but she’s held back by a script that actively ignores her character’s role in the military whenever it can, and at one point sidelines her as a babysitter to Samantha. It all makes the viewer “glad” that sexism can rear its ugly head in a movie, and if it’s supported by Tom Cruise then it’s all the better, and perhaps, even acceptable.

Rating: 5/10 – a sequel that lacks the bite of its predecessor, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back could also be called Jack Reacher: Never Knowingly Exciting; professionally done but a little too generic in its approach and presentation, it’s a movie that never strays out of its comfort zone, not even by accident.

The Library Suicides (2016)

01 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Catrin Stewart, Drama, Dyfan Dwyfor, Euros Lyn, Fflur Dafydd, Literary adaptation, Murder, National Library of Wales, Review, Ryland Teifi, Suicide, Thriller, Twins, Wales, Y Llyfrgell

Original title: Y Llyfrgell

D: Euros Lyn / 87m

Cast: Catrin Stewart, Dyfan Dwyfor, Ryland Teifi, Sharon Morgan, Carwyn Glyn

Twins Ana and Nan (Stewart) both work in the archive section of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Their mother, Elena (Morgan), is a famous author who has raised her daughters by herself. Ana is the creative, more outgoing twin, while Nan is the dependable, more introverted one. Their lives are orderly, well-managed and maintained, and their work appears to be all they have outside of their relationship with their mother. But all that changes when Elena commits suicide by jumping from a second story window at their home. With Ana and Nan both present in her dying moments, Elena says that “it was Eben”.

Eben (Teifi) was once a student of Elena’s who in the time since her death, has been granted access to her papers, and is intending to write her biography. The papers are kept at the National Library, in a vault room below ground. Late one afternoon he arrives at the Library to begin work on the biography. He’s shown in by security guard Dan (Dwyfor). Soon the Library closes, and once all the other visitors have left, Ana and Nan begin to carry out a plan they’ve hatched to kill Eben for causing the death of their mother.

Along with Dan, there’s another guard called Glyn (Glyn). The twins offer them both coffee laced with crushed sleeping tablets. Glyn succumbs, but Dan rejects the offer. Ana tempts him with alcohol (also laced with crushed sleeping tablets) but he only drinks enough to pass out for a short while. While both men are “out of action”, the twins confront Eben in the vault room. They pull guns on him, tie his hands together, put a noose around his neck, and make him stand on a chair. But as they pull away the chair, Dan – who has woken up and has seen what’s happening on a security monitor – cuts the power to the building. The lights go out, there’s a crash followed by a gunshot, and in the moments that follow, both Ana and Nan become aware that their plan for revenge isn’t going to go as well as they’d planned…

The Library Suicides is a bit of a rarity. It’s a Welsh thriller where the entire cast speak Welsh throughout (there’s the odd English phrase or word, but it still leaves the cast speaking Welsh for ninety-nine percent of the running time), and it’s largely set in the actual National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. There’s also something of a mystery to be solved, as the circumstances surrounding Elena’s death aren’t as clear-cut as they seem, and in particular, Eben’s involvement – if any – in what happened that day. As Ana and Nan put their plan into action, Eben’s behaviour, allied with some unexpected interventions by Dan, ensure that Ana and Nan have to improvise quite a bit, and in doing so, learn more about their mother than they suspected could be true.

Adapted from the novel by Fflur Dafydd (who also provides the screenplay), The Library Suicides is a smart, intriguing psychological thriller that makes good use of its unique location – it’s like a maze in there – and manages to keep the viewer guessing for most of its relatively short running time before it conforms to thriller conventions and reveals all. Before then, though, it throws in a few deft twists and turns, and keeps its focus firmly on Ana and Nan as they try to contain the fallout from Dan’s cutting off the power, and also contain their own feelings as they both learn about and reveal things about their mother.

In the hands of experienced director Euros Lyn – better known for his TV work on shows such as Daredevil, Broadchurch and Doctor Who – The Library Suicides is a dour but imaginative thriller that features a terrific dual performance from Stewart (who is herself a twin in real life), an ominous score courtesy of Dru Masters, and sterling cinematography from Dan Stafford Clark that captures the chilly atmosphere of the Library and the claustrophobic nature of the material as the characters become more and more trapped by the decisions they’re forced to make. One of the main reasons for how good the movie is lies at the door of Stewart, who at first makes it very difficult for the viewer to tell Ana from Nan and vice versa, but as the movie progresses, slowly but surely, she expertly defines both twins’ individual psychology, and in the process, gives two awards-worthy performances.

The mystery surrounding Elena’s death, and the meaning behind the phrase, “it was Eben”, is slowly but surely revealed as the movie progresses, and the deep, dark secret lurking behind it all (while it will be obvious to some viewers) is handled with care throughout. Lyn resists the temptation to make more out of it than there is, making it all more low-key than a lot of other movies would feel comfortable with. By doing so, Lyn ensures the viewer is more attentive and more invested than in a lot of other, similar thrillers out there, and he sprinkles some misdirection here and there to keep audiences on their toes.

This being a modern day thriller, there’s blood to be spilled, and though the physical demands of the production are entirely evident on the screen, it’s often the movie’s subtext that has the advantage of making more of an impact as the movie progresses. The movie is as much about redacted memory and the suppression of feelings than it is about revenge for an undisclosed crime, and Dafydd’s script keeps sight of all this even when said blood is being spilled. In particular it’s what the twins remember that carries emotional and dramatic weight, and again, both Lyn and Stewart are more than up to the challenge of revealing just enough to keep viewers enthralled and wanting to see what happens next. In the end it’s only a last-minute reveal that proves unnecessary, and while it may be clever in the context of what’s gone before, it does the narrative no favours and seems tacked on for effect – which it doesn’t need to do.

Rating: 8/10 – deliberately paced, and with the look and feel of a “Nordic noir”, The Library Suicides is a movie that gives its characters solid reasons for what they do, and never short changes them or the audience as a result; Stewart’s performances are compelling, and Lyn’s direction expertly juggles the visual demands of those performances, while also negotiating the spaces within the National Library with vigour and aplomb, making this one night shift that’s hard to forget.

Monthly Roundup – October 2016

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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400 Days, Action, Africa, Alexander Skarsgård, Christoph Waltz, Crime, David Yates, Documentary, End of a Gun, Greg Kwedar, Historical drama, John Dower, Johnny Simmons, Keoni Waxman, Louis Theroux, Malin Buska, Margot Robbie, Matt Osterman, Michael Nyqvist, Mika Kaurismäki, Monthly roundup, My Scientology Movie, Queen Kristina of Sweden, Reviews, Samuel L. Jackson, Sarah Gadon, Sci-fi, Steven Seagal, The Girl King, The Legend of Tarzan, Thriller, Transpecos

The Legend of Tarzan / D: David Yates / 110m

Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Chaplin

Rating: 3/10 – “meh”; woeful only just about covers how bad this movie is, from the wooden performances, to the haphazard scripting, to Yates’s casual engagement with the material, and all the way to the creaky use of CGI to simulate the African backgrounds – at no point does The Legend of Tarzan ever feel as if it has any intention of putting any real effort into things.

400 Days (2015) / D: Matt Osterman / 91m

Cast: Brandon Routh, Dane Cook, Caity Lotz, Ben Feldman, Tom Cavanagh, Grant Bowler, Dominic Bogart, Fernanda Romero, Sally Pressman, Mark Steger

Rating: 4/10 – four astronauts are locked inside a chamber designed to simulate the timescale of a planned mission, and the psychological effects of such a journey, but as the simulation nears its finish, the quartet find that things aren’t entirely what they seem; a mystery thriller that doesn’t need its sci-fi trappings (and where the mystery is unengaging), 400 Days plays out like an old Outer Limits episode but without the succinctness that show could provide, all of which leaves the viewer trying hard to make sense of what’s going on, and trying equally hard to decide whether or not they should be bothered about it all.

The Girl King (2015) / D: Mika Kaurismäki / 106m

Cast: Malin Buska, Sarah Gadon, Michael Nyqvist, Lucas Bryant, Laura Birn, Hippolyte Girardot, Peter Lohmeyer, François Arnaud, Patrick Bauchau

Rating: 5/10 – the story of Queen Kristina of Sweden (Buska), who in the ten years she ruled her country, did her best to bring enlightenment and peace for everyone, and who fought against her advisors’ insistence that she marry and secure her throne for the future; reminiscent of the Euro-pudding movies so prevalent in the late Seventies and throughout the Eighties, The Girl King lacks a coherent shooting style that isn’t helped by Hans Funck’s scattershot approach to the editing, but it does keep things admirably simple (if not too simple at times), and remains unexpectedly watchable thanks to Kaurismäki’s determined effort to convert Kristina’s reign (and her presumed lesbianism) into historical soap opera.

My Scientology Movie (2015) / D: John Dower / 99m

With: Louis Theroux, Marty Rathbun, Marc Headley, Tom De Vocht, Jeff Hawkins, Andrew Perez, Rob Alter

Rating: 7/10 – Louis Theroux, intrepid (and annoying) documentarian turns his attention onto Scientology, and attempts to understand why the organisation is so litigious and defensive about its practices; Theroux teams up with ex-Scientology bigwig Marty Rathbun to learn about what goes on behind the scenes, but succeeds largely in having childish spats with one of the organisation’s “security” team (very funny indeed), while organising a filmed representation of a meeting where Scientology leader David Miscavage threw a major tantrum, all of which leaves My Scientology Movie feeling arid for long stretches and not quite as illuminating as Theroux might have hoped.

Transpecos (2016) / D: Greg Kwedar / 86m

Cast: Johnny Simmons, Gabriel Luna, Clifton Collins Jr, Julio Oscar Mechoso

Rating: 5/10 – three Border Patrol guards find themselves in trouble with a Mexican cartel when they stop the wrong car at a checkpoint, and learn that one of them is in even deeper trouble than anyone knew; Transpecos makes good use of its New Mexico locations, and the opening twenty minutes point towards the movie being a tense, tightly constructed thriller, but sadly it soon degenerates into an unconvincing, meandering collection of scenes that are often dramatically inert, and which stretch the narrative in a variety of ineffective ways that it can’t recover from.

End of a Gun (2016) / D: Keoni Waxman / 87m

Cast: Steven Seagal, Florin Piersic Jr, Jade Ewen, Ovidiu Nicolescu, Jonathan Rosenthal, Alexandre Nguyen, Claudiu Bleont

Rating: 4/10 – retired DEA agent-cum-“ghost” Michael Decker (Seagal) rescues a stripper (Ewen) from her abusive boyfriend (by killing him) and finds himself helping her steal €2m of the man’s money – which doesn’t go down well with his drug czar boss; another Romanian-shot quickie from Seagal that keeps his stunt double, his running double, and his walking double in gainful employment, End of a Gun is made bearable thanks to a good performance from Piersic Jr, and Waxman’s ingenuity when shooting low-budget shootouts, but otherwise it’s business as usual, which is to say, pretty awful (and the less said about ex-Sugababes member Ewen, the better).

The Whole Truth (2016)

22 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Courtney Hunt, Crime, Drama, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jim Belushi, Keanu Reeves, Louisiana, Murder, Renée Zellweger, Review, Thriller, Trial

D: Courtney Hunt / 93m

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Renée Zellweger, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Gabriel Basso, Jim Belushi, Jim Klock, Ritchie Montgomery, Christopher Berry, Nicole Barré, Sean Bridgers, Mattie Liptak

In a small Louisiana town, young Mike Lassiter (Basso) is arrested for the murder of his father, Boone (Belushi). Having confessed to the crime, Mike says nothing more, even to his lawyer, Richard Ramsey (Reeves). Obviously this makes it hard for Ramsey to mount a defence, but as a friend of the family, and someone that Boone helped become a lawyer, he has inside knowledge about Boone that the jury won’t be aware of. With his client staying quiet, Ramsey’s only choice is to malign Boone’s reputation as a good father to Mike and loving husband to Loretta (Zellweger).

As the trial begins, Ramsey is joined by a junior lawyer, Janelle Brady (Mbatha-Raw). Together they begin to piece together a defence based on Boone’s abusive behaviour towards Mike and Loretta, while the prosecution – led by Leblanc (Klock) – reinforces the details surrounding the murder and Mike’s subsequent confession. The case seems hopeless until Ramsey calls Loretta to the witness stand, where she confirms just how abusive her husband could be. But as the trial continues, Janelle becomes suspicious about what might have really happened; she comes to believe that Mike is taking the fall for his mother. There’s no evidence to support this, however, and when Mike takes the stand and delivers a bombshell that no one could have prepared for, his testimony takes the trial in a direction that no one could have prepared for either.

With an introductory voice over by Reeves that sets the tone for the whole movie (he sounds bored and uninterested), The Whole Truth is one of those courtroom dramas where secrets are revealed every so often in an effort to keep the audience guessing as to what’s happened, or is happening, and which should add up to a last-minute revelation that will have said audience saying to themselves, “Wow! I never saw that coming!” Except, in reality, The Whole Truth opts for secrets that have no impact on the movie’s ending, and which are pretty much forgotten about once they’ve been revealed.

You don’t have to have seen hundreds of courtroom dramas to know that ninety-nine per cent of the time, if the defendant has confessed to the crime (but isn’t saying why they did it), then the chances of them actually being guilty are greatly reduced. And while it would be unfair to reveal if this is the case here, let’s just say that there is a formula here that’s being adhered to, and said formula shouldn’t spring too many surprises on anyone familiar with the genre. And thanks to screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (known here as Raphael Jackson, and perhaps wisely), the movie plods along from one unexciting revelation to another in a dour effort to appear exciting. It’s all so sloppily written that, from Ramsey’s “knowing” voice over to both his and Leblanc’s inability to cross-examine witnesses, The Whole Truth acts more as an educational movie about how not to make a courtroom drama than the effective thriller it wants to be.

Kazan’s script is one of the main offenders, but it’s not alone in handicapping the movie at every turn. Since coming to people’s attention with her well-received debut, Frozen River (2008), director Courtney Hunt has only worked on five TV episodes before taking on the challenge of molding this movie into something that isn’t the cinematic definition of “generic”. That she never gets to grips with the material, and films everything in a bland, TV-movie-of-the-week style, is evident throughout, and the look of the movie – all washed-out and looking as if bright colours were a no-no – further undermines any attempts the movie might make to stand out from the crowd. It’s as if cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin was instructed not to make the movie look attractive.

And then, somewhat inevitably, there’s the cast. Keanu Reeves has the kind of career that fluctuates between godawful and cautiously optimistic with almost absurd regularity. John Wick (2014) was a reminder that when he’s asked to play taciturn and given minimal dialogue, he’s playing to his strengths as an actor. But then he also appears in movies such as Man of Tai Chi (2013 – and which he directed), and Knock Knock (2015), and you’re reminded that he’s only good with certain material. Here he struggles as usual with both his character and his character’s dialogue, with his occasional voice overs further underscoring how often he looks and sounds removed from the movies he makes. He makes for an unconvincing trial lawyer as well, and The Whole Truth teeters on the edge of disaster every time Ramsey gets up to question a witness.

