47 Ronin

The short version is – it was bad, but not nearly as bad as I had expected it to be.

The poster and trailer are misleading. It’s kind of ridiculous to promote the film on the basis of an image that centres on none of the characters from the main storyline – no Ouishi, no Kira, no Asano – but instead shows Keanu Reeves, the behind-the-scenes baddy, and then a mute warrior and Zombie Boy, who features for all of 4 seconds of screen-time. And then an image of burning ships in Dejima, none of which is an accurate representation of what happens in this film – including the dominance of Reeves. The trailer also led me to expect a very silly fantasy with almost nothing to do with the original pseudo-factual story, very possibly not even set in the Japan of our world.

Well, this was Japan-through-fanciful-Western-eyes. Daibutsu grow organically out of mountainsides and Tengu that look rather too much like they’re from Star Trek hide in misty temples testing outsiders to either kill or bless them. But that’s alright, because this is intentionally supposed to be fantastical and puts magical powers front and centre, both for a big special effects-laden climax and for a way to make Asano more sympathetic than in the original tale – rather than just driven to rage by insults, he is manipulated by a spell.

The main thing that doesn’t work here is Keanu Reeves. Not the performance, necessarily – he does as much as I think there was to do in the flimsy part, and obviously put a lot of work into the combat sequences – but his part in the story. There’s some interesting things to be said here about the place of the ‘other’ and how being foreign, especially half-and-half, is a shorthand for both not belonging and being able to somehow be possessed of advanced abilities, but mostly what comes over, constantly and unceasingly, is how the character does not deserve to be foregrounded and has been shoehorned into this story so that Americans will actually go and see it, because the wider public still cannot identify well enough with a non-White character. Much protestation may be made about this, but the fact is that to avoid being pushed into a world cinema-y subgenre, this sort of awkward addition is necessary – it’s crass, but it simply translates into ticket sales. Shame, but true.

But it just doesn’t work. There’s no real place in the story for this weird half-Japanese, half-British person who has a mysterious past, should definitely have been killed after pretending to be a samurai, and whose main function in the story is to (a) get weapons, (b) have a stone-cold romance and (c) be able to deal with the made-up magic witch with made-up magic of his own. Awkward and jarring throughout – and that’s before dialogue like ‘I’m not afraid of you.’ ‘You should be!’

Take him and the witch out, though, and you get a fairly solid retelling of the classic story with big names. A large chunk of the Japanese acting community who have previously appeared in Hollywood films are represented – cast members of Thor, Pacific Rim, Battle Royale (okay, not actually a Hollywood film, but big Stateside), The Last Samurai and, yes indeed, Mortal Kombat are in the film, as well as an obligatory pretty-boy – this one from Kat-Tun. There are changes to the original in order to affect motivations, some of which make sense, like having Asano be innocent of resorting to violence, and some of which don’t, like Ouishi not throwing off spies by pretending to be a drunkard and womaniser but being thrown into a pit and inexplicably released just in time to be able to ruin Lord Kira’s plans. The one pardoned Ronin is one we actually care about rather than the random messenger boy – though I think it’s more devastating when Ouishi Junior, age 16, has to join his comrades. The climactic action is changed from storming a house to storming a castle using a theatrical show, but otherwise it’s a fairly loyal retelling with some big-name actors and some nice moments of cheesy pathos. Actually flesh out some more of the Ronin using the time otherwise spent on Reeves and you could’ve had an interesting take. But then – probably not one that added much to the old classic in any case.

So there we have it. A fairly decent film masked by a tacked-on extra plot to broaden the appeal. I must say, I find myself wondering what the Japanese thought of this. Is it, as I suspect, rather like English audiences going to see a film version of Robin Hood in which there’s a magical half-Japanese Merry Man inexplicably always being centre-stage?

Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Well, this is the point that the adulation stops, I feel. The need to string the franchise out so far that The Hobbit, of all books, is stretched into three overlong films has ended in Original Character fan-fiction, daft elf fighting scenes that have gone from small but amazing vignettes in the first films to rather tedious video game-esque events with rather too much surfing on the bodies of foes, and a makeup department that is unable to make Orlando Bloom look less than twenty years older than in The Fellowship of the Ring. 

This film could certainly have been an hour shorter and just as good. There were a lot of extraneous sequences, and while Smaug is undoubtedly the highlight of the film and quite brilliant to watch, there was far too much of him being incapable of catching his prey before the cliffhanger that close-ups of a missing scale and a reveal of a hidden black arrow in Bard's house has totally robbed of any real tension. 

To me, the film felt like a series of highlights - escaping from the elves, battling orcs, Sylvester McCoy constantly stealing the show (despite that scene on the Hobbit set in the Doctor Who special) and of course, Benedict Cumberbatch's superbly smug Smaug. I'm also a fan of those lovely sweeping shots of the environments. But between those just came far too much of very little, and the little love triangle between two elves and the one non-daft-looking Dwarf who isn't going to be the king definitely isn't up to the best parts of this most impressive of series. I also wasn't too sure about giving Stephen Fry another role, for much as I love seeing him on screen, it was jarring and very much a moment to take the audience out of their involvement with the story. 

But for all I know it had major flaws, I did enjoy the vast majority of it. I certainly wouldn't want to have missed it, and apart from going a bit too far with the combat sequences - yes, even the one with the barrel - this is some of the most spectacular film-making it's possible to see. It's true that really, Peter Jackson could spew out any rubbish with this production team and cast and I'd lap it up, but...I must say, I have to wish that it had been better. And shorter. 

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Thoughts on the original: link

So after this film, I was making jokes that book series that become huge hits because of female-dominated fandoms are all terrible. Yes, including Harry Potter. They were jokes, but…I must say I find it hard to provide much evidence to the contrary.

It may be no surprise, but I disliked Catching Fire. I actually had hoped that things would be more interesting in this film based on the possibilities of a wider story in the first, but…well, all that was promised there is still yet to come.

What I can’t fault are the blockbuster production values. The futuristic sets are superb, the direction, framing and editing work, the camerawork is no longer extremely annoying like in the first film and the performances are actually great, including the newly-introduced cast members. But again, it’s the writing I really have problems with.

I have huge problems with the fact that the film doesn’t work as a standalone story or as part of the overarching narrative. Alone, it’s deeply unsatisfying because it’s another total cop-out – Katniss and Peeta think they’re out of danger, but Katniss’s growing status as a symbol of defiance and revolution in a totalitarian society that, let’s face it, ought to be having a whole lot more uprisings than it does means that rather than simply being tortured into absolute subservience like a proper dictatorship would do, she’s put in for another Hunger Games against previous winners. Though this is built up to over an incredibly long time, it is for one thing completely stupid, as in reality everyone would have just died within a day with no survivors (much like the last games when they unleashed the CG dogs), but for another just like the first film raises lots of interesting moral questions about what will happen when the competition is whittled right down and Katniss has to start contemplating executing her allies, but then completely cops out and none of the promised tension ever reaches fruition, making the whole thing seem pointless. From the mastermind’s point of view, the whole exercise was stupid because Katniss was very likely to die many times over, and god knows what their original evacuation plan was because Katniss made hers up alone.

And worse, overall the film was just completely pointless. As I said, it basically ended at the point I thought it was start. The Capital really just let Katniss and Peeta go home unsupervised for months? And when they did, they didn’t slip away? The reasons Katniss has for not going, generally to do with her family and wanting to struggle from within rather than running, are reasonable, but only from a writing point of view to postpone action. And what is her action postponed for? This half-baked rehash of the first book that doesn’t even get anywhere. It would have been extremely easy for Collins to write a single scene that goes from Katniss and Gale contemplating leaving District 12 to the scene at the very end of this film, with none of what came in between. Thus, the film’s contents were superfluous and must be worthwhile alone – which they clearly weren’t.

It’s true that there are worst books out there. But after the first film, I said I was sad that this was being made rather than more His Dark Materials. Well, add Narnia to that. And colour me very disappointed that we get films of tripe like Eragon, Percy Jackson and Stormbreaker while superb YA books like Mortal Engines, The Wind Singer, Larklight and The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray never seem to get past preproduction. 

The Butler

A very worthy, pompous and sentimental film, The Butler nevertheless manages to hit the right emotional notes at the right time to frame neatly the guilt, the drama and the occasional incredibly brave spirits of the civil rights struggles in the latter half of the Twentieth Century in the United States – while making Hollywood studios a nice buck, in the time-honoured way.

Superb performances, a string of very pleasant surprises in the casting of successive actors as recognisable US presidents – some of them completely unexpected but actually inspired – and almost all of the heavy-hitting moments of the last sixty years of US history, from the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King to Vietnam, got checked off in the story of one Butler’s long tenure at the White House. Though it sounds like it could have been a fanciful bit of Hollywood invention and many critics have rightly likened it to Forrest Gump, it was based on the life of Eugene Allen, who genuinely did serve in the White House for 34 years, reaching prominence after a Washington Post article and living to see the first black president, though sadly not to see the film based on his life. He may have been uncomfortable with the interpretation in any case – while he was the inspiration for this film, his family life was entirely fictitious, from the traumas of his early childhood on a plantation to his sons highly symbolically going in very different directions, one to serve in Vietnam while the other became a black panther and ultimately a left-wing minor politician

Through the presence of a black man in the White House and the tensions between a father who has come from so little that he thinks his position is incredibly honourable and a son who thinks the black man serving the white is an abhorrent Uncle Tom, but layers of complexity are added with the butler – here named Cecil – gaining enough leverage to begin to fight for equal wages for black and white staff, and a fictitious but excellent quote from the film’s briefly-glimpsed Martin Luther King on the way a ‘black domestic’ can be subversive without knowing it.

There is much to recommend The Butler – the fantastic performances, especially from Forest Whitaker, Cuba Gooding Jr and Lenny Kravitz, and Oprah did her bit nicely too, though I think the filmmakers knew the audience was never going to be suckered into too sentimental a moment with her. I also loved how shellsuits are so perfect a shorthand for a certain era. But if you don’t want to go to the cinema to feel slightly manipulated and preached to, there may be more enjoyable choices. 

Gravity

The consensus amongst our little group was, I think, that while Gravity was worth a watch, it had been overhyped and was both sillier and more predictable than it was made out to be.

The story is pretty obvious from the trailer – when a space shuttle is hit by high-speed shrapnel (the Russians’ fault, of course), a scientific operation goes disastrously wrong and two astronauts are left out in the void of space with only one thruster pack between them, trying desperately to get to the ISS. 

It may have the novelty of a realistic treatment of space, but it’s the same basic scenario as any escape-from-a-hostile-environment film, be it a crew trapped in a submarine or a sci-fi flick about space shields slowly fading. It is also fanciful, relying on incredibly coincidental timing to put its characters in danger at just the right moments, one rather ham-fisted hallucination scene, a rather handy landing point just off a shore rather than in the middle of a vast ocean, and a fire-extinguisher-as-thruster scene that while reasonable overall, was done rather too soon after Wall-E.

The performances are strong, to be sure, and apart from some well-controlled hair the effects very convincing – done largely with CG and some huge rigs, apparently – but the effect is of course very familiar these days and only when you look into the lengths filmmakers go to get weightless shots (the most impressive being the ordeal for Apollo 13) do you realise how far it can be necessary to go for that effect. But the whole point of this film is to portray the environment realistically, with the dangers that can hit when technology fails, and thus the technical marvel only gets in the way.

In the end, beyond its first ten minutes, I don’t think Gravity manages to deliver on its promises. It’s a film that is ultimately not very thrilling, tense or believable, leaving only something that is quite formulaic and cliché. If the beauty of the view of Earth from orbit is enough of a draw, perhaps none of the other shortcomings matter. It’s not a film I would care to see again, though. 

Thor: The Dark World

It remains a bit of a golden era for comic book films - they keep on putting them out, with a whole lot of money behind them, and if your first try didn't quite fire on all cylinders, you get another chance, especially if you're an Avenger and your bad guy is a runaway favourite with audiences.

And so comes Thor 2, no longer needing to get bogged down with exposition or encouraging its audience to like its rather thin characters. And as such it was a silly but rather enjoyable film.

After quite a bizarre moment when after the trailers our 'Sky Superscreen' was taken over by Talking Tom from the Android app for somebody to propose to their future wife in the cinema (cute, but would you really choose Thor 2?), we donned our 3D glasses for the newest box office draw. With the various realms of Norse myth now largely peaceful and Loki locked up in prison, things seem good for Thor. But Dark Elves from before the time of Midgard - led by Christopher Ecclestone in heavy prosthetics - are seeking the aether, which will allow them to return the universe to darkness. As the realms align, little portals open, and since her job is to investigate such things, Natalie Portman's character steps through and happens to find the aether.

This is a story that relies on coincidence. It's Thor's girlfriend who finds the McGuffin, their allies have random bits of technology that just happen to be able to affect the portals between worlds in just the right way, and the ones falling in and out of these random wormholes are almost entirely our central gang, rather than innocent people ending up falling to their deaths and suchlike.

The film doesn't stand up to scrutiny and is deeply unsophisticated, but that's sort of the point. It's fun. The characters are broad but believable and Tom Hiddleston's Loki is one of the most compelling villains of any film franchise of the past few decades. Thor himself is flawed enough to be likeable and his Warriors Three excellent examples of economically-sketched characters. The big destructive setpieces are also highly enjoyable - with an extra thrill of pleasure for us watching the film in Greenwich, which is where the climactic action takes place. And yes, yes that woman on the Tube gave Thor bad directions.  I'm sure she was just flustered.

The traditional teaser in the first of two extra scenes during the credits revealed more hints about the Infinity Stones being central to the next Avengers film. Quite keen for that - though I hope things get incorporated a little better next time, for while the unexpected cameo here was fun, Thor's excuses for not going to visit the love of his life during or after The Avengers were basically awkward hand-waving. Iron Man 3 did it at least somewhat better with the heavy toll the finale took on Stark.

I'm very happy to continue to watch these silly comic films, I must say. Next time, bring on Beta Ray Bill!

Insidious: Chapter 2

Insidious, which I wrote a brief note about after seeing it saying that it started well but made the mistake of showing its ghosts and demons too often and too clearly and thus lost all of its tension, was a decent but ultimately disappointing film. However, it did well enough to spawn that staple of relatively low-budget horror: a sequel. And I must say, while similarly flawed, Insidious 2 was probably more consistently enjoyable and had some excellent moments, including a Back-to-the-Future-Part-II sequence tying into the first film that genuinely put a smile on my face, wrapped up by a similar treatment for this film’s prologue. Add in that pretty awesome old lady from the first film – sadly used for some dodgy Sixth Sense scene as a cliffhanger for a third ‘chapter’ already in the works – and you have something quite satisfying.

Which isn’t to say it’s good. The jumps are still very artificial, the ghosts’ powers vague and the lack of adequate lighting anywhere is somewhat tedious. It’s certainly nothing new, and most of the evil ghosts we’ve seen in horror since the 80s have had a tragic backstory about an abusive parent forcing a child into murder or some such – here with added ‘trap’…though this isn’t anime, of course. As horror sequels go, though, this is certainly one of the better ones, and I’d rather rewatch this than the original. 