Making her return to acting after a six-year hiatus, Renée Zellweger is, as many people have already pointed out, hard to recognise as Loretta. Even when she speaks you could still be forgiven for thinking she’s someone else, and this proves to be something of a distraction whenever she’s on screen. Why she picked this movie to make her comeback is a mystery that’s more intriguing than the central mystery around who killed Boone, and though she has second billing, Loretta is more of a supporting role than a lead. She’s not asked to do too much, and when Loretta takes the stand, Zellweger treats us to a glimpse of what she’s capable of, but otherwise it’s a performance that dozens of other actresses could have given. Mbatha-Raw is underused as well, her character the inexperienced, somewhat naïve ingenue who gets her one chance to shine in court before being relegated back to the sidelines.

With the performances unable to lift the movie out of its self-imposed narrative doldrums, and Hunt apparently unable to make much out of the material, The Whole Truth proves to be hugely disappointing, and resoundingly flat. There’s no impetus, no energy in the courtroom scenes, and by the end it’s difficult to care who did what, why or how. Courtroom dramas succeed or fail on the quality of the secrets that are revealed during a trial, and the odds against the defence lawyer winning, but here there’s so much apathy on display that any impact is curtailed before any such secrets are fully revealed. This may be a courtroom drama per se, but someone really should have pointed out that the drama was, in legal terms, misrepresented.

Rating: 4/10 – originally set to star Daniel Craig as Ramsey, The Whole Truth is a movie that wouldn’t have turned out any better even if he hadn’t dropped out just days before production was due to begin; clumsy and dull, the movie is like drudge work for the eyes and ears, and never once feels like it’s going to step up a gear and become even slightly interesting.

War on Everyone (2016)

18 Tuesday Oct 2016

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Action, Alexander Skarsgård, Comedy, Corrupt cops, Crime, Drama, John Michael McDonagh, Michael Peña, New Mexico, Review, Tessa Thompson, Theo James, Thriller

D: John Michael McDonagh / 98m

Cast: Michael Peña, Alexander Skarsgård, Theo James, Tessa Thompson, Malcolm Barrett, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephanie Sigman, David Wilmot, Paul Reiser

Do you like your cops as corrupt as the criminals they arrest/steal from? Do you like to see cops misuse their position and betray your trust in them at every turn? And do you like them to have so little regard for your (or anyone else’s) dignity or safety that they’d hit a mime with their car just to see if he yells in pain? Well, if you only answered yes to that last question, then War on Everyone is the movie for you. It’s a buddy cop movie where the cops in question, Detectives Bob Bolaño (Peña) and Terry Monroe (Skarsgård), will do everything they possibly can to screw over everyone they meet, be it their long-suffering boss, Lt. Stanton (Reiser), or one of their stoolpigeons, Reggie (Barrett), or just about anyone operating on the wrong side of the law (like them).

When news reaches them that a big heist is being planned, naturally Bob and Terry want to know all about it so they can grab the money once the robbers have done all the hard work. But the man planning the heist is a shadowy figure they’ve not encountered before, and the details are equally shadowy; all they have are the men who’ll be involved but not the location or where the money is to be taken. With Reggie managing to get himself the getaway driver’s job, Bob and Terry think they’ve got it all worked out: follow Reggie, grab the cash at the earliest opportunity, and head off to somewhere foreign with no extradition arrangement with the US. But of course, nothing goes to plan, and Bob and Terry find themselves up against a British aristocrat called “Lord” James Mangan (James), the mastermind behind the heist, and someone who doesn’t take kindly to their efforts to hijack the robbery and take most of the money.

After the relatively sombre and restrained The Guard (2011) and Calvary (2014), writer/director John Michael McDonagh has decided to cut loose – and quite a bit – with this tale of two ultra-corrupt cops that’s set in New Mexico, is bolstered by the inclusion of Glen Campbell on the soundtrack, and which has a very gritty Seventies vibe to it. War on Everyone is also extremely funny in places, as you’d expect from McDonagh, and there are a plethora of laugh-out-loud moments to keep the audience happy and the script from seeming too formulaic. McDonagh is great at creating a world for his dysfunctional characters to inhabit, and the bright, airy spaces of New Mexico are used to good effect to create a surprisingly natural background for the absurdities that unfold in the foreground.

The plot, such as it is, is acceptable without pushing any boundaries or bringing anything new to the table, and McDonagh is keen to highlight the fact that he knows this, and that the audience should just go along with it. It’s Bob and Terry who are the movie’s real focus, even though their relationship – built as ever on mutual trust and respect while everyone else (bar Bob’s family) is fair game – is one we’re meant to enjoy for its verbal jousting and the pair’s unspoken dependence on each other. Only when it seems that Bob has run out of luck do we see how much Terry depends on him as both a partner and a friend. But in keeping with the characters’ macho exteriors, it’s a necessarily brief glance – and then back to the action.

With McDonagh having established the bond that unites these two latter-day Robin Hoods (only difference: they don’t give to the poor), he adds subplots and secondary characters to flesh out the drama, but in the process and with the exception of Landry Jones’ twitchy portrayal of Mangan’s right hand man, Birdwell, never quite manages to make them as memorable as they need to be. Despite sending Mangan (literally) on an acid trip that’s designed more to show off some fancy camera moves and elaborate staging than to look into the mind of the character, the villain is essentially colourless and in the end, easily dealt with. Likewise, Terry’s love interest, Jackie (Thompson), who he places under his own personal protection and who he promptly falls in love with. Jackie’s a sweet enough character, and as a counterpoint to all the cynicism on display elsewhere she fits the bill, but McDonagh doesn’t develop her in any way, and she remains a frustrating caricature: the girl who needs to be rescued.

As the two felons with badges, Peña and Skarsgård make a great team. Peña is the erudite, well-read partner who can quote from the Greek classics, and who realises that they can’t keep doing what they’re doing indefinitely (it doesn’t help that he looks a little like a Latino version of the British movie critic Mark Kermode). Skarsgård brings the muscle, folding in on himself a lot of the time and accentuating his forehead, as if he’s about to use it as a battering ram. He’s the more dangerous of the two, unpredictable, and Skarsgård projects just the right amount of bottled-up menace that the role requires. Together the two stars are a joy to watch, and McDonagh ensures that their camaraderie is entirely believable, even when he takes them out of their New Mexico comfort zone and sends them off to Iceland to track down an absconded Reggie.

Making his first feature away from Ireland, McDonagh shows a confidence in his decision that isn’t supported by the way he handles the material, and on this occasion McDonagh the director doesn’t know quite what to do to combat the problems inherent in McDonagh the writer’s screenplay. But the movie is an enjoyable one for the most part, provided the viewer keeps their expectations to a minimum; then they might be pleasantly surprised by Bob and Terry’s antics, and also more invested in how things turn out. One area where the movie can’t be faulted is in its cinematography, courtesy of the very talented Bobby Bukowski, whose previous movies include Rosewater (2014) and The Iceman (2012). Thanks to his efforts, War on Everyone is often beautiful to look at, and he keeps the camera moving in ways that are often very inventive – and often without the viewer realising it.

Rating: 7/10 – at times a raucous, freewheeling movie with plenty of buzz about it, War on Everyone can’t sustain it’s initial set up for very long, and McDonagh’s script loses its freshness around the halfway mark; good performances from Peña and Skarsgård help things immeasurably, but this has to go down as a missed opportunity from McDonagh, but not so bad that his next movie won’t be as highly anticipated as this one was.

Mini-Review: The Greasy Strangler (2016)

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

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Big Brayden, Big Ronnie, Comedy, Disco, Drama, Elizabeth De Razzo, Horror, Jim Hosking, Michael St. Michaels, Murder, Sky Elobar, Thriller

D: Jim Hosking / 93m

Cast: Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo, Gil Gex, Joe David Walters, Abdoulaye NGom, Sam Dissanayake, Holland MacFallister, Mel Kohl

Big Ronnie (St. Michaels), an ex-disco entrepreneur back in the Seventies, lives with his middle-aged son, Big Brayden (Elobar). When they’re not bickering, they run a tour guide business where they show unsuspecting tourists various sites “supposedly” connected to the heyday of disco. Big Ronnie likes his food cooked in a lot of oil and grease, the oilier and greasier the better, because when he’s not chiding Big Brayden, or ripping off tourists, he’s the Greasy Strangler, a maniacal killer who has claimed several victims so far and whom the police are no nearer catching than when he started.

Big Ronnie and Big Brayden’s relationship is shaken up by the appearance of Janet (De Razzo). Much to Big Ronnie’s displeasure, Janet takes a shine to Big Brayden, and they begin dating. This makes Big Ronnie so angry that he claims more victims, including friends such as Oinker (Walters). Big Brayden begins to have his suspicions about the Greasy Strangler’s identity, and when Big Ronnie behaves “all smooth” and persuades Janet to be his girlfriend, the stage is set for a showdown between father and son, killer and self-appointed vigilante, that will (inevitably) change their lives forever – but not necessarily in a way that either could have foreseen.

Already being hailed as a cult favourite, and having a level of critical approval that most low-budget, indie horrors would themselves kill for, The Greasy Strangler is a funny, awful, side-splitting, appalling, blackly comic, dreadful movie that works very well in stretches but makes too much use of verbal and visual repetition to pad out its running time. Depending on your tolerance, conversations involving the phrase “bullshit artist” may prove to be annoying, as might seeing over and over again, Big Ronnie getting cleaned up in a car wash after a bout of killing as the Greasy Strangler. Co-writer/director Jim Hosking appears to be striving for some kind of banality here, a further example of the monotonous lives that Big Ronnie and Big Brayden live – they do little beyond the tours, eating together, and arguing – but it’s a device that soon wears out its welcome.

Alternatively, the movie is on firmer ground when it’s trying to be shocking and distasteful. Prosthetic penises and exploding eyeballs are the order of the day, and there’s a pleasing, sleazy Eighties vibe to it all (the special effects reflect the quality of the period). It’s also very funny in a “you shouldn’t really be laughing” kind of way, particularly in the ongoing war of attrition that makes for the relationship between Big Ronnie and Big Brayden; dysfunctional doesn’t even cover it. St. Michaels and Elobar are both excellent, pushing a number of physical and emotional boundaries in the script’s pursuit of ever more alienating content. Love ’em or want to get as far away from ’em as possible, Big Ronnie and Big Brayden are characters you won’t forget in a hurry, and the movie is on very firm ground when they’re on screen together.

Rating: 7/10 – a breath of welcome bad air in a year where few movies have dared to be different, The Greasy Strangler doesn’t always overcome its low-budget origins, but it does have a number of moments where the viewer will be thinking “No way“; bold in both tone and content, the movie never tries to be likeable or elicit sympathy for its lead characters, meaning it is what it is, and it’s entirely unapologetic about everything it depicts, which in this genre, is exactly what it should be doing.

Sacrifice (2016)

09 Sunday Oct 2016

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David Robb, Drama, Joanne Crawford, Literary adaptation, Peter A. Dowling, Radha Mitchell, Review, Rupert Graves, Sharon Bolton, Shetland Islands, Thriller

D: Peter A. Dowling / 91m

Cast: Radha Mitchell, Rupert Graves, David Robb, Joanne Crawford, Ian McElhinney, Liam Carney, Peter Vollebregt, Conor Mullen, Declan Conlon, Deirdre Monaghan

Consultant surgeon Tora Hamilton (Mitchell) wants to have a baby. After four miscarriages – and with no real reason why they should be happening – Tora and her husband, Duncan (Graves) relocate to his hometown in the Shetland Islands from New York. She starts afresh in the local hospital, while he works on an industrial project elsewhere on the island. She’s welcomed by one and all, especially by Duncan’s parents, Richard and Elspeth (Robb, Monaghan), who have arranged both their jobs, the house they live in, and the hassle-free adoption of a baby eight months from then via a specialised clinic on a neighbouring island. Everything is perfect.

But then Tora discovers the body of a young woman buried in the peat at the rear of the house, and everything stops being so perfect. The woman had died as her heart was cut from her body, and strange runes have been carved into her back. Tora also notices tell-tale signs that the woman had given birth a week or two before her death. The later discovery of a ring bearing the initials of a local councillor’s wife makes Tora believe she’s identified the young woman’s body, but she’s dismayed to learn that the woman in question died several years before. Unconvinced that she could be wrong in her belief about the woman’s identity, she challenges the local police, led by D.I. McKie (McElhinney), along with Sgt. Dana Tulloch (Crawford), to look into the matter further. She begins her own parallel investigation, one that touches on a local legend involving male firstborns.

She also finds herself becoming suspicious of Duncan, as well as several of the more important men on the island, all of whom have a single male child that was the result of a pregnancy with their first wives; what makes it all so strange is that these women all died soon after their pregnancies, and some from a stage four cancer that precludes their being pregnant in the first place. She and Sgt. Tulloch find linking evidence of a fraudulent use of charity funds, as well as a connection with the adoption clinic. But when Tulloch is killed, her death leads to the confession of the local solicitor; he admits to killing the woman found by Tora, and more besides. Everything is resolved – or, at least it seems to be – until eight months later, when Tora and Duncan are on the verge of completing their adoption of an unwanted baby.

The Denver Post had this to say about the novel on which Sacrifice is based: “The page turner of the summer… Extraordinary”. High praise indeed, but the same can’t be said for Peter A. Dowling’s muddled, plodding adaptation, which struggles to maintain a coherent or consistent tone, and which steadfastly refuses to explain its fractured storyline in any great depth or detail. So much goes unexplained that after a while, the viewer has no choice but to either go with the movie and hope for the best, or stage a King Canute-like attempt to stem the tide of narrative short cuts and poorly handled plot developments that make up large parts of Dowling’s untidy screenplay.

Thrillers like Sacrifice often require more of a commitment to suspended disbelief than usual. The quiet, seemingly idyllic island community, the hint of magical fantasy that informs local beliefs and behaviours, the sense of a long-term mystery needing to be solved, the plucky heroine going up against a shadowy menace that will protect itself at any cost – all these elements, if mishandled, can undermine the overall mood that the movie is attempting to create. And so it proves here, with Bolton’s well-received novel churned over repeatedly and reduced to a mass of warmed-over clichés. It’s almost as if Dowling couldn’t be bothered to make any of it even halfway plausible, from Tora’s opening miscarriage (which takes place while she ministers to a woman about to give birth – oh, the irony!), to the scene where a conveniently placed cleaner allows her access to the dental wing of the hospital, and all the way to the end and the moment where the chief villain hands Tora a sacrificial dagger and then stands directly behind her (what could possibly happen next?).

These and other moments will have even the most casual of viewers scratching their heads in disbelief, and faced with such ill-advised decisions, the cast have no choice but to keep a straight face and do their best against all the odds. Mitchell, an actress who just doesn’t seem to get the right breaks career-wise (seriously, 2016 has seen her in this, London Has Fallen, and The Darkness – time to rethink her representation perhaps?), and while she’s often been the brightest thing in some truly mediocre movies, not even she can rescue a movie that doesn’t allow its central character to grow or develop in any way. Likewise, Graves is saddled with the kind of secondary role that requires him to pop up from time to time, act shady on occasion to attract suspicion, and then pull action hero duty against a secondary villain in a vain attempt to inject some excitement into a movie that’s been determinedly second-rate up until then. It’s a thankless role, and Graves looks increasingly put out by the role’s lack of, well, everything, as the movie progresses.