(Another theatre review because of my lack of a theatre blog...)

Yesterday’s theatre trip to see Siro-A (ie, stylised, 白- A, or ‘White A’) was well worth the trip. The troupe of Japanese performers – five dancers, an electro DJ and a visual programmer – work their short but intensive set around a projector, and take the concept of interacting with light to great heights of precision-planning and cleverness. There were hints of tiredness about the show, with a rather less-than-full audience after an extended run in the Leicester Square Theatre and slight hints from the performers that they had been doing this same routine for a good few years – though the long beaky masks in most of their videos from Japan seem to have vanished. Part of what made everything work, though, was how extremely well-practiced it was, so seeing it after long months of repetition was no bad thing. The show kicked off with a fine example of cleverness, with the dancers holding up small boards to ‘catch’ areas of the stage-wide projection, then being able to interact with them, moving as they moved, combining them, pretending to knock them into each other, etc. Comedy was obviously going to be a big part of the act, with a typically ad-absurdium introduction for group leader Toshinori Abe that went beyond any typical resume to include his house on Google Maps, his entire family and even ex-girlfriends. Other ideas for the projection included shadow interaction with balls (the Japanese love shadow manipulation theatre – one game show we watched over there was ‘look at the performers and guess what their shadows will look like on a screen’), playing about with a hole that had some pretty brilliant surprise use of props, projecting onto a T-Shirt (and then having the performers mimic famous brands), imitating computer games, and a rather beautiful dance with ‘peacock’ psychedelic trails emanating from a pre-recorded version of the dance that ran near-perfectly behind the performer.

While the projections were ever centre-stage, it wasn’t just pre-made sequences performed in conjunction with a pre-made projector. Other sections included using real-time linked video and projection, including the first part where they turned the camera onto the audience and stuck their faces into various silly pictures. Of course, I was the first to be picked on, but was pretty amused when they made me into Superman. Another great use of the technology was to put two separate performances together in split-screen. The divided dance didn’t work brilliantly, but using the top half of one guy and the pictures the other brought out ended up hilarious, with centaurs and mermaids being topped off by the guy with the pictures using his hands for little ballerina legs. So funny. In other parts, they used audience interaction to create a very silly version of ‘We Will Rock You’ and pictures taken as the audience came in to have them almost ‘dancing’. It was at times close to the somewhat awkward English comedy club style of audience interaction, but somehow the theatricality of these stylised performers made them too otherworldly to find irritating – the same effect as with the Blue Man Group.

Funny, charming and clever, it was definitely money well spent. 

Other films watched on my flight today: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – an overlong and ponderous film I’d been meaning to watch for ages but put off for ages. I was not at all keen. Far overlong and far too assured of its cleverness when really it told one cheese murder mystery story that devolves into hunting a lame serial killer, and one horribly shallow and sensationalist attempt at a gritty story about a disadvantaged girl being horribly abused then getting revenge. Both are lame ducks that think far too highly of themselves, and the result is far too overlong and ponderous. A disappointment.

On the long-haul flight, I started with Stoker, purely because the posters had interested me. Again, it thought itself rather cleverer than it was just for writing about murderers. Because heightened senses were a theme, ostentatious cinematography was stressed, which was mostly annoying, It’s part Psycho and part Nabokov, but without any innovation and too many easy ways out of interesting problems. I’m amazed the content editors allowed the shower masturbation scene to make it.

Something light next, so after Epic I watched The Terminal, which we had been speaking about before boarding the flight but I’d never seen. Cute and funny, it got away with how far-fetched things got with its story – based, of course, on real life – and with its product placement because it was such light, frivolous, Pninian fun.

I didn’t feel up to The Great Gatsby, so then watched some fun documentaries about the available historical evidence for the existences of King Arthur, Marco Polo and Robin Hood, made a start on The Anchorman but didn’t find it my sort of thing, so went to sleep and then watched another documentary about finding shipwrecks until the plane landed. 

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim wears its heart on its sleeve, and is emphatic about being exactly what it is. Watching the trailer, we laughed at how it was clearly a Gundam film, but watching it, it soon becomes clear that it’s not pretending to be anything but a straight rip-off of Japanese monster films and mecha anime. The Godzilla-like creatures are even called Kaiju.

On the other hand, it is also still rooted very obviously in the Hollywood story. And the mecha subgenre in anime has grown to be very much centred on coming of age. From Gundam to Evangelion, Fafner to Gurren Lagann, the main characters are adolescents, sometimes with a time-skip to those adolescents being young adults. Piloting giant robots becomes a kind of metaphor for paternalistic control and early sexual tension abounds – as well as the sexualisation of the pilots themselves. Whereas in Hollywood, you get the action man who despite a trauma that makes him turn his back on his talents returns to kick butt and look macho. And while the latter is perhaps safer, it’s a whole lot less compelling and identifiable, and makes this for me very much a secondary experience to watching a mecha anime.

But that is not to say it is not at the same time a whole lot of fun and spectacular in a way that only a big-budget Hollywood film can be just now. The robots and monsters here are big and the CG is very impressive. There’s a great adrenaline rush from seeing a robot using a great long boat as a baseball bat, and even if the guy from Queer as Folk as a tough-guy American hero left a big hollow space at the heart of the film, especially alongside a very ordinary Japanese girl with a sad past that had to be fleshed out through flashbacks in a zero-chemistry romance, the minor players were fantastic. The two silly academics who had a peripheral but increasingly influential role on the story – essentially two up-and-coming actors channelling Rick Moranis and Lee Evans – were entertaining and crucially likeable, Del Toro of course gets his friend Ron Perlman in for an amusing cameo and best of all, Idris Elba from down the road in Canning Town is further cementing himself as a powerful Hollywood presence, perhaps doomed to always play powerful soldier types in genre films, but stealing the show every time and bringing with him a genuine gravitas that makes me want to see him play Othello.

Ah, I see he is to play Nelson Mandela soon. That ought to be something heavyweight to take him to the major leagues.

So while this didn’t feel like breaking new ground in terms of story or even Hollywood writing, it was immensely fun, a novelty to see in such a high-budget and realistic style and of course fills the quota on stuff being blown up and huge explosions. I liked how understated the Alice in Wonderland references were, too.

Some questions remain, of course, if we allow spoilers at the end here: were the sacrifices made by the Russians and Chinese really so irrelevant that nobody even acknowledges their deaths? Could Pentecost really not have packed the Aussie into an escape pod and set off his explosion himself? And making the newer robots entirely digital and able to be shut down by electromagnetic pulses – really? 

The Wolverine

They just missed the timing to have a film based on Wolvie’s time in Japan and see it do well. It is after all a little above being criticised as bandwagon-jumping, the idea that his past was at least in some significant part spent in Japan dating back to 1982 and a miniseries for which the young Frank Miller seems to consistently be given a bit too much credit. Miller was clearly a big fan of Japan and of manga – straight after that he went on to write and draw Ronin for DC – but that wasn’t the cliché it has come to be seen as today. The Silver Samurai elements of the story are even earlier – going back to the 70s. That said, the saturation of Japanese media is the reason this film comes just a little late – there’s already enough of a backlash against all things Japanese that I’m sure more than one potential viewer will dismiss this as ‘weeb stuff’.

And though it has problems, the Japanese element is not one of them. Treated rather as a more neon-lit potboiler New York, it’s very much exotic Japan packaged and presented to foreigners with certain expectations of a foreign culture. Thus, Wolvie is taken to Japan to meet a very old friend, gets mixed up in various intrigues, and ends up having to fight to save the day with his omega-level healing factor disabled – and we know how temporarily disabling omega-level mutants’ powers usually goes, right Mr. M? The Japan he enters is one of ninja, samurai and yakuza. It is one of glitzy high-rise apartments where politicians hire tall white whores – also popular in the hilariously busy and obvious red-light districts – where the super-rich live in extremely traditional old houses with sliding doors everywhere, and where people train kendo complete with absurd flips. It’s all very much how you’d expect a Hollywood superhero film to present Japan, and that’s okay by me.

The fact that Superman very obviously took its queues from how previous films have presented Logan was almost hilariously mirrored by this film, released almost simultaneously, has an almost identical set-up. Logan, wanting to get away from the life his powers give him, has become a drifter, going about small-town America with a busy beard and trucker’s clothes, trying to stay out of trouble but unable to resist meting out justice on the dumb rednecks where it is necessary, until an attractive young girl stalking him (Yukio from the miniseries with touches of Layla Miller) plucks him out of that world and into a new one of showing off superpowers in big dramatic battle scenes.

Things are a little different for Logan from before, though. Despite Scott getting not one single mention in the entire script, after the Phoenix saga Logan is haunted by guilt for killing Jean and preventing the Phoenix destroying the world. The whole premise revolves around the fact that Logan feels an immortal life is an empty one, and might welcome growing old and dying like everyone else – which remains probable even at the end, just not if it stops him making a bad situation better. Speaking of Superman, it was interesting how his getting his powers disabled reminded me that if not done carefully, a Wolverine story can be every much a Godzilla-vs-Bambi as anything from the Caped Crusader – for what tension is there when you know your hero can survive being reduced to a single atom or having his entire skeleton torn out?

Conceptually, then, the film was rich and well-judged. Unfortunately it stumbled on the basic building-blocks of a good story. I could live with the corny romance, even if it was creepy in exactly the same way Twilight is creepy (‘Hey, you were good friends with my granddad in the 40s? Well come hither baby!), but the plot was just too clunky. Captain America villain Viper is at once central to everything and peripheral, alternately seeming like mastermind and pawn, and her final motives – as well as the reason she’s kept around – all come over as muddy, which in turn make the archer character with the Silver Samurai’s original name have a bizarre story full of U-turns. If the ninja clan had expected Wolverine’s powers to be switched off, did they really think they could get him alive to the Silver Samurai? That, after all, was the plan, but de-powering him only seemed to make this harder to achieve, not easier. After all, he was very nearly dead in the Love Hotel (yes, they go to a Love Hotel, and it’s brilliant).

It’s for this reason I couldn’t wholeheartedly enjoy The Wolverine, even though Hugh Jackman is as always perfect in the role and the shinkansen scene is fantastic. It was also nice being able to understand the Japanese without subtitles 95% of the time – though I was conscious that Okamoto Tao has a bit of an odd accent in Japanese.

Then there was the scene in the credits, which was easily the highlight. How it reconciles with previous films I don’t know, but it was pure pleasure just to see those actors again, and though it was refreshing to have a film where really, the action was more James Bond than The Avengers in scale, I do want to see more of the X-Men again in Days of Future Past. 

Now You See Me

Something – and I don’t think any mentalist’s trickery was involved here – hooked me about the trailer for Now You See Me. I really liked the concept – four different kinds of show magician taking on the FBI, almost like superheroes – and the cast was great. I wanted to see Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine facing off. I wanted to see Woody Harrelson as the team’s sceptical older member, and Jesse Eisenberg once again capturing the very essence of a smug young man who nevertheless wields great power. I wanted to see Marc Ruffalo in another role other than Bruce Banner, and Isla Fisher in the flesh after so many roles in animation.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it, too – I enjoyed the central idea, the Robin Hood attitude, the different aspects of illusionism and the place of the guy who debunks other magicians, too. I figured out the twist, as I’m sure most did – but only because of an awareness of Hollywood conventions when it comes to twists, and the mistake of suspicion being cast on every other major player in the piece as the true mastermind…meaning it was going to be none of them.

The big reveal was surprisingly enough not the main attraction here, though, and the ride itself was the fun. In particular the dynamic of the four magicians was great – the big showman who goes from the trick with the slight delay on one card that David Blaine did for cinema adverts rather better to a spectacular building-sized reveal, the mentalist who is a master of cold-readings but also a gifted hypnotist, the one-time sidekick who has gone solo with a seductive yet sadistic shock routine, and the young street magician whose real gifts are pickpocketing and lockpicking. Where suspicion cast on them means that at certain points you’re not sure if you’re seeing character development or careful performances, enough of their true colours show that they’re a very likeable bunch and of course not the masterminds of the piece, and the other side gets humanised by a young female Interpol officer who really gets into the concept of magic.  

There are a few stretches – not least that several times the characters could really have ended up dead – but it just hangs together enough to work. Fun, gripping and overall a bit comic-book without actually being comic-book, it’s one of the most fun films I’ve seen in a long while.

After Earth

World War Z was bad, and so was After Earth, but After Earth was bad in an enjoyable way. It’s a subtle but crucial difference that largely revolves around how good it was trying to be. World War Z seems to fancy itself some great epic with an incredibly serious tone, gritty characters and heart-wrenching scenarios yet falls flat. After Earth is a cheesy sci-fi and doesn’t try to be any more than that. It’s less pretentious, much sillier and much smaller-scale – and as a result, though both are bad films, this one is far more likeable and honestly the critical consensus that this is by far the worse film strikes me as nonsense.

Though probably having Smith’s original idea of this being set in a real-world remote wilderness and the son having to go out for help across a mountain or some such could have been a much more engaging, challenging and intelligent film and done much better, I did enjoy the cheesy sci-fi setting and the silly form-fitting colour-changing sci-fi suits that I assume not only looked but acted much like the Stillsuits in Dune, since the only bodily function Kitai seemed to need to think about was breathing. Ambitious but vulnerable and headstrong young Kitai must go to find a distress beacon when the spaceship carrying him and his extremely capable but badly injured father crashes and is torn into two parts. He is adorably hapless at first and Jaden Smith’s skinny body, ability to look very scared and features that definitely look like a mini version of his father all helped him do this part well and be both likeable and inspire a protective instinct, which is all the film really needed.

Of course, it’s cheesy – especially at the end, with the daft scenes of Jaden learning to be a badass and an inspirational salute. But it revels in cheese. It’s like a cartoon adaptation (a far better one than Shyamalan’s previous attempt with Avatar) or a remake of an old sci-fi with a couple of bloody scenes thrown in to pretend to be grown-up. It’s fun.

That’s what I think the critics missed here. All that makes me slightly sad is that the other film that didn’t happen, the gritty one about father and son stranded in the modern day, could have been a good successor to The Pursuit of Happyness.  

World War Z

Though at one point on course to be a megaflop, it looks like World War Z may now be considered successful enough for sequels. Like Avatar, this is another triumph of style over substance. It has some very impressive scenes of bodies piling up and planes and helicopters crashing down and huge crowd scenes, but plot, characters and pace? Truly dire.

The sad fact is that after playing The Last of Us, this comes as a pale imitation. Sure, games haven’t reached a true level of realism yet, but the zombies are a hell of a lot more creepy and the story is far more imaginative.

Here, Brad Pitt’s character, who we’re expected to believe is respected at the very highest level of government and a super-kick-ass operative, has become a family man with two incredibly annoying kids whose uselessness is meant to give him a sensitive side but just grates like nails on blackboard. Coerced into going into the field, he fucks things up for everyone he meets (an army base is massacred because his phone goes off; he doesn’t tell what survivors there may be on a plane that he’s gonna blow up its wall so they all die along with the pilots who would otherwise have likely made it; and okay, in Israel he just happens to be there right as chaos really sets in. He also has a mutant healing factor after getting a metal spike through the abdomen, and magical powers of finding a building from a plane crash site with no way of knowing how to get there.