Dowling also fumbles the use of local folklore, neither explaining it fully or giving the viewer any clue as to why its practices would be maintained in a more contemporary setting (though, on the plus side, this does mean the chief villain doesn’t get to monologue his way through the inevitable cliff-top showdown). And the whole thing is so unnecessarily convoluted it’s a wonder any of the participants can keep track of what they’re doing and why – just like the audience. Ultimately, Sacrifice is a movie that doesn’t try hard enough to be anything other than just about acceptable as a time waster.

Rating: 3/10 – another low-budget, poorly made thriller that at least acknowledges it doesn’t have pretensions, Sacrifice is so bad that at times you wonder if it wouldn’t have been improved by the introduction of some humour to leaven things out; a “meh” movie then, and one that cuts corners both narratively and through the erratic editing process, leaving the unsuspecting viewer to wish that they too had been killed and left in a peat bog, thus ending their misery at watching a movie that wants to be like The Wicker Man (1973) but ends up being more like The Wicker Tree (2011).

Oh! the Horror! – The Darkness (2016) and Lights Out (2016)

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Anasazi, David F. Sandberg, Diana, Drama, Grand Canyon, Greg McLean, Horror, Kevin Bacon, Maria Bello, Radha Mitchell, Review, Teresa Palmer, Thriller

The Darkness (2016) / D: Greg McLean / 92m

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Radha Mitchell, David Mazouz, Lucy Fry, Matt Walsh, Jennifer Morrison, Parker Mack, Paul Reiser, Ming-Na Wen

In The Darkness, a family returns home from a trip to the Grand Canyon, unaware that their autistic son has released an ancient supernatural force that had been imprisoned in a secret Anasazi location. Once the feuding Taylors – dad Peter (Bacon), mum Bronny (Mitchell), teenage daughter Stephanie (Fry), and son Michael (Mazouz) – get settled back into the routine of sniping at each other and generally ignoring the fact that their combined behaviours are slowly tearing the family apart, the inevitable strange things start to happen. First, the taps in the kitchen turn on by themselves…

… and with that, any aspirations to be or do anything different for the remainder of the movie goes so far out of the window you’re not even sure if it’s landed anywhere. The Darkness is a shockingly bad amalgam of horror tropes and the supposed best bits from other horror movies. But in the main it’s Poltergeist (1982) that gets ripped off the most here, from the American Indian connection to the spiritual healer recommended to Peter by his boss (Reiser), and all the way to the portal that opens up in Michael’s bedroom.

With the script having been cobbled together by director Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong and Shane Krause, the movie ambles along on creative life support before it reaches the end and gives up the ghost entirely. Along the way it attempts to add depth by giving the Taylors their own personal demons to face as well as the ones formerly held at bay by Anasazi rituals. Peter once had an affair (though of course it didn’t mean anything), Bronny has a history of alcohol abuse, and Stephanie is bulimic (though one trip to the doctor’s seems to sort that one out). Personal demons, supernatural demons – what has this poor misguided family done to deserve all this? (What’s that? The supernatural demons are metaphors? Oh, right…)

There’s no shortage of cringeworthy moments in The Darkness (though the demons going by the collective name of Jenny is probably the best/worst), and the cast appear to have given up quite early on – Bacon in particular looks like he’s wondering if he could drop a few scenes and thereby lessen his involvement – but it’s McLean’s lack of focus on both the performances and the material that hurts the movie the most. With the script on only nudging terms with credibility – and yes, this is a horror movie, and yes, credibility is often the first thing to go when one is being made – it still needed a firmer hand at the controls, but McLean, now a long, long way from the glory days of Wolf Creek (2005) just lets the movie drift to a unsatisfactory finish that is at least in keeping with how unsatisfactory the rest of the movie has been.

Rating: 3/10 – meh horror that lacks commitment from all concerned, and offers nothing new… at all; daft, confusing, muddled, and dramatically inert for long stretches, The Darkness will make you feel uneasy – but, sadly, not for the right reasons.

Lights Out (2016) / D: David F. Sandberg / 81m

Cast: Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Maria Bello, Billy Burke, Alicia Vela-Bailey, Andi Osho

Martin (Bateman) is a young boy whose stepfather is killed in a very violent fashion. His mother, Sophie (Bello), already on medication for depression, is acting strangely. She talks to someone called Diana (Vela-Bailey) who doesn’t appear to be real. But one night Martin sees the hand of an unnatural figure in his mother’s room. Scared, he finds it difficult to sleep properly, and instead, falls asleep at school. When this happens for a third time, and the school can’t get hold of Sophie, they contact his older sister, Rebecca (Palmer). Rebecca left home years before, shortly after her father (Sophie’s first husband) decided to leave for good himself. Rebecca looks after Martin, but thanks to the intervention of Child Services, isn’t allowed to do so full-time.

With the aid of her would-be boyfriend Bret (DiPersia), Rebecca finds herself quickly coming to terms with the fact that Diana is real – desite having died many years before – and needing to do something about the wraith’s deadly attacks on Martin and herself. Armed with the knowledge that Diana’s attacks only take place in the dark thanks to the extreme heliophobia she suffered from when she was alive, Rebecca and Martin take steps to protect themselves, and to get Sophie to admit that her childhood friendship with Diana is allowing the spectre to exist. But Diana has other plans…

Expanded on from his 2013 short movie of the same name, David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out is an efficient, no-nonsense horror thriller that takes its basic premise – lights on: no ghost, lights off: there it is – and finds various clever ways of keeping the central conceit from getting too stale too quickly, even at eighty-one minutes. While Diana’s back story only partially explains her reason for haunting Sophie and her family, and Diana herself isn’t quite as frightening as she’s meant to be, nevertheless, Sandberg succeeds in making her as credible a character (in the circumstances) as can be, and manages to achieve the same success with Sophie, Martin and Rebecca. Sandberg is helped by strong performances all round – Palmer is particularly good as Rebecca – and a script by Eric Heisserer that does its best in avoiding the pitfalls of dishing up too many horror movie clichés (though it does serve up two unsuspecting police officers as victims of Diana’s wrath, just to keep the momentum going).

The movie is strong on atmosphere, with certain scenes having a clammy, claustrophobic feel to them that isn’t entirely to do with the characters being in confined spaces, and Marc Spicer’s cinematography makes the darkness that surrounds the characters for most of the movie as threatening as possible thanks to some very good lighting choices and some expert framing. The look of the movie is of primary importance in how scary it is, and Sandberg provides viewers with a mix of generic visuals and heightened situations that is surprisingly uncomfortable to watch at times. It’s not entirely successful – Bret is a seriously one-note character, the basement of Sophie’s house conveniently reveals a secret that otherwise would never have been known, a confrontation with Sophie about Diana (and her death) features some very stilted and ill-chosen dialogue – but on the whole it’s a far better movie than expected.

Rating: 7/10 – a horror movie that dares to be different, and succeeds for the most part, Lights Out has a creepy central premise that’s handled well and makes for some effective jump scares (for a change); inevitably, a sequel has already been greenlit, but this is an effective, self-contained movie that stands on its own and proves that intelligence and horror can go hand in hand, and not just wave to each other in passing.

Monthly Roundup – September 2016

30 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Andrew Asper, Antoine Fuqua, Ben-Hur, Chris Pratt, Denzel Washington, Drama, Elizabeth Mitchell, Fantasy, Florence Foster Jenkins, Frank Grillo, George Montgomery, Ghostbusters (2016), Glenn R. Miller, Historical drama, Horror, Hugh Grant, Ione Butler, Jack Huston, James DeMonaco, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Meryl Streep, Paul Feig, Review, Richard Boone, Robbers' Roost, Sidney Salkow, Stephen Frears, The Magnificent Seven (2016), The Purge: Election Year, Thriller, Timur Bekmambetov, Toby Kebbell, Western, Zoombies

The Purge: Election Year (2016) / D: James DeMonaco / 109m

Cast: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell, Mykelti Williamson, Joseph Julian Soria, Betty Gabriel, Terry Serpico, Edwin Hodge, Kyle Secor

Rating: 6/10 – several years after the events in The Purge: Anarchy (2014), ex-cop Leo Barnes (Grillo) is now head of security for Presidential candidate Senator Charlie Roan (Mitchell) – whose anti-Purge stance has made her a significant target come the latest Purge night; more of the same from writer/director DeMonaco, with the villainous Founding Fathers coming in for more grief thanks to the series’ need to avoid repeating itself, but without it actually finding a solution to the problem, all of which leads to The Purge: Election Year sounding good on paper, but proving instead that it’s an idea that’s already running out of steam.

Ben-Hur (2016) / D: Timur Bekmambetov / 125m

Cast: Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell, Rodrigo Santoro, Nazanin Boniadi, Ayelet Zurer, Pilou Asbæk, Morgan Freeman, Sofia Black-D’Elia

Rating: 3/10 – meh; a waste of time, money, resources, the cast, the crew, and another unwanted remake which ruins the one thing it should have moved Heaven and Earth to ensure it got right: yes, the chariot race, a sequence that’s assembled and edited so badly that you won’t have any idea what happens to Messala (Kebbell) other than that he loses.

Robbers’ Roost (1955) / D: Sidney Salkow / 83m

Cast: George Montgomery, Richard Boone, Sylvia Findley, Bruce Bennett, Peter Graves, Tony Romano, Warren Stevens

Rating: 6/10 – revenge is on the mind of cowboy Jim Wall (Montgomery) as he tries to track down the killers of his wife, some of whom he suspects may be part of a notorious gang of cattle rustlers led by Hank Hays (Boone); an average Western bolstered by a strong cast, Robbers’ Roost is rough and tough and bristling with repressed macho energy, all of which is channelled – eventually – into a less than exciting showdown, and an about-face by Hays that undermines both the character, and Boone’s enjoyable portrayal of him.

Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) / D: Stephen Frears / 111m

Cast: Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Rebecca Ferguson, Nina Arianda, Stanley Townsend, Allan Corduner, Christian McKay, David Haig, John Sessions, Brid Brennan

Rating: 7/10 – the true story of musically misguided socialite Florence Foster Jenkins (Streep) as she determines to bring her less than gifted voice to the unsuspecting ears of the public; as light and fluffy as a soufflé (and as enjoyable), Florence Foster Jenkins tries to be serious from time to time, but nothing can detract from Florence’s whimsical nature or the script’s determination to be nicer than nice, even when it needs to be a tad dramatic, such as when Florence’s husband (a terrific Hugh Grant) is shown to be having an affair, or Florence faces jeers rather than cheers from her audience.

The Magnificent Seven (2016) / D: Antoine Fuqua / 133m

Cast: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Peter Sarsgaard, Haley Bennett, Luke Grimes, Matt Bomer

Rating: 4/10 – a land-grabbing, thieving, murdering businessman (Sarsgaard) plays nasty with the small town of Rose Creek and threatens to ruin them all, leaving them with only one choice: to hire a band of mercenaries who’ll save the town and defeat the evil land baron; leaden and uninspired, Fuqua’s remake features characters you don’t care about, a huge body count that quickly becomes tedious to watch, and a cast that move about like they’re wading in treacle searching for some much needed motivation (not that they’re likely to find any, as it’s something the script isn’t interested in exploring in any real depth).

Zoombies (2016) / D: Glenn R. Miller / 87m

Cast: Ione Butler, Andrew Asper, LaLa Nestor, Kim Nielsen, Marcus Anderson, Brianna Joy Chomer, Ivan Djurovic, Aaron Groben, Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau

Rating: 3/10 – somehow monkeys become infected with a virus that brings on zombie-like symptoms, and before you can shout “No, don’t open the door!”, they’re loose in the grounds of a massive zoo just days before it opens to the public; rubbish on a bargain basement level, Zoombies is lame in so many ways you’d need more time than the movie plays for to go through it all – and that’s if you can at least stomach the movie’s incessant inanity, and it’s seriously worst-ever gorilla suit.

Ghostbusters (2016) / D: Paul Feig / 116m

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Chris Hemsworth, Neil Casey, Michael Kenneth Williams, Matt Walsh, Andy Garcia, Cecily Strong, Ed Begley Jr, Charles Dance

Rating: 3/10 – more meh; a perfect example of just how out of tune some movie makers are when it comes to remakes, Ghostbusters is so lame it makes Ghostbusters II (1989) look like a masterpiece of comic horror fantasy, and labours consistently under the impression that if you put four comediennes together in the same room, instant hilarity will be the result – an idea that this farrago lays to rest speedily thanks to Feig and Katie Dippold’s creatively moribund screenplay (and let’s try to forget the awful cameos from Murray, Weaver, Ackroyd, and Hudson).

The Girl With All the Gifts (2016)

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Colm McCarthy, Drama, Fungal infection, Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close, Horror, Hungries, Literary adaptation, M.R. Carey, Paddy Considine, Review, Sennia Nanua, Thriller

D: Colm McCarthy / 111m

Cast: Sennia Nanua, Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Anamaria Marinca, Fisayo Akinade, Anthony Welsh, Dominique Tipper

In the future, humanity has been infected by a variety of fungus known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. Victims lose the power to think and reason, and the basic need to eat living flesh becomes paramount. For this reason, the victims are called Hungries. But they won’t eat each other, only those who aren’t infected, and with the infection being passed on through blood and saliva, it’s even more important not to get bitten. Civilisation is in ruins, and what few survivors there are, are holed up in places like the army base located somewhere outside London. It’s here that the army, apparently under the command of Sgt. Parks (Considine), is working with a scientific team led by Dr Caroline Caldwell (Close), in an effort to find a cure for the fungal infection. Their best hope? Synthesizing an antidote from the brains and spinal columns of children who are second generation Hungries.

Second generation Hungries – children born with the infection – are able to think and reason but still hunger for flesh. There’s around twenty of them at the base, all kept in cells, and all kept in restraints when they attend their “schooling”. Their teacher, Helen Justineau (Arterton), is well-liked but naïve. She has a “class” favourite, Melanie (Nanua). Melanie is ten years old and very intelligent, even though she has no experience of the outside world, and she dotes on Helen as a surrogate mother. Meanwhile, Dr Caldwell is working her way through the children, using them (and then disposing of them) in her efforts to find a cure.

Inevitably, the base is overrun. In the melee that follows, Melanie saves Helen from being attacked, and they in turn are saved, unwittingly, by Sgt. Parks in an armoured vehicle. They, along with Dr Caldwell and two privates, Dillon (Welsh) and Gallagher (Akinade), escape into the nearby countryside. Their aim is to get to another base called the Beacon, but in order to do so, they find themselves having to travel through a Hungry-infested London, and having to rely on Melanie to help get them through…

At no point in The Girl With All the Gifts is the word zombie used or referred to. But this is clearly a movie featuring zombies, and there’s a significant amount of zombie carnage going on, but M.R. Carey’s adaptation of his novel of the same name isn’t really interested in all that. It’s an important part of the narrative, certainly, but the focus here is on watching Melanie become self-aware, and what that will ultimately mean for the non-Hungries she’s travelling with. As she learns more and more about the world she’s a part of, Carey’s best trick is to let Caldwell – so intent on doing good and saving the world – provide the impetus for the irrevocable choice that Melanie makes at the end of the movie (you’ll have to see the movie to find out what that is).