Overlong to the point of pomposity, hugely unoriginal and with a solution that should have been observed by huge numbers of the population and those leading scientists who were shown as so inept, not just tough guy Pitt. 

Man of Steel

The latest Superman reboot, unlike 2006’s glossy Superman Returns, got in line with the last decade’s fashion for making superhero films darker and grittier. And I must say, I ended up liking it considerably more than I expected to.

The trailer was misleading, making it look like the film would largely be Smallville the Motion Picture, which I don’t think I would have enjoyed much, so I was quite pleased that what I got was largely a high-octane sci-fi melodrama. In the grand scheme of comic book adaptations, it’s in the lower half and is in large part just another Thor – with an uncannily similar overall story – but it was still spectacular, enjoyable and less frustrating than most Superman stories.

This Supes is not the all-American hero who quick-changes in the phone booths, wears his underpants outside his trousers and turns back time by flying around the Earth really fast. He’s a lot more Wolverine here, drifting on his own in scruffy stolen clothes and a wild beard, silently saving lives and disappearing before anyone asks too many questions. After a great cheesy prologue with Russell Crowe as Jor-El whuppin’ some ass before sending baby Kal off to Earth shortly before Krypton goes the way of Thundera, we largely follow this wildman, with some flashbacks to his father Kevin Costner impressing on the young Clarke Kent that keeping his powers secret until the time is right is important. When a scouting ship from Krypton is found, Clarke makes his way there and inadvertently starts up a beacon. Of course, this summons General Zod to Earth with his cronies, they promptly out Kal-El as one of them, and some good ole super-scraps can start up.

This was really what Man of Steel had that other versions of the same story don’t. Terrence Stamp is pretty awesome, but Superman II just didn’t have the technology we have for ridiculous fights where single punches send steel bodies ripping through buildings or into exploding trains. Apart from when Zod scales a building there’s a real weight and momentum to these fights that felt missing from most recent superhero films aside from the silly but refreshing Hancock and the latest Iron Man, and the scale of Snyder’s action sequences has no regard for buildings, military hardware or human lives (unless of course there’s a character shield in place, as with Laurence Fishburne’s doing-much-with-little newspaper boss (Perry White?).

The reason I was pleasantly surprised was that the trouble with Superman is that he’s so overpowered that any threat other than an equal just doesn’t work. Constant use of Kryptonite gets tiresome – and it’s thankfully absent here – and Lex Luthor being so easily squashable unless he has some absurd robot suit on makes him so unsatisfying as a nemesis (he’s here only in an oblique ‘Lexcorp’ nod). But this is a straight-ahead action film about a friendly superpowered alien who gets into a huge fight with other aliens with equal powers – a familiar but very different sort of film – and that works very well without the need for silly alien rocks or unlikely indistinguishable-from-magic tech.

There were some very distracting quibbles – the worst-placed Wilhelm scream ever and prison capsules for Zod and co that looked uncomfortably like squat dildoes (and I just Googled that to make sure I wasn’t alone – which I wasn’t’!) – but overall the lack of things I dislike about Superman in general, the likeable if cliché-gritty new version of Clarke in newly-awesome costume, the absurd but highly enjoyable action and for once heavy things really felt like heavy things. Only a few shades above mediocre, but that made it a pleasant surprise. 

The Purge

This guileless, sensationalist, hypocritical and overall very tedious film took great pride in raising interesting moral questions and then doing absolutely nothing to answer them. About the only thing that impressed me was realising how much work they clearly do to make Lena Headey look so glamorous and stiff in Game of Thrones when here she looks so nice-normal-mother-of-two.

Ripping off that old ‘Red Hour’ episode of Star Trek (though at least giving a decent explanation), the premise is in the near future, the financial crisis got so bad that American society broke down, and the only way that the ‘new Founding Fathers’ could bring back stability and order was to introduce a 12-hour annual ‘purge’, in which all crimes are made legal.

It’s quite clear that some studio exec beefed up the tagline with ‘all crimes’, though, as it is obviously only assault and murder that are legalised. This is hinted at when a recorded voice states only weapons of a certain class and under are permitted, and after all you don’t see mass fraud, no kids are abused, no drugs are taken, nobody marries multiple spouses and no movie collections are downloaded – at least onscreen. For twelve hours, basically gangs are allowed to roam the streets with guns and knives and attack whoever they find, or one another.

The moral dilemma that the script pays most attention to is the social divide this necessarily causes – the rich buy security systems for their homes and stock up on guns, while the poor become the targets of hunts as those inclined to murder frame it as improving society – culling those who do not contribute so that society as a whole is left with those who contribute. This goes a little way to explaining why mostly people go out ‘hunting’ with just a few weapons and possibly scary masks, rather than body armour or weaponized vehicles, and nobody has minigun barracks added to their homes, which would have been very sensible for our protagonists here – rather than attacking one another, mostly the people in this dystopia apparently prey on the weak.

This, along with two other events, forms the impetus for the action here. Pure-hearted little twelve-year-old boy sees a homeless black guy getting chased and pleading for help, so lets him into the central family’s armoured home, leading a mob of privileged thrill-seekers to lay siege to them unless the uncooperative homeless guy is given up to them. Of course, enjoying their legal killing and being creepy and rich makes them morally okay to kill, closely following the Hollywood rules, and little kiddy doesn’t have to deal with the fact that his act of mercy leaves many, many people dead including one very close to him, because that would be a little too complex an issue for this film.

The other two things that spark the action are the teenaged daughter character’s boyfriend deciding the best way for the family to accept him is to kill his girlfriend’s father, which of course goes wrong and ends up a plot that goes absolutely nowhere and feels so extraneous it felt like it had to come back in some form later – but doesn’t. And then the ridiculously obviously signposted intervention of the neighbours, whose timing is nonsensical but who at least provide an amusingly absurd closing scene.

The long and short of it is that the central idea is too absurd to really work, the execution is so limited as to feel like a total waste, and the moral questions raised only get vaguely touched at – barely even scratched. The horribly obvious scriptwriting, the over-the-top bad-guy acting, the cheap attempts at horror-style jumps and the uninteresting characters make this feel like a bad episode of a television series, and not even close to the quality a feature film should have.  

The Imposter

Forgot one more film from the plane: The Imposter, a rather bizarre documentary about a 23-year-old heavily-accented not-even-very-youthful-looking Frenchman who manages to pass himself off as a 16-year-old American who disappeared at 13 and was small, blonde and pretty. The family take him in and he even makes national news with his story, getting increasingly outlandish in his lies – he was kidnapped by a child prostitution ring in the upper echelons of the military who broke his bones and went so far as to change his eye colour for no apparent reason. Eventually it all comes out and he’s arrested, but then comes the question of just why the family were so quick to believe such a different-looking man is their lost son – grief and desperation and an overestimation of just how far abuse can go to completely changing a person, or an ulterior motive? The latter is put forward but seems unlikely to me, especially if they were willing to let the ‘boy’ go on television and appear in the papers. Amazing he didn’t flat-out refuse that part, too. A case of reality being stranger than fiction…

More plane films: Jack the Giant Slayer; Hitchcock; The Impossible; Sinister

It’s time for film report! The first plane had some nice new films for the week, but sadly the 777, while having a far better interactive system – in fact, the best of all four flights – had not been updated, so it was the same selection as on our outgoing journey. Oh well, the selection was very wide – so I was not left bored.

First, for schlocky entertainment value, I watched Jack the Giant Slayer. A pretty by-the-numbers modern-day sort-of-gritty but still very silly adaptation of a fairy tale, it tried to make the twee old story epic by having not one giant with a sensitive nose stalking about his castle, but a race of giants who had invaded the lands below before but been kept in check only by a magical crown forged from one of their hearts. When Jack accidentally plants his beans, the motivation to climb is not golden eggs but rescuing a princess, and people will die grisly deaths on the way – as long as they don’t have character shields, of course. With About a Boy/Skins kid putting in a performance so dull and listless that it made his turn as a zombie boy seem energetic and Ewan McGreggor basically doing what struck me as an extended Kenneth Brannagh piss-take. There’s some good clever CG in the beanstalks, the cleverly-skirting-the-realistic-and-the-grotesque faces of the giants and the big action setpieces, but unfortunately Jack is dull, the royals are unlikeable and the ending falls totally flat. A flop.

Next I went for the more artsy Hitchcock, with Anthony Hopkins in the title role, Helen Mirren excelling at showing how strong and influential Alma was, Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Biel looking very fine as glamorous ladies of the 50s and Toni Collette still instantly recognisable to me even in a small role – which is quite different from the fine edgy turn from Ralph Macchio as Joseph Stefano, not that I knew until the credits. Anthony Hopkins’ face is rather friendlier than the real Hitch’s and this is clearly a biopic made to make the old brute look human, vulnerable, childishly impetuous and charming, but getting the audience on his side is why this works.

I started to watch Phil Spector, about the murder trial of the legendary producer, but just as I was growing to accept Helen Mirren’s surprisingly dreadful American accent (after such a good turn in Hitchcock) and Pacino was making his appearance, it was time to change trains…and the second one didn’t have the rest of the film. Oh well.

Instead I opted for The Impossible, and I’m glad I did. Based on true events, it shows a family torn apart by a tsunami hitting their beach resort in Thailand. While the main characters seemed a little too immune to danger because of the set-up and the real impact of the death all around them never quite attained the right enormity, it was a haunting and highly compelling film with strong performances from Ewan McGreggor and Naomi Watts underpinning a brutally realistic story. It was Billy Eliot (musical version) star Tom Holland as Lucas, however, who really managed to capture the hopelessness, panic, fear, bravery, hope and grief of the situation, though (with several other outstanding younger child actors). This may sound a little weird, but if I could spend all eternity being Lucas, running around the hospital trying to help others, experiencing the full gamut of emotions and growing wise beyond his years…well, I would. Oddly, I’d very much like that. And I’d like to see another film from the Thai perspective.

Finally, a bit of silly horror in the form of Sinister. Much like Insidious, it suffered the problem of being able to do the unseen threat and suspense style of horror well, but then falling totally flat once it revealed its supernatural elements and focused on them. The glimpsed or the half-seen is always going to be better than actors in heavy makeup. The ending is also the lazy way out, with everything seeming to build up to a possible comprehension, understanding and counterstrike, or at least escape, only for what we all knew was going to happen from about 25 minutes into the film forming an unsatisfactory climax. A shame. Still, Ethan Hawke managed to make the central character and his obsessions interesting. 

Robot and Frank, A Werewolf Boy and Argo

Went for another silly film, though a slightly more highbrow one, in Robot and Frank, which is about a very old ex-cat-burglar in the near future, when robot helpers are an everyday sight. He is given one by his son, and while he detests it at first, he soon sees how it can be used as a tool for burglary, and gains a new lease of life that becomes more meaningful as time goes on.

With a neat mixture of strong performances, the poignancy of the onset of dementia and the classic comedy of robots missing the point or being amusingly blunt, it goes to serious places with a silly idea and ends up working very well. I missed this one in the cinema, but I’m glad I saw it.

Korean film A Werewolf Boy, which I sort of half-watched because it wasn’t exactly captivating, also tried to pluck at the heartstrings, but came over as mostly hollow. A feral boy in his late teens – who of course when scrubbed up is a K-Pop boyfriend hottie – is discovered by a family out in the countryside, where the teenage girl gets past her fear of him to begin making him civilised. And of course, their feelings for one another soon become something more.

Mawkish and overlong, it like so many East-Asian films ends up getting highly melodramatic towards the end, with lots of tears and lovers shouting each others’ names and wicked older men standing in the way of true love. It was a smash hit in South Korea, apparently, but I have to say it didn’t hit any emotional notes for me and came over as very cheesy.

Finally – other than the two animated films that will get their own separate entries, I saw Argo, Ben Affleck’s apparent return to form. Directing and starring with a funny beard, he tells the fascinating true story of how a government agent had to sneak six embassy officials out of Iran during the hostage crisis by pretending they are part of a Canadian crew for a sci-fi film. Obviously, Hollywood loves stories about itself, especially with a real-world-heroes angle and the seriousness of crises in the Middle East, so it was highly lauded at the last Oscars, winning Best Picture.

While somewhat demonising the Iranians as a whole (though that was of course America’s prevailing view at the time) and apparently totally skewing the action to make the Americans look heroic and the Canadians a bit unimportant (as well as for some reason making up a line about other Embassies turning the six away), as well as a number of fictional scenarios to make the action more tense and exciting, taken as a work of entertainment and fiction it was very enjoyable. I did have a slight problem with it relying on making its audience believe it was historically accurate for its impact when it was anything but, but that didn’t stand in the way of it being an enjoyable film. 

Films on the flight: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and Warm Bodies

 The first stupid film I watched on the plane was Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. In the recent tradition of taking a familiar children’s story and doing it in very gritty style, then running with the idea to make a brainless action film with lots of guns, it did exactly what it was expected to do. After killing the witch in the gingerbread house, Hansel and Gretel become witch hunters in a semi-historical setting that melds the Wild West with a vaguely Germanic set-up, and as adults, become wrapped up in a plot to make a coven invulnerable to fire – which also brings out various revelations about their true pasts.

It’s dumb, cheesy and seems a bit piecemeal – the Hansel-is-diabetic angle in particular feels like a good idea that had to be shoehorned into an action scene – and none of the characters get well-developed. But as a classic good-vs-evil romp it was an entertaining way to pass the time, and thus excellent for a plane trip.

The second stupid film I saw was Warm Bodies, which also did what it said on the tin. An awkward romantic comedy about one girl and her zombie, it never quite decided whether it wanted to slot in beside Twilight or thoroughly mock it, and that somehow ended up making it stand well on its own. It neatly answered the questions it raised only a little after they became vital – why isn’t she mourning her dead boyfriend? Shouldn’t she be trying to take him into her society by now? – but overall it was a little slow and vapid. The central idea remained funny, though, and the sweet relationships between zombie friends worked, as did dumping the monstrous elements onto a more advanced sort of zombie, suggesting the intermediate ones can be redeemed. With the power of love. Yes, again it was utterly stupid – but also enjoyable because it wasn’t meant to be anything else. 

Star Trek: Into Darkness

The first rebooted Star Trek film, four years ago now, was one of a slew of franchise reboots, ranks as one of the better iterations of the trend. I wasn’t hugely impressed, but I definitely enjoyed it and was happy a sequel was announced – though concluded my original thoughts with ‘it’s no Wrath of Khan’.  