Along the way, Melanie’s interactions with Parks and Helen – her default step-parents, if you like – allows her to become more emotionally aware as well. Her initial doting on Helen, a young child’s needy infatuation, becomes more intense and more meaningful. Likewise, Parks’ simmering mistrust of Melanie and her motives gives way to mutual respect and trust, and Melanie learns from this as well. And when Gallagher is in danger from a group of feral Hungry children, it’s Melanie’s liking for him as an older brother that prompts her to insist they rescue him. All Melanie wants is to have a family around her, and even Caldwell fits into the mix as a grandmother figure. And thanks to the clarity and consideration found in Carey’s script, this need is defined without coming across as too laboured or too obvious.

It’s the personal relationships that anchor the movie, along with McCarthy’s strong, confident direction (all the more impressive for this being only his second feature), Kristian Milsted’s bleak yet arresting production design, and an eerie, unsettling score courtesy of Cristobal Tapia de Veer. With zombie movies virtually ten a penny these days, and with most looking to stand out from the crowd by virtue of any gimmicky concept they can come up with e.g. Zoombies (2016), The Girl With All the Gifts avoids such narrative and structural conceits by playing it completely straight and by applying studious attention to the details (though that’s not to say the script gets it right all the time; there are a handful of decisions made by the characters that don’t always add up).

The performances too are a major plus. Arterton, an actress whose career has never really taken off in the way that may have been expected, plays Helen with a quiet, sincere focus that gives the character a surprising depth. Considine is on equally fine form, Parks’ initial animosity toward Melanie giving way to the already mentioned respect, and the actor revealing an emotional quality to the character that could so easily have been overlooked. Close has the toughest role, as Caldwell’s single-minded pursuit of a cure creates more problems than it does answers, and leaves the character perilously near to being one-dimensional. But Close avoids this by imbuing Caldwell with an awareness of the cost to herself from her actions.

But this is Nanua’s movie. She gives such a finely nuanced performance that it’s hard to believe that this is her feature debut. As Melanie develops both emotionally and in terms of her relationships with the adults around her, Nanua displays a maturity that is quite impressive for her age, and her understanding of Melanie’s needs and desires is often very affecting. She tempers this with a no-nonsense, direct approach that matches the mood of the movie, and which allows her to dominate the scenes she’s in, making her more than a match for her more experienced co-stars. Wherever her career takes her, Nanua is off to a very good start, and her portrayal here is award worthy.

Rating: 8/10 – a post-apocalyptic thriller that boasts a clutch of very good performances and a tremendous sense of time and place, The Girl With All the Gifts is a surprisingly effective, and affecting, movie that breathes new life into a mostly moribund genre; it may not be the prettiest movie to watch, and it doesn’t shy away from being uncompromising when needed, but this is a genuinely rewarding movie that shouldn’t be missed.

ARQ (2016)

23 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Drama, Gray Powell, Rachael Taylor, Robbie Amell, Sci-fi, Shaun Benson, The Bloc, Thriller, Time loop, Tony Elliott, Torus

D: Tony Elliott / 88m

Cast: Robbie Amell, Rachael Taylor, Shaun Benson, Gray Powell, Jacob Neayem, Adam Butcher, Tantoo Cardinal

In the future, a man (Amell) wakes with a start. It’s early in the morning and there’s a woman (Taylor) sleeping next to him. Suddenly, men wearing air filtration masks burst in; when the man resists them he’s rendered unconscious. When he wakes for the second time, he and the woman are tied to chairs in the basement. The men are threatening, but will leave if the man gives them his “scrips”, credit notes they believe he has a large supply of. The home invaders leave the couple to think about it. The man finds a way to free himself and the woman. The man attempts to escape and is killed in the process.

In the future, the man (whose name is Renton) wakes with a start. It’s early in the morning and there’s a woman (whose name is Hannah) sleeping next to him. Suddenly, men wearing air filtration masks burst in; when Renton resists them he’s rendered unconscious. When he wakes for the second (fourth?) time, he and Hannah are tied to chairs in the basement. The men are threatening, but will leave if the man gives them his “scrips”, credit notes they believe he has a large supply of. The home invaders leave the couple to think about it. The man finds a way to free himself and the woman. Aware that, somehow, this has already happened, he forms a plan to kill the intruders by releasing cyanide gas into the ventilation system. While he turns on the system, he waits for Hannah to release the gas. But she doesn’t, and is revealed to be in collusion with the men. Renton hands over the scrips but is then shot and killed.

Renton wakes with a start. It’s early in the morning… and his predicament is beginning all over again. He formulates another approach but this backfires as well, and so on, until one by one, Hannah and the intruders become aware that they’re all stuck in a time loop, one that lasts for around three hours and fourteen minutes, endlessly repeating itself. The cause is a device, the ARQ (pronounced Ark), that Renton was working on for the Torus Corporation, and which he stole from them when he realised that its properties as a perpetual motion machine could be used as a weapon. The intruders, and Hannah, are members of a rebel group called The Bloc, and Renton is convinced that they’re after the ARQ and the need for scrips is incidental. Not wanting to let either side get their hands on the ARQ, Renton tries to figure out a way of escaping the time loop, saving himself and Hannah, and foiling the plans of the Torus Corporation and the Bloc.

Writer/director Tony Elliott’s first feature, ARQ is a quirky, sincere sci-fi drama that is refreshingly free of the kind of initial setting up period that would normally introduce us to the characters and their surroundings before letting them loose in the overall plot. Instead, Elliott throws us and Renton straight into the thick of things, and with a great deal of aplomb, lures his main character, and the viewer, into thinking that a solution to the time loop can be easily arrived at – and despite our knowing that nothing that easy is likely to happen; this is a time paradox movie after all.

With each successive loop, the movie creates more and more unexpected twists and turns, and in doing so, proves remarkably refreshing to watch. Of course, things get increasingly worse with every loop, and there’s an awful lot of dying involved (mostly by Renton), but Elliott’s script retains a fair degree of optimism as Renton’s efforts to solve the problem of the time loop and the ARQ’s role in it gathers momentum and urgency. The necessary internal logic that keeps everything as credible as possible is strictly maintained – for the most part – and one huge flaw aside, keeps the viewer hooked and wanting to see what happens next (the flaw involves the ARQ and what’s needed to shut it down). As Renton’s dilemma becomes more acute – can he afford for even the Bloc, the nominal good guys in this story, to have the ARQ? – Elliott works hard to maintain a level of suspense that also allows the relationship between Renton and Hannah to be explored in some detail.

Their back story allows for a degree of ethical debate, but thankfully it’s not at the expense of the movie’s more acute thriller elements. But it does add some much needed emotional depth to what would otherwise be a straighforward sci-fi thriller. Both Amell (best known for roles in TV shows such as The Flash and The Tomorrow People) and Taylor (also a TV alumni from shows such as 666 Park Avenue and Jessica Jones) strive for an honesty and a sincerity in their roles, and while they both stumble occasionally thanks to minor inconsistencies in Elliott’s script, their commitment to the material is evident in every scene and every twist and turn of the narrative.

The story plays out in a claustrophobic home setting, with a splendid mix of futuristic and old-fashioned production design courtesy of Oleg M. Savytski that makes Renton’s home look entirely practical for his needs and not just the script’s. If occasionally it feels like it’s a home designed to replicate a warren, with too many corridors and rooms for comfort, it merely adds to the level of anxiety created by the recurring time loop and the feeling that there’s no escape. Even when Elliott allows Renton and Hannah a brief respite by letting them go outside, they’re too uncomfortable with the open space (and a further mystery) to stay there. They return inside, and their brief sojourn is forgotten, another wrinkle in the machinations of the ARQ.

Elliott makes good use of his limited resources and keeps things moving intelligently and with a good deal of visual flair, despite the gloomy, and sometimes oppressive, atmosphere. The ARQ itself is nothing more than a revolving drum, and doesn’t always carry the weight of being such an important component of the story. Elsewhere, Elliott’s decision to make one of the intruders into an all-out bad guy adds unease to the narrative, and allows the story to go off in some unexpected directions. It’s this willingness to change the storyline and take chances with the material and the characters that is, ultimately, the movie’s biggest strength. And if these chances don’t always pay off, it’s a small price to pay for a largely solid and deliberately unprepossessing movie that tries hard to be different – and largely succeeds.

Rating: 7/10 – some viewers may be put off by the familiarity of some of the twists and turns thrown up by the time loop, but ARQ isn’t afraid to mix expectations and surprises, and it often manages to transcend both; a small-scale triumph then – not without flaws though – and a movie that has been carefully thought through from the off, it’s been assembled with a fair degree of skill and precision.

Welcome to the World of High Concept/Low Return – Don’t Breathe (2016) and The Shallows (2016)

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Blake Lively, Blind man, Drama, Dylan Minnette, Fede Alvarez, Home invasion, Horror, Jane Levy, Jaume Collet-Serra, Medical student, Mexico, Murder, Review, Robbery, Seagull, Shark, Stephen Lang, Surfing, Thriller

Don’t Breathe (2016) / D: Fede Alvarez / 89m

Cast: Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Stephen Lang, Daniel Zovatto, Franciska Töröcsik

You can hear the pitch even now: “What if these thieves tried to steal a lot of money from someone, and that someone was blind and he trapped them in his house and turned the tables on them?” A grateful production executive greenlights the project in seconds, and sometime later, the finished project is hitting screens with all the fanfare required of an original thriller (Don’t Breathe is being advertised and touted as a horror movie. It’s not; but more of that later.)

However, the grateful production executive clearly abdicated any responsibility for the project once he gave it the go-ahead. If he hadn’t, then maybe he could have insisted that the basic storyline, the marginally interesting characters, and the increasingly silly narrative be better developed before filming began. Sadly, it wasn’t, and the intriguing pitch that started everything off goes nowhere fast before throwing itself head first into the Comedy Zone in its last twenty minutes.

Every year the critics – and audiences – latch on to a movie they believe is a cut above the rest when it comes to other thrillers/horror movies/comedies etc. Don’t Breathe is one such movie, but as it does so little to justify its elevated importance, it’s tempting to wonder if the critics – and audiences – have seen a completely different cut of the movie; and if they have, why aren’t we allowed to see it? The basic premise is somewhat intriguing – three delinquents, Rocky, Alex and Money (Levy, Minnette, Zovatto), decide to go for broke on their next robbery/home invasion, but come up against a blind man whose resourcefulness (and unnerving ability to be in the wrong place at the right time) puts them in a life or (mostly) death situation.

Alvarez is a rising star in the horror firmament, and his remake of Evil Dead (2013) was better than expected. But here he’s in classic thriller territory, with a group of “innocents” being pursued by a relentless killer (Lang’s preternatural blind man), and finding themselves pushed beyond their limits. And though Alvarez is undoubtedly talented, here it’s obvious that he doesn’t have any answers when a script breaks its own rules – repeatedly. The blind man is referred to as an Army veteran, and because he’s played by Lang, we know he’s going to be a hard man to beat. But where a blind person’s other senses are often enhanced, here they come and go on a whim and a prayer. One minute he can hear extremely well, enough to pinpoint someone’s position in a ventilation system, the next he can’t hear a heavily wounded Minnette sneak up on him.

The problem with Don’t Breathe is that it wants to be a thrill ride with bloody (but non-horror) moments, but it forgets to add the thrills. A string of attempts to escape the house are repeatedly set up for Rocky and Alex to fail (Money exits stage left early on), and the plot’s major “twist” seems at first to be “great”, but it’s more of a way to keep the plot from collapsing in on itself (and pad out what would otherwise be a pretty meagre running time). In the end, the script, by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, runs out of steam and values unfortunate laughs over the muted tension it’s achieved earlier on. And as for the coda, well, let’s just say that clumsy is as clumsy does, and the end of the movie is very, very clumsy indeed.

Rating: 5/10 – with no one to care about or root for, Don’t Breathe becomes an exercise in soulless thriller tropes that let’s down the viewer continually once the blind man makes his presence felt; notwithstanding an eerie sequence in the basement when the lights go out, and some excellent production design, the movie will have long-standing fans of the sub-genre yawning at the absurdity and hamfisted nature of it all.

The Shallows (2016) / D: Jaume Collet-Serra / 86m

Cast: Blake Lively, Óscar Jaenada, Angelo José Lozano Corzo, José Manuel Trujillo Salas, Brett Cullen, Sedona Legge, Diego Espejel

As with Don’t Breathe, you can hear the pitch just as clearly: “What if a surfer, a lone woman even, gets trapped on a rock two hundred yards from land, but can’t get there because there’s a huge great shark stopping her?” And once again, a grateful production executive greenlights the project in seconds, and sometime later, the finished project is hitting screens with all the fanfare required of an original thriller. And yet…

The problem with The Shallows, however, is that, like Don’t Breathe, you don’t get a chance to really care about the main character, Nancy (Lively). We get to spend an awful lot of time with her, and while her predicament is scary enough on its own, it isn’t really enough in general terms for it all to work as well and as harmoniously as it would like. We get some back story – Nancy’s making a pilgrimage to the beach her mother, who has died recently, fell in love with twenty-five years before – but it’s very perfunctory and serves to pad out the script at the movie’s beginning. Then we have an extended section that shows just how good a surfer Blake Lively’s stunt double is, before Nancy’s leg gets chomped on and she makes it to the rock (along with an injured seagull).

And then the movie does something unforgivable: it makes Nancy’s predicament boring to watch. As if realising that having its heroine stranded on a rock with nowhere to go isn’t quite as cinematic as it hoped, the movie brings in a drunken Mexican (and brings back two surfers from earlier on), and serves them up to the shark as a way of re-engaging the audience’s interest (the drunkard’s death is particularly nonsensical, and any viewer who doesn’t hang their head in despair at the way in which he goes to his death, should give up now if they think it makes any sense whatsoever). Then it’s full speed ahead to the final showdown, Nancy vs shark, and the kind of over the top outcome that provokes laughter instead of relief.

After a string of uneven yet mostly effective thrillers starring Liam Neeson – Unknown (2011), Non-Stop (2014), Run All Night (2015) – Collet-Serra seems unable to do anything positive with Anthony Jaswinski’s tension-free script. From the decision to shoot most of the movie against a green screen (making most shots and scenes look false and oddly lit), to failing to address issues of continuity (how do the two surfers fail to see the drunkard’s remains on the beach when they come back?), Collet-Serra allows the fractured narrative to play out with barely an attempt at tightening things up, or avoiding treating the viewer like a numpty (sure, you can “stitch” a bite wound with just a couple of pieces of jewellery and not bleed out – no problem).

As the injured yet resourceful Nancy, Lively is a good enough actress that she can overcome some of the more bizarre decisions her character makes – resetting a seagull’s dislocated wing, anyone? – but for most of the time she’s either yelling in pain or shouting for help. Some of the earlier scenes are geared around showing off her figure, and there’s a particularly gratuitous surfboard-cam cleavage shot that adds nothing to the sequence it appears in, but as the movie progresses she keeps covered up and her predicament is kept to the fore – until the end when she’s required to strip back down to her bikini. We may be in the twenty-first century but in certain regards, it seems, the times they aren’t a-changin’ (or are ever likely to).

Rating: 4/10 – a thriller that plays out by the odd numbers alone, The Shallows does everything it can to fall short of expectations and commitment; with its unhappy use of CGI, and an overbearing score courtesy of Marco Beltrami, it’s a movie that brings apathy and indifference to the table in ever increasing portions.

Skiptrace (2016)

16 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Bingbing Fan, China, Comedy, Con man, Crime, Drama, Drugs, Eric Tsang, Eve Torres, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Johnny Knoxville, Macau, Mongolia, Renny Harlin, Russia, The Matador, Thriller

Original title: Jue di tao wang

D: Renny Harlin / 107m

Cast: Jackie Chan, Johnny Knoxville, Bingbing Fan, Eric Tsang, Eve Torres, Winston Chao, Youn Junghoon, Shi Shi, Michael Wong, Kuo Pin Chao

Here’s a question for you: when did you last enjoy – really enjoy – a Jackie Chan movie? Was it Dragon Blade (2015)? Or Chinese Zodiac (2012) perhaps. Or was it even further back? The Karate Kid (2010) maybe. If it’s been even further back, don’t worry, it’s likely you’re not on your own.

Back in 2012, Chan told reporters at the Cannes Film Festival that Chinese Zodiac was going to be his last action movie. He was getting too old, and he felt the world was “too violent”. And for a whole year it seemed that Chan was sticking to his word… and then he went and made Police Story: Lockdown (2013). So much for that, then. And now he’s back again with another action movie, Skiptrace, and this time, it’s… practically dead on arrival.

Let’s try another question: when did you last enjoy – really enjoy – a Renny Harlin movie? Was it The Legend of Hercules (2014) Or Devil’s Pass (2013)? Or something from the time when his name on a picture was reason enough to see it, say back in the Nineties. Unlike Chan, Harlin has never announced his “retirement” from action movies, and now he’s back with Skiptrace, and this time… well, you get the picture.

There are many, many, many movies that are made because somebody somewhere thought they would be a good idea. Movies like Skiptrace, which are made both for a domestic market (in this case, China and Hong Kong) and a wider, international market, show up each and every year. Some succeed in gaining that wider, international success the makers hope for – the Internal Affairs trilogy, for example – while the majority barely make an impact. In between are movies such as Skiptrace, with its bankable, internationally famous star; less bankable but still well-known co-star; even less bankable but still fairly well-known director-for-hire; country-hopping locations; uninspired action set-pieces; and a patience-testing script that has no intention of making any kind of sense at any point in the movie.

The plot, such as it is, has Chan’s dogged cop, Bennie Chan, still trying to avenge the death of his partner (Tsang) at the hands of criminal mastermind the Matador. Nine years have passed since that terrible event, and Bennie has spent the years since in trying to prove that high-profile businessman and philanthropist Victor Wong (Chao) is the Matador. Of course he’s been unsuccessful, and his latest attempt leads to the kind of property destruction that warrants his being told to take a month’s leave of absence. In the meantime, his deceased partner’s daughter, Samantha (Fan), has infiltrated Wong’s organisation in an attempt to find some evidence against him… but she’s drawn a blank too. It’s not until con man and gambler Connor Watts (Knoxville) turns up at a casino run by Wong and witnesses a murder that Bennie has a solid chance of bringing Wong to justice.

So far, so straightforward. But the script, already over-complicating things by having Bennie as Samantha’s guardian, introduces us to Connor by putting him in jeopardy in Russia thanks to an ill-advised relationship with a mobster’s daughter. A series of non-linear flashbacks to the previous twenty-four hours reveals Connor’s actions at the casino (including winning a large amount of money), his meeting Samantha, trying to avoid the Russian mobster’s goons (out to bring him back to Russia so he can be put in jeopardy), witnessing a murder in the process, and coming into possession of a mobile phone that will reveal the identity of the Matador. Too much already? Don’t worry, there’s more – much more.

What follows is a tortuous road movie that sees Bennie and Connor eventually learn to respect and admire each other, and which takes in such locations/developments as the Russian bowling alley where Connor finds himself in peril, a train that both men jump from as soon as they hear the ticket inspector approaching, buying the slowest vehicle in Mongolia without ensuring it has enough petrol to get them anywhere, an encounter with a group of Mongolian tribespeople (more of which later), a game of bluff and double bluff at the Chinese border that sees them arrested, their opportune “rescue” by the Russian mobster’s goons, a whitewater raft ride, and eventually, a zipline escape from Wong’s men.

There’s more still, but it’s all too tiring, a series of desperate attempts by the screenplay – step forward writers Jay Longino and BenDavid Grabinski, whose first collaboration this is – to keep viewers from nodding off or asking themselves why they’re still watching after the first half an hour. If the events listed in the previous paragraph sound exciting, don’t be fooled: even handled by Harlin, not exactly a slouch when it comes to action movies, those sequences lack energy and are shot through with the kind of slapstick humour that Chan’s movies are famous for. And it needs to be said: Chan is getting on. His decision to “retire” back in 2012 should have been followed through, because in Skiptrace you can see just how slow he’s become. The speed and intricacy of his past fight scenes are absent here, with blows and parries signposted well in advance and Chan being given more than enough time to get into position for each.

And then there’s the encounter with the Mongolian tribespeople. It’s a standard sequence to begin with, a misunderstanding leading to Connor and then Bennie squaring up against the tribe’s best fighters. The misunderstanding is resolved and the tribespeople take to the pair as if they were long-lost relatives. A feast ensues, and after a few too many drinks, Bennie begins to sing a song. A young woman joins him, and soon everyone is singing along as well, word perfect and in perfect harmony. The song is Adele’s Rolling in the Deep, and it’s possibly the most bizarre moment you’ll ever see, and hear, in a Jackie Chan movie. It’s also the best example of how haphazardly the script has been assembled, with sequences obviously arrived at and decided on before a plot was actually dreamt up.

Like so many of these productions, the editing is the worst aspect of all, leaving the movie looking like a cinematic patchwork, with shots truncated and poorly framed, and the performances (such as they are) suffering as a consequence. Chan is his usual amiable self, unstretched by the material, while Knoxville’s comic relief portrayal of Connor serves as a reminder that when a script is this bad the actor doesn’t have a way of countering it. Elsewhere, the supporting cast do what they can with their underwritten roles, with only ex-WWE wrestler Torres standing out thanks to her impressive physicality. Harlin is a bland presence in the director’s chair, his regular visual flair absent from the mix. It’s hard to believe that this is the same man who directed Die Hard 2 (1990) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996). But then, it’s hard to think of anyone who could have made something even halfway decent from the material on offer.

Rating: 3/10 – not the finest moment in Chan’s career, Skiptrace is hard to sit through and barely acceptable as entertainment; with all the vitality of a contractual obligation, the movie crams in a surfeit of incidents that, ordinarily, would keep at least another two movies happy – but ultimately, it doesn’t have any idea of what to do with them.

Bastille Day (2016)

05 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Bombing, Charlotte Le Bon, CIA, Crime, Drama, Idris Elba, James Watkins, José Garcia, Kelly Reilly, Paris, RAPID, Review, Richard Madden, Thriller

D: James Watkins / 92m

Cast: Idris Elba, Richard Madden, Charlotte Le Bon, Kelly Reilly, José Garcia, Thierry Godard, Anatol Yusef

Meh (see also Mechanic: Resurrection).

Rating: 3/10 – uninspired, heavy-handed, preposterous, and as dead on arrival as the four victims of its fictional bombing, Bastille Day limps along from one turgid, barely credible scene to another with all the panache and style of a boxer who’s on the ropes and seeing double of everything; not even Elba’s stoic presence can save this Euro-mess of a movie, an action thriller that insults its audience at every turn, plays fast and loose with its own narrative, and which flags up every single plot development with all the subtlety of a punch in the face.

Monthly Roundup – August 2016

03 Saturday Sep 2016

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A Perfect Day, Aid workers, Animation, Benicio Del Toro, Blue Sky, Curt Siodmak, Denis Leary, Drama, Espionage, EVP, Fedja Stukan, Fernando León de Aranoa, Galen T. Chu, Harrison Gilbertson, Haunt, Haunted house, Horror, Ice Age: Collision Course, Ione Skye, Jacki Weaver, Jean Byron, John Leguizamo, Ken Hughes, King Donovan, Liana Liberato, Little Red Monkey, Mac Carter, Mélanie Thierry, Meteorite, Mike Thurmeier, Morello Curse, Murder, Nuclear scientists, Olga Kurylenko, Queen Latifah, Ray Romano, Review, Richard Carlson, Richard Conte, Rona Anderson, Russell Napier, Sci-fi, Scrat, Simon Pegg, Spaceship, Sylva Langova, The Balkans, The Fifties, The Magnetic Monster, Thriller, Tim Robbins

The Magnetic Monster (1953) / D: Curt Siodmak / 76m

Cast: Richard Carlson, King Donovan, Jean Byron, Harry Ellerbe, Leo Britt, Leonard Mudie, Byron Foulger, Michael Fox

Rating: 6/10 – a sample of selenium, bombarded with alpha waves, becomes a lethal danger to mankind as it develops exponentially – and only the A-Men from the Office of Scientific Investigation can stop it; an exposition heavy sci-fi thriller that takes time out for (stranger) domestic interludes involving Carlson and Bryan, The Magnetic Monster packs a lot in to its relatively short running time and is unexpectedly entertaining for all its techno-speak and overly serious demeanour.

Haunt (2014) / D: Mac Carter / 86m

Cast: Harrison Gilbertson, Liana Liberato, Ione Skye, Jacki Weaver, Brian Wimmer, Danielle Chuchran, Ella Harris, Carl Hadra

Rating: 3/10 – a family move into a house where tragedy struck the previous owners, and the son (Gilbertson), along with abused neighbour Sam (Liberato), discovers that the place is haunted by a vengeful spectre; muddled, confused and scare-free, Haunt aims for unsettling and frightening but misses by a mile thanks to weak plotting, a jumbled storyline, stock characters, absentee direction, and an overbearing score (and that’s without mentioning the performances, particularly Weaver’s – which is dreadful).

Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) / D: Mike Thurmeier, Galen T. Chu / 94m

Cast: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah, Simon Pegg, Keke Palmer, Adam Devine, Wanda Sykes, Seann William Scott, Josh Peck, Jennifer Lopez, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jessie J, Nick Offerman, Chris Wedge

Rating: 5/10 – while Scrat does his best to keep his acorn safe aboard a spaceship, his actions lead to a massive meteorite heading for Earth, which in turn leads to Manny (Romano) and the usual gang having to formulate a plan to avoid the extinction of them all; while the series can still manage to sprinkle a handful of inspired visual gags throughout each entry (and this is no different), the law of diminishing returns is having a savage effect on the storylines, with this outing proving less than inspired, and leaving the characters teetering on the edge of becoming their own caricatures.

Little Red Monkey (1955) / D: Ken Hughes / 71m

aka The Case of the Red Monkey

Cast: Richard Conte, Rona Anderson, Russell Napier, Sylva Langova, Colin Gordon, Donald Bisset, John King-Kelly, Bernard Rebel, Arnold Marlé, John Horsley

Rating: 7/10 – when several nuclear scientists are murdered, and the culprit appears to be a little red monkey, Scotland Yard and a visiting US State Department agent have to make sure that defecting Professor Leon Dushenko (Marlé) doesn’t end up dead as well; an agreeable, fast-paced thriller, Little Red Monkey mixes international espionage, early Cold War paranoia, romance, and intrigue to good effect, and thanks to the script by Hughes and James Eastwood, has a discreet Hitchcockian vibe that benefits it tremendously.

A Perfect Day (2015) / D: Fernando León de Aranoa / 106m

Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Tim Robbins, Olga Kurylenko, Mélanie Thierry, Fedja Stukan, Eldar Residovic, Sergi López

Rating: 7/10 – a group of aid workers in the war-torn Balkans try to have a dead body removed from a well that provides drinking water, and are met by every type of obstruction possible – bureaucratic, cultural, and just plain bizarre; A Perfect Day‘s very good cast can’t mitigate against the episodic nature of the story, or de Aranoa’s offhand treatment of some of the minor characters, but otherwise this is a pointed, unsentimental look at the quieter horrors that war can throw up, and when it wants to be, uses black humour as a trenchant counterpoint to all the tragedy.

Mechanic: Resurrection (2016)

31 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Arms dealers, Australia, Crime, Dennis Gansel, Drama, Hitman, Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Malaysia, Michelle Yeoh, Review, Sequel, Thailand, Thriller, Tommy Lee Jones

D: Dennis Gansel / 99m

Cast: Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Tommy Lee Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Sam Hazeldine, John Cenatiempo, Toby Eddington, Femi Elufowoju Jr, Anteo Quintavalle

Meh.

Rating: 3/10 – a terrible sequel that lies dead on the screen, Mechanic: Resurrection features some of the worst green screen work ever (the opening fight in Buenos Aires), a plot that makes absolutely no sense at all, and performances from all concerned that border almost on perfunctory – if only they could have made that much effort; action movies don’t have to tie up every loose end or narrative loophole, but this has a script that just doesn’t know when to give up and go home, making it one of the worst experiences you’re likely to have at the cinema all year.

Blood Father (2016)

28 Sunday Aug 2016

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Action, Crime, Diego Luna, Drama, Erin Moriarty, Ex-con, Jean-François Richet, Literary adaptation, Mel Gibson, Michael Parks, New Mexico, Peter Craig, Thriller, William H. Macy

D: Jean-François Richet / 88m

Cast: Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, Diego Luna, Michael Parks, William H. Macy, Miguel Sandoval, Dale Dickey, Thomas Mann, Richard Cabral, Daniel Moncada, Ryan Dorsey, Raoul Trujillo

The recent career of Mel Gibson has seen him appear in one movie per year since 2010 (with the exception of 2015). While personal troubles have dogged him over the last ten years, and caused him no end of embarrassment – and given Ricky Gervais the opportunity to make one of the best jokes about an actor, ever – Gibson has tended to stick to the action genre that has stood him in such good stead in the past. Aside from his role in The Beaver (2011), Gibson’s choice of roles has seen him engage fitfully with the material on offer, and he’s been the villain in two action sequels that should have been much, much better: Machete Kills (2013) and The Expendables 3 (2014).

But now, with Blood Father, Gibson finally has a role he can really sink his teeth into, and the result is a performance that serves as a (much-needed) reminder of just how good an actor he really is. An adaptation of the novel by Peter Craig, and co-written by Craig and Andrea Berloff, the blood father of the title is an ex-con by the name of John Link. He’s been out of the joint for a year, and sober for two. He lives in a trailer outside a small town in New Mexico, and is a tattooist by trade. He’s also divorced, and has a seventeen year old daughter, Lydia (Moriarty). But Lydia has been missing for the last three years, ever since she ran away from the home she shared with her mother and her mother’s third husband. John has hopes of finding her one day, but without any clues as to her whereabouts, it’s unlikely he will.

It’s Lydia who finds him. Having gotten involved with a junior member of a Mexican cartel, Jonah Pincerna (Luna), Lydia finds herself in very deep trouble when Jonah raids the home of someone who’s been stealing from him. As a test of her loyalty he asks her to kill the woman there; Lydia ends up shooting Jonah instead. On the run, and with no one else she can call, Lydia contacts John and he arranges to meet her. He takes Lydia back to his trailer, but it’s not long before Jonah’s crew turn up looking for her. The ensuing gunfight prompts John to leave and take Lydia with him, and to find out more about Jonah and his connections. After a lucky escape from the police, John discovers that the cartel have sent a hitman (Trujillo) to kill Lydia.