Well, this was the new production company’s chance to make their own second film, their own Wrath of Khan. Ultimately, as with those original films, the sequel is better than the original. The plot is more consistent, the characters develop at a better pace, the effects are fantastic and the fan-pleasing moments are numerous – though I wanted to see the aftermath of that Tribble being alive! The audience is now familiar with the enterprise crew, with coolly logical Mr Spock, histrionic Mr Scott, grim Doctor McCoy, feisty Lt. Uhura and the rest. Chekhov basically has to make an appearance to get a laugh, and Spock showing his emotions will always be a crowd-pleaser. Chris Pine and Benedict Cumberbatch make an excellent pair, sparking off one another whether allied or baring their teeth, and the older contingent of the Federation have a more interesting side than in the old series – though after all, where there the founding stone was supposed to be an idyllic society where all the people of Earth are working together to benefit the universe and things like money have been abolished, here we still get drama driven by humans wanting to use one another, start wars for personal gain and sacrifice anyone who they deem unnecessary.

I left the film a little unsatisfied. Cumberbatch’s character was so powerful, so threatening and so manipulative that ultimately it seemed he should have been able to do much more in his position. He never seems like a mastermind unfurling a great plot – he gets what he wants, is tricked, then his grand plan is reduced to a vague suicide bomb plot that doesn’t get talked about afterwards in nearly as tragic terms as it should have been, has a bit of a fist-fight and that’s the end of him. I wanted him to seem like a real threat. I wanted him to get to those comrades of his and come within a hair’s breadth of shutting down the entire federation. Instead, he just…never seems to get very far, and the isolation of a nearly unmanned starship doesn’t help with the scale of things.

Ultimately, the film ends in a position that mirrors the start of the series, so it’s quite possible they could leave it at that. But with a money-spinner like this, I doubt that will happen.   

Olympus has Fallen

Olympus has Fallen was not at all what I expected, and that was part of why I had a grant old time with it. I expected a gritty terrorism movie that essentially sought to be like a historical re-enactment or documentary about what would happen if in a large-scale military operation, terrorists stormed the White House and took the President hostage. Instead, I got a very, very silly Die Hard-style all-American story of one man alone taking down the whole terrorist cell with his incredible infiltration skills while a cheesy baddy sneers, beats people up, plots to destroy the whole of the US and puts the plan into action with a 5-minute countdown in big red numbers on a screen. It’s so dumb and so dated, so sub-James Bond and so laden with awful one-liners, yet so sincere and unironic in its execution that I found it quite brilliant.

And that’s before all the infamous Tweets from American viewers who saw the film and left the cinemas ranting about Pearl Harbour, gooks and chinks. Oh, the great American public.

Stony-faced Gerard Butler fits his dumb role a little too well, and Morgan Freeman puts in a slightly less hammy performance than in Oblivion, but one gets the feeling he is there largely because his name is a box office draw, rather than because his role has any meat to it. Rick Yune continues his rather iffy but high-profile film work as the slimy North Korean terrorist Kang Yeonsak, and some guy who was in The Perks of Being a Wallflower plays a turncoat secret agent operative who gives himself away in what has to be the most clunky bit of writing in any Hollywood film I’ve seen in years, and indeed would have been face-smackingly over-obvious in a preschool cartoon.

After the initial highly-coordinated attack on the whitehouse, begun by a huge aircraft and finished by gattling guns in the backs of good vehicles, Butler’s character Mike Banning is literally the only good guy left alive who has not been made a hostage. He sneaks about the White House and shuts down the surveillance control in a very unlikely scenario, while the terrorists seem to come after him in groups of no more than four. Not only does he take them all down, he rescues the President’s cute-as-a-button young son, he struggles with the guilt from a melodramatic opening sequence, he orders about the top men in the pentagon and he takes down an advanced automated anti-aircraft gun on the roof.

Ultimately it all comes down to a manly manly fight of punches, knives and roundhouse kicks to the face, and you can hear the rings of ‘America! Fuck yeah!’ echoing somewhere in the distance.

Some will loathe all the dull-witted braggadocio, but I thought it was a riot. Loads of fun – and it’s even more amusing that a near-identical film, White House Down, will be coming out later in the year. Maybe that’ll be one to take slightly more seriously. But maybe not!

Oblivion

Nothing to do with The Elder Scrolls, the film Oblivion is an epic post-apocalyptic sci-fi that it is no surprise was based on what was going to be a graphic novel by Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski. It has a whole lot of visual appeal, some decent performances and some great action sequences, but it was very much lacking in soul and had a twist that was far too obvious, telegraphed from very early on by tell-tale signs like ‘our memories were wiped’ and ‘in two weeks our mission will be over and we will rejoin the rest of humankind’, which set warning bells ringing after having seen the likes of Moon and Cloud Atlas and, indeed, having played Portal. And I must say, Moon did a lot more with the idea.

Tom Cruise’s character lives in a very clean, glassy futuristic apartment with his lover/coworker, maintaining drones to protect huge machines that are taking the water from Earth for a mass migration to Titan. Scrabbling on the surface and trying to capture him are the ‘scavs’, aliens who have lost the war that destroyed the moon and killed most of the human population. Everything changes, of course, when a beacon set up by the scavs brings down a ship with another survivor.

In the end there are many twists but also many plot holes. Why don’t the scavs just take their masks off when the drones aren’t around but Tom Cruise’s character is? How did the flight recorder found in the sleep capsule record things after the capsule was detached. And most pressingly, if Morgan Freeman saw the thousands he described pouring out, presumably all of whom were needed in active service, where are the rest at the end?

But the main problems are not plot holes – they’re really that between the exciting sequences are long stretches that get tedious – without really likeable characters to carry them forward, despite Tom Cruise’s remarkably youthful looks at half a century old. Too much is clinical and detached, including Morgan Freeman who until his last scenes is doing a totally unnecessary take on Morpheus from The Matrix – a clear influence here.

For some, the lush visuals, nice use of classic rock (Procul Harem!) and the impressive CG will carry the film. Others will find it tedious. But I really doubt any will get emotionally invested, or consider it a masterpiece. 

Iron Man 3

Tony Stark may have become ever more annoying in the Marvel comics, essentially being the antagonist of Civil War and providing most of the many low points of Avengers Vs X-Men, but as this last part of the trilogy shows, his films continue to be the best of all Marvel’s big-screen adaptations, and his anchoring presence in The Avengers make it much more palatable.

That film’s presence here is somewhat oddly incorporated in a series of anxiety attacks that actually make Stark much more vulnerable and sympathetic. The existence of aliens and gods hasn’t entirely transformed the Marvel Movie Universe, but it has certainly affected Stark, who can’t sleep and spends his time tinkering with new suits. Meanwhile, the terrorist threat of The Mandarin begins to put pressure on the American government and faces from Stark’s indifferent party-boy past begin to come back to haunt him.

The film manages to adapt from the Extremis storyline but makes its own distinct and complete statement. It does a lot in its run time, and paces it all excellently. You have the huge explosions and suits of armour flying about shooting things. You have thrilling rescues of people falling from thousands of feet. You have helicopters blowing up buildings and damsels in distress. But you also have Stark having to deal with mental illness, bonding with a random kid, regretting his past and having to deal with putting those he loves in danger. You have James Bond-style infiltration. You have brilliant comedy, including scenes with grunts that come from the Whedon school of humour yet do not jar like his similar lines do. You have an utterly brilliant way to use Sir Ben Kingsley and the Mandarin character that will no doubt have some comics purists gnashing their teeth but is brilliant for this film and the post-Bane superhero world, with the ever-current terrorists-sending-videos-and-making-threats paranoia of the States both used and subverted. And in a concession that just about manages not to be patronising, you get the damsel in distress solving everything. Everything you want from a blockbuster, and more.

The film wraps up a little too neatly, and though I was thankful that it didn’t just ignore the possibility of Stark using a miracle healing formula to deal with that shrapnel in his heart, the epilogue felt very artificial, especially as we all know there’ll be more from the Avengers yet and the film appends a very Transformers the Movie ‘Tony Stark will return’ anyway.