A reunion with an old army buddy, Preacher (Parks), goes awry when he attempts to claim the missing persons reward money put up when Lydia ran away. She and John manage to get away, and at a motel they change their appearances, John shedding his beard and Lydia dyeing her hair blonde. While John travels to a nearby penitentiary to visit an old friend, Arturo Rios (Sandoval), who has concrete information about Jonah, Lydia is persuaded to take herself to a public place by John’s sponsor, Kirby (Macy), and trust no one. But it’s a set up, and Lydia is abducted. Her abductors contact John, and a rendezvous in the desert is arranged, but it’s a rendezvous that is likely to end in both of them being dead…

Fans of Mel Gibson the actor will be glad to see that his performance in Blood Father is very definitely a return to form. Ostracised and pilloried for the racist remarks he’s made in the past, Gibson seemed to be getting by on the goodwill of others – Jodie Foster, Robert Rodriguez, Sylvester Stallone etc. – and while he’s still a highly watchable actor in his own right, there was always a feeling over the last few years that Gibson wasn’t trying too hard, that the work he was taking on couldn’t have been challenging for him, and so he wouldn’t rise to the challenge. Here, though, Gibson has found a role that is not only challenging, but inspiring, rewarding, and above all, one of the best fits for his skills as an actor.

Inevitably, there’s more than a smidgeon of Martin Riggs lurking inside the character’s DNA. Witness John’s response to the arrival of Jonah’s henchmen and the gunfight that follows: he’s dismissive of them, and once they open fire and he has to deal with them he gives angry voice to the variety of ways that their appearance will lead to his breaking parole. He’s pissed off, he’s mostly unconcerned by their firepower, and he can’t wait around for the police – the sensible thing to do – because he’s convinced they won’t believe a word he says. Playing John with a fatalism that speaks volumes for the character’s mindset, Gibson gives one of the best performances of his entire career, and proves as mesmeric an actor as he was back in the late Eighties, early Nineties. As he scowls and growls his way through the movie, Gibson also imbues John with a subtle vulnerability that adds depth to the character and makes his need to reconnect with Lydia entirely credible.

Thanks to the combination of Gibson’s performance, Craig and Berloff’s astringent screenplay, and Richet’s sharp, purposeful direction, Blood Father is more than just a standard action drama punctuated by brief, kinetic bursts of violence. It has an off-centre sense of humour, is sure-footed enough to keep John and Lydia’s relationship free from sentiment, makes very good use indeed of its stunning New Mexico locations (beautifully lensed by DoP Robert Gantz), and above all, maintains a level of tension that many other so-called thrillers fail to achieve for even a fraction of the movie’s running time. As a return to form, Gibson couldn’t have picked a better vehicle or character, and the movie is proof positive that he’s still as mercurial an actor as ever, and that when the right role comes along, he’s nigh-on untouchable.

Rating: 8/10 – with deft supporting turns from the likes of Sandoval and Macy allied to Moriarty’s low-key, sympathetic portrayal of Lydia, Blood Father is more than just a vigorous action thriller; despite its awkward title, the movie explores themes of loss and regret, hope and sacrifice, that elevate the narrative beyond its basic, conventional set-up and make it one of the more astute “relationship dramas” out there.

Now You See Me 2 (2016)

27 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Daniel Radcliffe, Dave Franco, Drama, FBI, Jesse Eisenberg, Jon M. Chu, Lizzy Caplan, London, Macau, Magic, Magicians, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, New York, The Eye, The Horsemen, Thriller, Woody Harrelson

D: Jon M. Chu / 129m

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Daniel Radcliffe, Lizzy Caplan, Morgan Freeman, Jay Chou, Sanaa Lathan, Michael Caine, David Warshofsky, Tsai Chin

Ten questions you need to ask yourself while watching Now You See Me 2:

Why would prison authorities allow convicted criminal Thaddeus Bradley (Freeman) access to computer equipment that would enable him to make threats against the Four Horsemen (“You will get what’s coming to you. In ways you can’t expect.”)?
Pigeons? (Yes, pigeons.)
How does Lula (Caplan) know so much about the Four Horsemen, including the reason why Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher’s character from the first movie) isn’t around any longer?
Why is Dylan Rhodes’ (Ruffalo) attendance at a Four Horsemen “event” more suspicious to his FBI colleagues than his talking into his sleeve?
How convenient is it that Bradley has just the form Rhodes needs to get Bradley out of jail?
Chase McKinney (Harrelson) – unfortunate stereotype or unfortunate stereotype?
How likely is it, in a sequence that lasts nearly four and a half minutes, that not one of the security guards notice the playing card as it’s whipped, zipped and slipped from one Horseman to another?
How do lines such as, “But I don’t agree that we have a sackful of nada, ’cause we’re all here. That’s a sackful of something” get past the first draft stage?
When did the FBI’s remit extend outside of the US?
Could the screenplay by Ed Solomon have ended on a more absurd, ridiculous note than the surprise reveals made by Bradley?

Rating: 4/10 – another poorly constructed sequel that plays fast and loose with logic, Now You See Me 2 wants the audience to like it as much as the mass London crowds go crazy for the Horsemen; slickly made but soulless, only Caplan makes an impact, and the magic tricks lack the first movie’s sense of fun, leaving the movie to rattle on for two hours without anyone having to care what happens to the characters (which is both a bonus and a relief).

Oh! the Horror? – Cryptic (2014) and Visions (2015)

25 Thursday Aug 2016

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Anson Mount, Bart Ruspoli, Coffin, Crypt, Cryptic, Dan Feuerriegel, Drama, Ed Stoppard, Freddie Hutton-Mills, Gillian Jacobs, Horror, Isla Fisher, Jim Parsons, Joanna Cassidy, Kevin Greutert, Philip Barantini, Pregnancy, Ray Panthaki, Reviews, Thriller, Vampire, Vineyard, Visions

These days it’s easy to make a horror movie, and these days it’s even easier to be taken in by movie makers who promote their product as being one thing when it’s actually another. Here are two movies that, on the surface, look like horror movies and even have a basic horror movie set-up. Closer attention though reveals two movies that in reality are closer to thrillers with horror overtones than out and out scarefests.

Cryptic (2014) / D: Bart Ruspoli, Freddie Hutton-Mills / 93m

Cast: Ed Stoppard, Dan Feuerriegel, Ray Panthaki, Philip Barantini, Vas Blackwood, Ben Shafik, Sally Leonard, Robert Glenister

Five gangsters, their banker, their lawyer (and a random drug addict), find themselves in a crypt containing a strange metal coffin – and have strict instructions not to open it until their boss arrives later that night. With wild stories about a vampire killing off their fellow gangsters, it’s not long before the group begins to wonder if their boss has captured the creature in the metal coffin, and they’re all there to exact revenge on it when their boss turns up with the key. Tensions arise, however, with the idea that one of them might be the vampire instead, and accusations abound. With guns and knives all too ready to be employed, the group’s initial solidarity begins to disintegrate, and when one of them is found dead with wounds that could have been made by a vampire, suspicion and paranoia are the order of the night.

As the group struggles to reconcile their boss’s orders with the possibility of being locked in with a real “live” vampire, they become obsessed with the contents of the metal coffin. Now believing it contains weapons that could kill the creature – if it is one of them – they argue over whether or not to try and open it. Some, like banker Steve Stevens (Stoppard), are all for leaving the coffin alone and waiting for their boss. Others, such as loose cannons the Jonas brothers (Feuerriegel, Barantini), are all for opening it and using whatever’s inside to defend themselves (even though there’s no guarantee weapons are inside it). With an uneasy truce between the two sides looking unlikely to last, another death makes it impossible, and things quickly escalate…

A very low-budget British independent project, Cryptic is a rough diamond of a movie that mixes often corny humour with outbursts of blood-soaked violence and an East End vibe that works surprisingly well given its single location set-up and coolly bizarre scenario. That writers/directors Bart Ruspoli and Freddie Hutton-Mills have managed to stretch their very basic plot over ninety-three minutes and kept it entertaining is a tribute to their inventiveness, and the obvious fun they had in putting it all together. Even if the narrative does get bent out of shape now and again thanks to some fervent story ideas, and the need to keep its oh-so-important subplot ticking along in the background, Cryptic still manages to hold the attention and reward the viewer’s time.

Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills are aided by a more-than-game cast who invest their characters with recognisable traits and motivations, even when the action descends into unbridled psychopathy. Stoppard leads the pack as the suave, acerbic banker who refuses to let himself be rattled by the notion of a vampire in their midst, while Feurriegel and Barantini sidestep the script’s occasional need to caricature their characters by highlighting their solidarity as brothers even when they’re violently at odds with each other. And Blackwood is a delight as Meat, possibly the dumbest gangster ever, who buys his weapons on the Internet. They and the rest of the cast are hugely responsible for just how good the movie is, and it’s to Ruspoli and Hutton-Mills’ credit that they chose their cast so effectively and so well. By buying into the absurdity of the situation, their efforts make the movie a treat to watch.

Rating: 7/10 – an unexpected gem amongst the plethora of low-budget tosh the British Film Industry has released in recent years, Cryptic is deserving of a wider audience, and all because it’s clearly a movie that its creators have spent more than five minutes putting together; with a wicked streak of humour running through it from start to finish, and an edge that is only employed when necessary, this is proof that East End gangster movies don’t all have to be pony and trap.

Visions (2015) / D: Kevin Greutert / 82m

Cast: Isla Fisher, Anson Mount, Gillian Jacobs, Jim Parsons, Joanna Cassidy, Eva Longoria, Bryce Johnson, John de Lancie

Moving to Paso Robles to reopen a vineyard they’ve purchased, Eveleigh and David Maddox (Fisher, Mount) are expecting their first child. Having been on anti-depressants following a car accident a year earlier, Eveleigh has come off them thanks to her pregnancy, but is beginning to experience strange visions that lead her to believe that there are supernatural forces at work in their home. David isn’t so convinced, especially when their realtor confirms that the property doesn’t have a bad history. At the insistence of her OB/GYN doctor (Parsons), Eveleigh resumes taking anti-depressants and the visions cease.

Some months later, Eveleigh is persuaded to come off her anti-depressants by her friend, Sadie (Jacobs). But the visions return, and Eveleigh’s paranoia surrounding them leads her to believe that David is somehow involved. She delves further into the vineyard’s history, and discovers that a century earlier, paranormal activity prompted the then owner to burn it down. And Eveleigh’s research reveals pictures drawn by a medium who tried to contact spirits in the house; the pictures show Eveleigh and David. When her doctor and some of their friends mount an intervention, Eveleigh is forced to realise that her visions are not as she first thought, and are even more frightening for what they really mean.

There’s a twist in Visions that, all things considered, comes too late to save the movie from its determination to be bland and unremarkable. Despite a plot that requires Fisher to be put in jeopardy from the beginning, Lucas Sussman’s convoluted screenplay throws in everything bar the kitchen sink in its efforts to distinguish itself from every other “haunted house” movie. The result is a movie that promises much but delivers very little, from Fisher’s anguished mother-to-be, to Mount’s too-good-to-be-completely-true husband, and all the way to the “surprise” villains that audiences should have spotted a mile off. Greutert’s last movie was Jessabelle (2014), a movie that gave new meaning to the phrase, “so-bad-it’s-bad”, but here he’s on firmer ground, even if that ground contains the occasional narrative quicksand.

But the central mystery isn’t as gripping as it needs to be, and Fisher is often left stranded by the sudden twists and turns that her character’s visions propagate. Mount is left stranded by the script’s decision to involve him only occasionally, while supporting characters come and go without making any impact (including Parsons’ doctor, a role that does nothing to allay any suspicions that the actor can only play The Big Bang Theory‘s Sheldon Cooper). As the fitful tension begins to escalate, the movie – also edited by Greutert – at least makes an attempt at providing real thrills, even if they’re of the cheap and nasty kind. But all this pales beside the notion that the sins of the future are as dark and disturbing as the sins of the past; they’re not.

Rating: 4/10 – an unremarkable “chiller”, Visions tells its dull story with a modicum of creativity, but sadly, remains an underwhelming experience; Fisher is given the enviable task of not only being pregnant but “possessed” as well, but isn’t given enough support by the script to make some (or all) of her possessions come to her.

Jason Bourne (2016)

20 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Alicia Vikander, Asset, Athens, Berlin, Black ops, CIA, Drama, Iron Hand, Las Vegas, London, Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass, Review, Sequel, Thriller, Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel

D: Paul Greengrass / 123m

Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Ato Essandoh, Scott Shepherd, Bill Camp, Vinzenz Kiefer, Stephen Kunken, Gregg Henry

The original Bourne movie trilogy was smart, inventive, thrilling, and a massive boost for the ailing spy genre. It made an action hero of Matt Damon, featured action sequences that were fresh and exciting, and had an emotionally complex through-line that bolstered the already intense plotting. At the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, David Webb had gained the answers to questions that had plagued him ever since he’d been saved from a watery grave by the crew of a fishing boat.

Except… he hasn’t, not really. The closing lines from The Bourne Ultimatum – “I remember. I remember everything.” – are repeated here at the movie’s beginning, and are followed by a montage of scenes from the original trilogy (as far as this movie is concerned, The Bourne Legacy (2012) never happened). But in amongst these memories are flashes of scenes we haven’t seen before. And when Jason Bourne snaps out of his reverie, we find him in the back of a truck and heading for an illegal fight ground in Greece. Clearly the years since he took down Treadstone and Blackbriar haven’t been good to him: despite his fighting prowess he still looks lost. And the bad dreams, or reveries, he’s experiencing aren’t helping. For someone who “remembers everything”, he’s having some of the most spectacularly disturbing and disorienting dreams ever. And he can’t make sense of them, especially the ones that involve his father, Richard Webb (Henry).

Help comes in the familiar but unexpected form of ex-CIA analyst Nicky Parsons (Stiles). Having hacked into the CIA mainframe, she’s done so with the aim of helping Bourne learn more about his past, and has discovered that his father had a greater role in the Treadstone programme than Bourne has been led to believe. But in hacking the CIA, Nicky has become a target and her contacting Bourne in Athens leads to his getting “back in the game”. With CIA operatives on their trail, as well as an Asset (Cassel), Bourne gains access to the information Nicky hacked, and once he becomes aware of his father’s involvement, he finds his enrolment in the Treadstone program wasn’t as clear cut as he thought. But as before, his reappearance has senior members of the CIA, including Director Robert Dewey (Jones), unwilling to let Bourne expose their Black Ops programs. Using a combination of the Asset and the head of the Cyber Crimes Division, Heather Lee (Vikander), to track down Bourne and eliminate him once and for all, Dewey plots to keep the CIA’s secrets as hidden as ever.

Fans of the Bourne Trilogy are generally dismissive of The Bourne Legacy, the Jeremy Renner starring addition to the series that failed to add anything new to the mix, and which felt like an uninspired retread of everything that had gone before. Matt Damon famously turned down the chance to cameo in Legacy, and made it clear that he wouldn’t return to the franchise unless Paul Greengrass was back on board as well. Well, Damon got his wish, and Greengrass is back as the movie’s director. But perhaps Damon should have made another stipulation: that Greengrass didn’t write the script.

Jason Bourne has many of the same attributes that The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum share. There’s the generous use of “shaky cam”, Christopher Rouse’s exemplary editing, excellent location work, and a series of intense and very well-staged action sequences (one of the series major strengths). But there’s one aspect that’s missing this time round, and aside from Greengrass’s muscular directorial style, it’s perhaps the series’ most important component: the contribution of Tony Gilroy. As screenwriter of the first two movies, and co-screenwriter of the third (though his input was drastically reduced), as well as Legacy‘s writer/director, Gilroy helped guide the series from its inauspicious beginnings to a position of critical and commercial success worldwide. His scripts had intelligence, depth and subtlety, and his villains were drawn with a vividness and care that made them worthy adversaries.

But without Gilroy (no doubt a casualty of The Bourne Legacy‘s poor reception), Jason Bourne proves just as disappointing as its unacknowledged predecessor. Nearly ten years on from the events of Ultimatum, Bourne is still an emotional mess, haunted by memory fragments that cause him pain and regret. He looks awful, and Damon plays him like a man besieged. For a man who found all the answers he needed, Bourne looks even more tormented than when he was in the dark. The movie never really attempts to explain why this is the case, preferring instead to give audiences a tortured Bourne without expanding on his back story. As a result, his decision to jump back in, prompted by some spurious nonsense involving his father, seems perfunctory instead of necessary.

With Bourne himself treated in such a cavalier fashion – he’s really just a one-man wrecking crew here – the other characters fare just as badly. Dewey is a stock villain, one step removed from twirling an invisible moustache and muttering “mwah-ha-ha!” whenever the script has him do something nefarious. Jones has no chance with the role, and there are times when his awareness of this comes through loud and clear; just watch his scenes with Vikander, and ask yourself if he looks committed. Cassel’s Asset is fuelled by revenge for the torture he suffered through Bourne’s exposure of the Blackbriar program, but as the character spends an inordinate amount of time running around chasing Bourne without actually catching him, his anger (and his back story) gets shoved to the side. And then there’s Heather Lee, the Cyber Crimes head who acts as this movie’s Pamela Landy. There’s supposed to be some mystery as to which side she’s on (she helps Bourne in various ways while pushing a separate CIA agenda), but thanks to Greengrass’s less than subtle direction, Vikander never looks anything other than extremely distrustful.

And then there’s the small but important matter of how Bourne gets about. From Greece he travels to Berlin, then to London. He does so on his own, without any help from anyone, and manages to elude detection at every turn (a facet of the series that was usually, and very cleverly explained away – but not here). And yet when he travels from London to Las Vegas he does so by commercial aircraft, and though he receives assistance from Lee in getting through US Customs, it still begs the question how UK Customs didn’t flag him up in the first place. (Also, it seems that outside of Athens and Las Vegas there’s not the CCTV infrastructure to allow the CIA to track Bourne efficiently anywhere else.) And stop and think about this: in Las Vegas, at an expo for a communications platform that Dewey wants to appropriate – don’t ask – Bourne picks up various conveniently placed bugging devices that he uses to get to Dewey, all of which begs the question, what plan did he have originally (as he couldn’t have known they were there beforehand)?

Gaping plot holes like these only add to the realisation that Jason Bourne is a less than rewarding, less than necessary sequel to four previous movies (three of which had already told the story effectively and with impressive style), that throws in a handful of rousing action sequences, makes Bourne indestructible, has a subplot involving a communications platform – actually, still don’t ask – and features some of the blandest characters in the whole series. Greengrass is a mercurial director, with a great visual style, but he’s not as good a screenwriter as he might think, and along with Rouse, he makes things too simplistic for the movie’s own good. The end result? A movie that only takes off when it’s throwing punches or chasing SWAT vehicles.

Rating: 5/10 – a missed opportunity to enhance and expand on the series, Jason Bourne trades on nostalgia instead of bringing something new to the franchise; Bourne looks tired throughout, as does Jones, and by the movie’s end the viewer will feel exactly the same way.

600 Miles (2015)

16 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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ATF, Crime, Drama, Gabriel Ripstein, Gun running, Hostage, Kristyan Ferrer, Mexican cartel, Mexico, Review, Thriller, Tim Roth

Original title: 600 Millas

D: Gabriel Ripstein / 84m

Cast: Tim Roth, Kristyan Ferrer, Noé Hernández, Harrison Thomas, Armando Hernández, Mónica Del Carmen, Orlando Moguel, Gilberto Barraza, Harris Kendall, Ángel Sosa

Trading on long static shots and a stately pace in which to anchor its two leading characters, first-time writer/director Gabriel Ripstein has made a movie that takes an interesting (if not original) idea and transforms it into a movie that moves bluntly from scene to scene, and rarely seeks to engage with its audience. It’s a crime drama where the crime is incidental, a road trip movie where the journey is nothing more than a journey, and a buddy movie which lacks any real sense that its two main protagonists have really bonded (this is particularly thrown into sharp relief thanks to the movie’s final two scenes, the second of which has a real sting in the tale).

It also takes a long while to bring its two central characters together. Arnulfo (Ferrer), along with his bully of a friend, Carson (Thomas), smuggles guns into Mexico for a cartel. He’s a young man who lacks self-confidence, and he wants to impress his bosses, but he’s awkward and unsure of himself when he’s around them. Several runs go without incident, and Arnulfo begins to feel more confident. He meets a girl he likes and begins a (very) tentative romance.

What Arnulfo is unaware of is that his activities are being monitored by ATF agent Hank Harris (Roth). Every time he and Carson buy guns to take into Mexico, Harris is right there to collect the details of their purchases. When he finally has enough evidence to arrest them, Harris approaches Arnulfo’s truck while he waits outside a gunsmith’s for Carson to come out. Carson manages to overpower Harris before leaving Arnulfo with the problem of what to do with him. Panicked by the whole thing, Arnulfo puts Harris in the back of the truck, and not knowing what else to do, decides to drive the six hundred miles to the cartel’s base. He believes that the cartel will be able to use Harris for information.

But six hundred miles is a long way, and though Harris is stuck in a hidden section of the truck until they cross the Mexican border, once in Mexico, Arnulfo lets him ride up front, albeit tied up. And so begins a long, drawn-out section of the movie where Harris and Arnulfo get to know each other a bit better – but not in such a way that they can call themselves newfound friends. In fact, if anything, their relationship (such as it is) has the feel of a fait accompli, a way for Ripstein to pass the time until he can get to the inevitable showdown at cartel HQ. (There’s also an attempt at emotional confliction due to the fact that one of the cartel bosses is Arnulfo’s uncle.)

Alas, for all of Ripstein’s efforts, 600 Miles is as arid as the Mexican desert vistas we see in the movie. By taking an almost documentary approach to the material, and by stripping back the narrative to almost bare minimum levels, Ripstein has ensured that the movie looks good but is scarce on incident, and his characters seem to be devoid of an inner life. As a result, it’s difficult to care what happens to Harris and Arnulfo, and it’s even harder to imagine their journey together as being anything other than a chore for both to get through. Even though Arnulfo is trying to do “the right thing” as he sees it, his naïve decision has potential consequences that even he should be able to foresee. That he doesn’t is too ingenuous for the movie’s own good, and there are further instances where Ripstein’s dramatic needs – such as they are – mean that Arnulfo undergoes too many emotional transformations for them to work effectively.

As the troubled young man, Ferrer adopts a shy, deferential demeanour that fits well with the character’s insecurity and lack of worldly experience. By contrast, Roth is all silent stares and dishevelled authority. He’s a weary man in a weary job, as inured by ennui as Arnulfo is by immaturity. He’s not even very good at his job, pointing a gun at Arnulfo and not announcing his ATF status, and allowing himself to be kidnapped in broad daylight. Roth is good at playing understated characters, but he has so little to work with, not even a basic character arc, that even he can’t give the kind of magnetic, internalised performance the movie needs from the role.

What the viewer is left with is a movie that promises much in the way of well-judged characterisations, clever insights into the male psyche, and occasional outbursts of violence, but which fails to engage except on a superficial level. It’s a symptom of low budget, arthouse fare that we get interminable scenes of people staring out of or through windows, or lapsing into prolonged silence as if the mere fact of their being silent was evidence enough of some inner turmoil or struggle. In most cases this muted behaviour feels more like padding than incisive direction, and Ripstein’s efforts to convince us that these two characters are more than what we see never ring true.

Sadly, the movie is also let down (though not quite as badly) by Ripstein’s involvement in the editing, along with Santiago Pérez Rocha León. Between them, both men have shaped the style and rhythm of the movie in such a way that instead of feeling languid and somewhat pastoral in nature (which would have helped), it instead feels sluggish and lacking in passion. Certain scenes end abruptly, while others go on beyond their natural lifespan; it’s hard to know which way each scene will go. What is undeniably a plus for the production is Alain Marcoen’s simple yet highly effective cinematography, a great example of how to make a movie look dazzling even when using natural or low-level lighting.

Rating: 4/10 – audiences may well feel that 600 Miles is a triumph of style over substance, and while they might have a case, it’s Ripstein’s lack of directorial experience that hampers the movie and stops it from fulfilling its potential; Roth and Ferrer do their best to elevate the material, but they have so little to work with that ultimately, their efforts are in vain.

Before I Wake (2016)

14 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Canker Man, Drama, Dreams, Foster parents, Horror, Jacob Tremblay, Kate Bosworth, Mike Flanagan, Nightmares, Review, Thomas Jane, Thriller

D: Mike Flanagan / 97m

Cast: Kate Bosworth, Thomas Jane, Jacob Tremblay, Annabeth Gish, Dash Mihok, Antonio Evan Romero

Made in 2014 but only released now thanks to its US distributor, Relativity Media, filing for bankruptcy last year – which explains the credit “and introducing Jacob Tremblay” – Before I Wake is a horror thriller that takes the idea of dreams (and nightmares) that are able to come to life, and have a lasting physical effect on the “real” world. The focus is on a young boy, Cody (Tremblay), who has the ability to, literally, make dreams come true. After a string of foster placements break down because of this ability, Cody is placed with Jessie and Mark (Bosworth, Jane), a couple who have decided to foster following the death of their young son, Sean (Romero).

Cody settles in and at first all is well, despite his unwillingness to get a good night’s sleep. Instead he uses caffeinated drinks to stay awake, all so he can ensure that he doesn’t have a nightmare and summon the Canker Man, a force for evil that devours its victims. Cody believes the Canker Man killed his mother, and is responsible for the disappearance of some of his previous foster carers. But while he may have nightmares that bring the Canker Man to life, Cody also has regular dreams, and ones that give life to Cody’s chief interest: butterflies. Soon, Jessie and Mark are revelling in the appearance of dozens of these magnificent creatures; at least, until Cody wakes up – then they disappear in a puff of smoke.

Cody’s interest in Sean leads to his appearing one night, and as real as when he was alive. Jessie is quicker to associate Sean’s “return” with Cody’s dreams than Mark is, and she soon takes advantage of the situation, ensuring Cody sleeps so that she can spend more time with Sean. Once Mark becomes aware of what she’s doing, and highlights how inappropriate her behaviour is, it proves to be too late. Cody has a nightmare, and the couple have their first experience of the Canker Man, a terrifying creature that threatens them both. Following on from this, Jessie decides to find out more about Cody’s life before she and Mark began fostering him, and to see if his past holds any clues that will help deal with the threat of the Canker Man.

There are lots of horror movies that take place in a dream world, or in the realm of waking dreams, but very few where dreams are allowed to manifest themselves outside of these arenas. The beauty of Before I Wake – at least in its first thirty to forty minutes – is that it patiently sets up the rules of its scenario and does its best to adhere to them. During this period we see a particular cause and effect to Cody’s dreams that shows writer/director Mike Flanagan, and co-writer Jeff Howard, have thought their movie through, and have done their best to ground it from the start. However… once Jessie begins looking into Cody’s past, all that patient build up and attention to detail is abandoned, and the movie loses its identity to become yet another generic horror thriller (Flanagan refutes the idea that this is a horror movie, preferring the term “supernatural drama”; he has a point but it only goes so far).

This leaves the movie feeling dramatically rich and engaging in its first half, tackling as it does issues of grief, dependency, overwhelming sadness, and the deliberate exploitation of a child. Jessie may well be grieving still for Sean (the movie takes place six months after his death), but the way in which she so readily accepts Cody’s gift and uses it for her own needs, is in many ways more horrifying than the Canker Man himself. Mark calls it abuse, and he’s right. It’s such a breach of trust that the script runs the risk of making Jessie unlikeable as well as selfish, but thanks to Bosworth’s sympathetic performance, this is avoided. There are moments, though, when it looks as if the Canker Man is going to have a run for his money in the villain stakes. (And what a different movie it would have been if Jessie’s motivation had remained the same throughout; how would the audience have felt about her then?)

But as already mentioned, the script hives off from this approach into much more familiar, and prevalent, territory as Jessie delves into Cody’s past. This involves the easy theft of his social services file (complete with the location of the children’s home he’s sent to once things have escalated beyond the point where Jessie and Mark can deal with everything themselves), a visit to a mental institution to talk to a previous foster parent, Whelan (Mihok), and a confrontation at the children’s home where all the staff appear to have gone home for the night. Again, the credibility built up until now is left to drift off by itself, discarded in favour of a showdown between Jessie and the Canker Man that is thankfully brief, and true to the nature of, and reason for, Cody’s dreams.

Flanagan is a talented rising star, and while Before I Wake has its problems, he’s still able to show a confidence in the material, as well as the visual design, that bode well for any future endeavours. He’s also able to coax a good performance from the criminally under-used Bosworth, and shepherds Tremblay through his first lead role in fine style (even if his sing-song voice can be a bit grating at times). Sadly, Jane gets sidelined by the script too many times for comfort, but at least he’s in good company, with Gish (as a harried social worker) and Mihok allowed just enough time to move things forward when necessary. Some viewers may find themselves struggling to connect the dots once Jessie relates Cody’s unfortunate history, and some may even feel that it’s all too contrived, but at least Flanagan doesn’t pitch a special effects laden climax at his audience. There are a few scares along the way, but none that will trouble anyone who’s seen any recent scary movies, and no last minute idea for a sequel (hallelujah!).

Rating: 6/10 – a bunch of narrative inconsistencies and moments where the movie goes “off reservation” aside, Before I Wake is a hybrid horror/thriller that provides enough tension in its first half to help overlook the failings of the second; Bosworth is good value as always, and there are genuine moments of beauty thanks to Flanagan’s use of a kaleidoscope of butterflies as a potent indicator of Cody’s dream state.

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I Am Wrath (2016)

12 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Amanda Schull, Christopher Meloni, Chuck Russell, Corruption, Crime, Drama, John Travolta, Murder, Rebecca De Mornay, Revenge, Review, Sam Trammell, Thriller

D: Chuck Russell / 91m

Cast: John Travolta, Christopher Meloni, Amanda Schull, Sam Trammell, Patrick St. Esprit, Rebecca De Mornay, Asante Jones, Paul Sloan, Luis Da Silva Jr, Robert Forte Shannon III, James Logan

You’re an ex-Black Ops veteran turned law-abiding car engineer about to work for Honda (probably). You come home from a job interview and meet up with your wife who’s working on an independent review of a proposed water pipeline that’s being backed by the state governor. Both of you are approached by a shady looking guy who wants help paying his parking ticket. You warn him off but he gets offended. The next thing you know, you’ve been hit over the head and are on the floor, then the shady looking guy pulls out a gun and shoots your wife. She dies instantly. Thanks to your knowledge of cars, you recognise the sound of the car engine the shady looking guy and his two accomplices drive off in. Later, at the police station, the detectives assigned to your wife’s murder are sympathetic and helpful. Even later, those same detectives tell you they’ve got someone who may have been involved. At a line-up, you pick out the shady looking guy thanks to the distinctive fly tattoo he has near his right eye. And right then and there, the rug gets pulled out from under you: the detectives don’t have enough evidence to arrest him. The shady looking guy goes free. Now what do you do?