Guy Pearce does a brilliant turn as a man transformed over the course of 13 years, and both Jon Favreau (director of the first two films) and Gwynyth Paltrow doing a lot in limited screen time. And the naturalistic acting of Ty Simpkins, with all the ums and ahs and gabbled lines of a Downey Jr, will very possibly lead to a long and accomplished career. James Badge Dale puts in some gangster swagger, but he has an edge that makes him very compelling to watch. Of course, Stan Lee makes his appearance, and it’s one of the funniest yet, and they get Mark Ruffalo in for a silly stinger scene at the end.

I have to say, though, it does seem to me that this Christmassy film ought to have been released at Christmas. 

Evil Dead (2013)

1981 isn’t that long ago, but The Evil Dead is certainly dated. The remake may feel a little redundant, but it’s going to bring horror fans in and put bums on seats, that’s for sure. A bit of a cult classic, the original is perhaps better-remembered than it deserves, but I understood the motivation and the financing behind the reboot.

Unfortunately, with the quirky humour replaced by a po-faced refusal to acknowledge how the plot (ancient evil unleashed by affable young people in a secluded cabin thanks to vague evil magic in artefacts) has become cliché enough that it underpinned Cabin in the Woods, and the attempts to scare replaced by post-saw attempts to make you cringe with the visceral depictions of extremely painful acts, it mostly just felt dull. I’ve always found torture porn on the lame side, and if there’s no underlying psychological element, which here was at a bare minimum, it’s just not very interesting.

And the character types were not very likeable. I’m not going to like a drug addict, a jock, a geeky stoner guy, a firm female doctor-type and a token girlfriend unless they’re more than those archetypes, and none of them are. There was more of interest in the 2-minute prologue than in the entire remainder of the film, and the fact that when ancient evil is truly unleashed it gets only to the car park is truly anticlimactic. The only smile that the film raised was also the grim shaking-my-head sardonic one that came from realising deaths were coming in the least politically correct order possible.

Really, I couldn’t have expected much more than this. They couldn’t exactly throw out the entire plot. But I certainly expected to be much more entertained than I was. 

The Book of Mormon

(Not a film, but eh, I don't have a theatre blog)

Much of the buzz about The Book of Mormon is that it’s got a lot of buzz. You won’t get tickets without booking six months in advance. That’s part of the whole mythos it’s created. Well, I got lucky – a Facebook message from a schoolfriend saying a ticket was spare if anyone wanted it, so I waited all of two hours to get the hottest ticket in town.

And it was well worth the price of admission, and the genuine waiting time too – from beginning to end, it was incredibly enjoyable, and funny enough that I don’t want to do a plot summary in case any little detail of the brilliantly funny story is spoiled. Suffice to say it’s very much in the South Park vein, a few degrees away from the extreme crudeness and out-and-out surrealism of similarly-themed episodes, but also has its own strong identity and voice.

Throughout, much like Parker and Stone’s other musical ventures, there are gentle parodies of other musicals and musical styles. The hand of Avenue Q guy Martin Lopez is apparent too, and I felt like the momentary appearance of a big monster head was a nod backwards. Nothing is quite as good as the Les Miserables parody in Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and the general pastiches of rock musicals, showtunes et all work better than the direct derivatives of The Lion King and Annie, but the fact is that the writers are absolutely brilliant at making their songs funny – not counting sad refrains, every single musical number had at least one huge laugh, several of them being the very first line.

I paused to wonder in the interval why it is that I love the parody and pastiche here, but hate what Joss Whedon does and found it didn’t work in Eric Idle’s stage production Spamalot. After all, Parker and Stone are poking fun at musicals, and have a certain way of being able to stand above criticism by saying ‘Oh, it’s parody’. They can go over the top, have their actors overact and their songs lack taste because it’s comic exaggeration based on expectations, which rather makes hard criticism seem to miss the point. But the difference is, I think, affection. These imitations don’t sneer at what they poke fun at, they make an earnest and convincing attempt to recapture the same thing and do it right. They don’t sarcastically push camp and silly tropes away, but make use of them in a loving, amused way. That seems to be the distinction.

What The Book of Mormon emerges as is a warm tribute to a rather silly American institution, with odd-couple humour and Parker and Stone’s appealing skewering of naivety in the face of a world with problems that happy-clappy proselytisers seem to have no conception of – but they are strong with characters, too, and both the leading characters, while they go off on their own individual paths, end up likeable and deeply flawed. The Ugandans are not a politically correct representation of a people – of course not! – more a collection of others who have an innate noble-savage superiority to the clueless white kids who want to teach them about God, but they also get most of the best moments, especially a King & I-like moment towards the end, and I suspect ‘Hasadiga Eeboway’ will enter pop culture in some way or another. None of the characters are exactly detailed, realistic character studies – nor meant to be – and it works perfectly that way.

Analyse it however you like – the bottom line is that this is brilliantly funny stuff, and masterfully executed. Add in an ensemble that put anyone who’s ever been on X-Factor to shame, inventive costumes and sets and a very accomplished orchestra and you have…well, a show that deserves all the awards and attention it’s getting! 

Oz, the Great and Powerful

Whether Disney’s last foray into the world of Oz was a success or not is a bit of a tricky subject. Return to Oz was a bit of a flop, but has been rehabilitated by history somewhat, and now has a cult following for its creepiness and 80s aesthetic.

I doubt that Oz the Great and Powerful will get the same treatment, for while its reviews, too, are mixed, and while I enjoyed it, it was very simple and straightforward, and lacks the quirkiness of a cult classic.

But I would still call it a good, enjoyable film that does what it’s meant to do. In similar territory to Wicked, but much more canonical and much less subversive (ignoring the musical adaptation I haven’t seen), it serves as a prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and The Wizard of Oz). The wizard comes to Oz as an ordinary illusionist (and womaniser), is taken as a leader, at first is impotent and unable to stand up to the witches who largely rule Oz as he finds it – and who he stirs to transition from string-pullers in a largely benevolent realm to vicious tyrants – but with help from his close friends comes up with a plan to use spectacle and illusion to become the Wizard. Which is exactly what I hoped for an exactly what I got.

That said, I was a little worried for the first half. OZPINHEAD himself is hard to like, a scoundrel and a shameless breaker of hearts, and the way the plot is established is extremely lazy – it’s a prophecy that takes Oz from any random person to potential Wizard, and the one who sees him arrive just happens to be one of the most important people in the country, apparently out for a stroll alone in some random deserted area.

It really changes when Oz meets the little China Girl, a tiny girl made of porcelain who is a neat mixture of classic refinement and modern affection for forceful girls – and let us not forget this is a film no feminist test is going to find wanting, even if it’s the male who is at the centre, saving the day. Finding the little broken girl is a turning point for the character – he has to become responsible, and he has someone who believes in him. He has been sent on a frankly daft mission by the Wicked Witch of the East (in disguise, of course), who uses the opportunity to make a Wicked Witch of her sister – and if the transition from black and white standard-definition to widescreen (techni)colour wasn’t enough of a nod to the first film, the green skin, broom and sibling relationship here (none of which was in Baum) make it clear this is intended more as prequel to the famous film than the famous book.

Oz’s companions may be no Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion (all of whom are obliquely referred to in some way), but the China Girl, cowardly monkey and, indeed, Glinda all serve a purpose and offer comic relief. Everything is a little slow until the very end, but the payoff is most certainly worth it.

There’s perhaps not quite enough heart here, and it’s all a bit clinical and by-the-numbers. True quirkiness seldom makes it through Hollywood rewrites these days, so don’t expect it. But accepting it as a product of its time and enjoying it as something simple and accessible, it is certainly to be enjoyed.