Well, if you’re John Travolta, and the movie you’re starring in is called I Am Wrath, then you tool up and go after the man who killed your wife, and his two accomplices. But what is it that prompts you to do this? Is it a profound sense of justice needing to be done? Is it anger and a need for revenge? Is it because you’re fed up with leading a “normal” life and you want to get back to killing bad guys? Or is it because a Bible the priest at your wife’s funeral gave you, lands open at a particular place (Jeremiah 6:11 to be precise) after you’ve thrown it to the floor? And is it because the phrase “But I am full of the wrath of the LORD, and I cannot hold it in” is featured there, and it seems like God’s giving you permission to go out and kill some people? Well, praise the Lord. Seems he doesn’t mind people committing murder after all.

This is exactly how Travolta’s character, called Stanley Hill (and since when did Travolta ever look like a Stanley?), comes to make the momentous decision to take the law into his own hands and seek vengeance on shady looking guy and his pals. If you’re in any doubt as to how good or bad this movie is at this point, then rest assured the scene with the Bible is as far from cinematic gold as it’s possible to get. Travolta hurls the good book to the floor. It lands cover side down and open at the aforementioned passage. Travolta looks over at it. He gets up, a look of consternation on his face. As he approaches the Bible he begins to look as if he already knows what he’s going to read when he picks it up. And once he does, there’s no doubt: it’s a sign! And he knew it was a sign! Stanley has been given a sign from God (even though he’s not a praying man)! Say Hallelujah everyone!

Unfortunately for I Am Wrath, any further religious overtones or connotations are abandoned with undue haste. Save an artless confessional scene much later on, the script and direction steer well clear of any religious undertones and concentrate on Travolta – aided by Meloni as his pal from their Black Ops days – and his mission to avenge his wife’s death. Along the way he discovers a conspiracy that involves the police, a local crime lord, and – shock! horror! – the state governor. What could have been an intriguing, finely balanced exercise in the nature of faith versus morality, instead becomes yet another tired actioner where one man and his friend take on a whole bunch of bad guys, break every law going in the process, and are cheered as heroes for “taking out the trash” (quite literally at one point).

First optioned as a vehicle for Nicolas Cage back in 2012, and with William Friedkin set to direct, the project derailed six months later. Watching this finished result, it’s hard not to see why, as it’s difficult to tell if Paul Sloan’s script – he also plays crime lord Lemi – is the same now as it was then, free from any revisions or amendments. It’s a screenplay that signposts everything so far in advance, that even the most naïve or inexperienced of viewers would have no trouble predicting each step or move made by the characters before they happen. From Travolta reassuring his daughter (Schull) that the drive-by shooting that nearly killed her will be the only time she’s put in danger (yeah, right!), to the police (Trammell, Jones) being in the pocket of both the crime lord and the governor, to the epilogue that apparently sees Travolta at the mercy of a “surprise” (not really) gunman, I Am Wrath diligently avoids doing anything that might be construed as original or different.

Those with fond memories of The Blob (1988), or The Mask (1994), might be encouraged by the presence of Chuck Russell in the director’s chair, but any hopes that the fourteen year hiatus since The Scorpion King (2002) has left him pumped and raring to go should be abandoned from the start. It’s clear that Russell is just a director for hire, and his bland, uninspired approach to the material reflects this idea all too well. He’s unable to motivate his cast either, with Travolta going through the motions, Meloni playing the sidekick with a (much needed) sense of humour, Schull reduced to creating a character out of whatever reaction she’s required to have from scene to scene, St. Esprit oozing venom like it’s expected of him whatever the circumstances, Trammell and Jones playing detectives who don’t have an ounce of depth between them, and Sloan snarling away at everyone in lieu of providing a proper characterisation. It’s all as bad as it looks, dispiriting too, and without even a sense of its own absurdity to redeem matters.

Rating: 3/10 – another nail in the coffin of Travolta’s career, I Am Wrath is disjointed, mediocre, passionless, and calamitous in equal measure, with lacklustre direction, a weak script, perfunctory performances, and woeful continuity (look for Travolta’s disappearing/reappearing forehead contusions); when movies look and sound this stale, you have to wonder what could possibly have motivated everyone to have taken part, the answer to which would probably make for a better movie than this one could ever be.

Money Monster (2016)

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Algorithms, Caitriona Balfe, Dominic West, Drama, FNN, Fraud, George Clooney, Hostage, IBIS Clear Capital, Jack O'Connell, Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, Review, Shares, Thriller, TV show

D: Jodie Foster / 98m

Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Denham, Lenny Venito, Chris Bauer, Dennis Boutsikaris, Emily Meade, Condola Rashad, Aaron Yoo

Lee Gates (Clooney) is the host of TV show, Money Monster. Gates acts as an advisor for anyone looking to invest their money in stocks and shares, but he does so in a hyped-up, devil-may-care fashion that makes him seem sharp and ahead of the game. From the opening dance routines to his frequently ad hoc approach to any scripted segments, Gates talks and behaves as if he can’t ever be wrong. As he gears up to present the latest edition of the show, Gates is expecting to interview Walt Camby (West), the CEO of IBIS Clear Capital, an investment company whose main trading algorithm has developed a glitch and “lost” $800 million, leaving some of their investors high and dry. But Camby is off the grid, and his chief communications officer, Diane Lester (Balfe), is left to field Gates’s questions.

Once on air, the show is interrupted by a delivery man (O’Connell) who appears on set and reveals he has a gun. He forces Gates to put on a vest that’s crammed with C4, and threatens to detonate the explosives unless he gets some answers as to why IBIS’ algorithm went so badly wrong. The delivery man, whose name is Kyle Budwell, is appalled that Gates, and everyone else, is just accepting Camby’s line that it was all just a glitch. Why, he asks, isn’t anyone asking how it could have happened, and why is everyone not as angry as he is, especially as Gates, on a previous edition of the show, told his viewers that investing in IBIS was safer than investing in savings bonds.

The police are quick to arrive, and the show is allowed to carry on broadcasting live. Gates’s producer, Patty Fenn (Roberts), is stuck in the unenviable position of having to keep both Gates and Kyle calm, and to keep the on-set camera and sound team from being hurt as well. Soon the police – and Gates – learn that Kyle inherited $60,000 when his mother died and he invested it all in IBIS shares; now he has virtually nothing except a job that pays fourteen dollars an hour and a pregnant girlfriend, Molly (Meade). Meanwhile, Diane begins to suspect that all isn’t as it seems at IBIS when her senior colleagues prove less than helpful as she tries to piece together what happened to make the company lose so much money in one hit. And as she begins to work out what happened, so too does Patty and Gates. As the mounting evidence points to fraud on a massive scale, Camby resurfaces, and he and Gates and Kyle find themselves on a collision course to reveal the truth.

If you’re thinking that Money Monster sounds like a fast-paced financial thriller where Wall Street is the bad guy, and Clooney portrays a champion for the little guy who exposes fraud and corruption wherever they rear their ugly heads, then you’re going to be disappointed. It is a financial thriller, that much is true, but the pacing is a little haphazard, and any tension inherent in the material is worn down by director Jodie Foster’s unwillingness to have the movie edited appropriately (and it’s not as if her editor, Matt Chessé, hasn’t any experience in this area – he’s worked on both World War Z (2013) and Quantum of Solace (2008) before now). This is best expressed in a horribly lengthy sequence that sees Gates and Kyle walk from the TV studios to Federal Hall, surrounded by armed police and baying crowds. With precious little happening apart from Clooney looking anxious and O’Connell looking like he can’t work out what’s going on, the sequence comes to a contrived end long after you’ve begun hoping that they’ll get there already.

With the movie’s thriller elements lacking energy or defined purpose, there’s the small matter of the McGuffin, the $800 million. Such is the muddled approach to the story as a whole, that the script – by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Rouf – never really decides if it’s important or not. That Camby is behind its disappearance is never in doubt, but Kyle’s motivations for challenging its public perception as a glitch manage to change from scene to scene. One minute he wants the money back so all the investors who’ve lost out can be remunerated, the next he wants an explanation as to how the money could have vanished in the first place, and then he’s looking for an admission of guilt. With the script unable to decide what Kyle wants, it leaves O’Connell adrift and having to do the best he can with a character who keeps telling Gates he’s not stupid, but who is then outed by his girlfriend as being exactly that (and when she does, it’s harsh).

Clooney is left stranded a lot of the time, especially in the twenty minutes or so after Kyle’s arrival on set. But when Gates is given stuff to do – argue about the state of his life against Kyle’s, plead with the public to buy IBIS shares in order to save his life – he’s stuck with dialogue that feels and sounds clunky and unconvincing. Clooney is a very good actor, but not even he can do anything with lines such as, “We take care of each other. It’s in our DNA. Not because an equation tells you to do it, but because it’s the right thing to do.” Roberts is likewise hampered by a role that requires her to be too many things at once: TV producer, hostage negotiator, amateur detective, and grudging friend (to Gates). She does her best but in the end has to coast along with the vagaries of the script like everyone else.

The script tries to make the apparent complacency of ordinary investors as much to blame for financial disasters as it does the banks, the investment companies and the government, an argument that sounds edgy but is quickly shelved once Camby’s apparent perfidy is placed front and centre, and there are some Gosh No! moments when Kyle trots out a few financial conspiracy theories, but on the whole this is a movie with a script that doesn’t know exactly what it wants to say, and sadly, a director who doesn’t quite know how to get it into better shape. There are stretches where Money Monster is quite listless, content to cruise along in neutral and wait until the next plot development hoves into view. What that means for the viewer though, is a movie that never grips as it should, and never engages consistently with its audience.

Rating: 5/10 – only moderately rewarding, Money Monster lacks discernible energy and stumbles around trying too hard to be an efficient thriller (without quite knowing how to be one); a disappointment then given the talent involved, this could have been a lot more interesting, and a lot more entertaining, if it hadn’t been so rambling in its approach and its execution.

Edge of Winter (2016)

08 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Drama, Father/son relationships, Joel Kinnaman, Percy Hynes White, Rachelle Lefevre, Review, Rob Connolly, Thriller, Tom Holland

D: Rob Connolly / 89m

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Percy Hynes White, Tom Holland, Rachelle Lefevre, Rossif Sutherland, Shiloh Fernandez, Shaun Benson

Set in the (very) snowy Canadian wilderness, Edge of Winter begins with an awkward meeting between Elliot Baker (Kinnaman), his ex-wife, Karen (Lefevre), their two sons, Bradley (Holland) and Caleb (White), and Karen’s new husband, Ted (Benson). The reason for the meeting is due to Karen and Ted heading off on a cruise holiday and needing Elliot to look after the boys. Everyone looks and feels uncomfortable, and it’s clear from Karen’s behaviour that Elliot isn’t exactly her first choice, but he is the boys’ father.

We never learn the reason why Elliot and Karen’s marriage ended, other than that the boys were “more mature” than their father. But his nervous attitude and eagerness for their visit to go well serves as a signal that all is not well with Elliot himself, and that it’s unlikely he’ll get his wish. Of the boys, Bradley is the more withdrawn and unhappy at having to spend time with his father. He’s a teenager and probably remembers more about the breakup of his parents’ marriage than he’d like (though how long they’ve been divorced is something else we never learn). On the other hand, Caleb, who is a few years younger, is more open to the idea.

The boys’ discovery of Elliot’s hunting rifle should be the opportunity for him to lay down some boundaries, but instead he offers to take them where they can learn to shoot. On the trip, Elliot lets his sons know just how important their visit is to him, and even goes so far as to confiscate Bradley’s mobile phone so that it doesn’t become a hindrance to their all getting on. When they arrive at the place where they can learn to shoot, Bradley’s first experience of firing a rifle concludes with his being embarrassed and refusing to carry on. Caleb is more enthusiastic, and he does well. When it comes time to leave, Elliot lets Bradley drive, but an argument between the brothers leads to their car skidding off the road and into a ditch. Unable to get the car free, the trio are forced to spend the night there. And while they wait, Elliot learns something that has a tremendous effect on him.

The next morning, and with Elliot claiming that it’s too far for them to walk back to the highway, they head off to reach a cabin by a lake that Elliot says is near enough for them to get to. When they get there, both Bradley and Caleb begin to wonder just how long their father is planning to stay there before trying to get home. Elliot himself is less than forthcoming, and the sudden arrival of two fishermen leads to the realisation that their father may not even want to get back home, and that maybe what he really wants is for the three of them to stay at the cabin indefinitely…

From the very first moment we see Elliot – dealing with a debt problem on the telephone – we know that all is not well with him. He looks pale and uncertain about things, anxious and agitated in a way that speaks volumes about his character right from the off. Whether this is the way the script describes him, or a decision made by Kinnaman in terms of his portrayal, or the way that first-time feature director Connolly advised the actor to portray Elliot, his agitated state works as a clumsy kind of cinematic shorthand: this is a man on the edge. But aside from having money problems, we never learn very much about Elliot, or the reasons for his being so anxious. Instead we’re left with a poorly constructed portrait of a man trying to connect with his sons who doesn’t understand the difference between appropriate and inappropriate, and who has no cognisance of the harm he’s doing in trying to bond with them.

As a result, Elliot’s behaviour stretches the viewer’s patience. With little or no back story to fill in the gaps, he becomes the movie’s weakest link, called upon to propel the narrative forward by virtue of some equally weak plotting. The arrival of the fishermen inevitably leads the movie into confirmed thriller territory, but it’s at the expense of what little credibility has been achieved so far. Elliot’s determination to keep his sons with him becomes increasingly preposterous (just how deluded is he to believe that hiding out at the cabin indefinitely is a good idea?), and his efforts to “keep them safe” are as equally preposterous on both a dramatic and a conceivable level.

The movie isn’t helped by the pedestrian pace adopted throughout. Connolly, along with editor Greg Ng, fails to realise that this isn’t an indie character study (even though there are elements of this buried in the script), but a slowburn thriller that should be highlighting the horror inherent in its basic storyline: that the biggest threat to the two boys’ safety is their own father. Instead it downplays any terror in favour of clumsy interactions between the characters, developments in the plot that defy rational explanation (the burning of the cabin, for one), and a reveal that begs the question, how could Elliot have done this without anyone else knowing? There’s no sense of urgency to help make the final twenty minutes more exciting than the rest of the movie, and no sense that the boys are in any real danger. Instead, the script (by Connolly and Kyle Mann) lumbers through an unconvincing series of confrontations and encounters until ending on a whimper rather than a bang.

Rating: 4/10 – with its cast able to provide only adequate performances thanks to the under-developed script, Edge of Winter is a disappointing and unrewarding experience; not even the beautiful Canadian locations can compensate for a movie that consistently avoids meeting its audience’s expectations, and which wastes too much time in achieving very little of merit.

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