Men in Black 3

It seemed a pretty odd idea to finish this trilogy after a gap of ten years – 15 since the original. Apart from marvelling at how little Will Smith has aged, it mostly made fans and newcomers alike think…what’s the point? Why now, rather than in 2006?

This third part in many ways felt superfluous and certainly never reaches the heights of the original film, but it was entertaining, well-crafted and had some really amusing moments as well as fine performances.

When a formidable criminal Boglodyte known as Boris the Animal escapes from his lunar prison, he has one aim in sight – go back in time, kill Agent K and thus stop the chain of events that leads him to being locked away. He accomplishes this, but only Agent J remembers the true timeline, and as plot contrivance teaches us is inevitable, Boris never having been locked up means he can lead an invasion fleet to Earth which just so happens to arrive at the time a few hours after he went back to change things, so Agent J has to go back to prevent this future from ever happening.

Off he goes, to 1969, leading to lots of amusing jokes about how much worse racial discrimination was then, and how the crazy pop culture of the time was influenced by aliens – and undercover agents. Though the Warhol gag would have worked better without the feeling of repetition having seen Lady Gaga listed as an alien earlier. He finds the younger K, brilliantly played by Josh Brolin (who I’d seen before as the bad guy in True Grit but didn’t recognise), so further amusing hijinks happen as a man from the future tries to make his story believable. They set out investigating, finally finding the psychic alien Griffin, played in a sweet, winsome way by Michael Stuhlbarg, who I knew I had seen in something before but never would have been able to recall was the kindly, Jewish-looking film historian in Hugo. Griffin’s ability to see myriad possible futures, as well as being in possession of an important anti-invasion device, make him a bit of a cheap plot device, but he moves things along and soon Boris and the Agents meet for a showdown – with a very iconic event as backdrop.

Meanwhile, we can find out a bit more about Agent K, giving him a bit more humanity with the love interest of Agent O (older version played with just the right amount of staid eccentricity by Emma Thompson), and even about Agent J’s past through a rather contrived and mawkish twist.

The film feels mostly pretty inconsequential, and suffers from how Rip Torn’s character’s being written out and the non-appearance of the talking pug feel like actors just refusing to reprise their roles, but it is still perfectly entertaining, and the cast, old and new, look like they’re having an extremely good time. Boris, played by one of the Flight of the Concord guys in a way that makes him seem much older and larger, is exuberant, the Agent Ks are believably the same people, and crucially despite being an old, very rich Scientologist who has pushed his kids into the limelight and who didn’t even provide one of his cheesy raps for this film, Will Smith remains very likeable indeed.

Nobody ought to expect a masterpiece from this film. Don’t even expect something that matches up to the first film (though it’s as good as the very forgettable MIBII). But catch it if you can – I’m glad I did, even if only days from the end of its run.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Like so many of these very silly ideas, this was a fun concept and had some big laughs towards the beginning, but then had to actually string it out into a full feature with a satisfying ending and actually got rather dull towards the end.

The title is brilliant, and it’s certainly what it says on the tin. After kicking off in very obviously comic book style, dispensing with details like his sister and his step-mother, we see Lincoln seeking revenge for his mother’s death with a pistol. The firearm goes wrong, but eventually the young Lincoln manages to make it go off and bewilderingly the pellet both lodges in the other man’s eye and kills him – maybe it ricocheted back from the back of his skull! Such things do not need to be overthought.

The man of course comes back to life and Lincoln is saved only by another man – a man who hunts vampires. Lincoln learns his craft, starting from an incredibly comic book scene where he channels his anger through his axe-blows, and soon the future president is a supernaturally gifted vampire hunter.

Balancing living an anonymous life hunting the dead in the southern States with the beginnings of a political career, Lincoln also finds love. However, when he finally takes out the vampire he wanted revenge upon, he provokes the ire of the head vampire, and things must inevitably come to a head – against the background of the confederates taking up arms and the American Civil War beginning.

Don’t look here for a politically correct film. It’s not. It won’t pass feminist tests about whether women speak to one another. It’s horribly insensitive about race, with the slaves literally treated as food, plenty of tokenism and – even if spoken by the antagonist – lines equating slavery of human beings to other, more trivial forms of slavery that nobody argues against. It’s certainly disrespectful to the dead, who after all died less than two hundred years ago, especially when it came to portraying those fighting for the South as being allied with bloodsucking vampires. But it’s all a ridiculous film about Lincoln hunting vampires with an axe, so who cares?

The problem is that it doesn’t fully embrace its daftness. This needed to go into camp excess, to be a 300 or a Sin City. It needed absurd amounts of style and silliness. Instead, it plays it as a straight comic book horror film, and so by the time there’s a big confrontation on a train, it’s much too serious – and even the amusing way it makes a fork an image of great importance can’t save it from getting dull enough I almost nodded off.

Strong performances from Benjamin Walker, the ubiquitous Dominic Cooper (here doing a simple, cool performance, which suits him best) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead – the girl from Scott Pilgrim – help carry things along, but ultimately it needed a stronger script and more style. Or at least even more silliness. Because the last thing I expected this to be was dull.

The second misfire with Tim Burton’s name attached (even if not as director) in the last couple of months. Still, it’s piqued my interest for Spielberg’s Lincoln. 

Prometheus

Though there was always a tiny glimmer of doubt, nobody I knew really went into Prometheus thinking it was anything other than an Alien prequel. We’d seen that the story of the so-called ‘Space Jockey’ would finally get filled in – as a long-time fan of the franchise, I’ve long been aware of the weirdness of that one scene in Alien where a huge fossilised humanoid sits in a navigation chair, long dead, but is never mentioned again. Essentially its presence was one of the larger HR Giger fingerprints on the property – he drew the Space Jockey as one of the pieces of concept art he supplied for the first film, and it was duly realised. But the continuation of the Alien story didn’t need any more information about the dead extra-terrestrial; he was left a mystery and his people occasionally showed up in the extended non-canon universe as elephant-headed things. And that was where Prometheus came in. Set only a couple of decades before Alien and only at the end of this century, it tells the story of the space explorers who follow the signs left in ancient artworks to find a buried alien ship. Where, of course, they set loose something they soon wish they hadn’t.

There’s a purposeful simplicity here, as the story very much follows the Alien template, a template that isn’t exactly exclusive to Ridley Scott films. A crew full of broad, recognisable characters goes to investigate the mysterious artefacts, awaken unpleasant things and end up getting killed first in scenes full of suspense and then later in heart-racing action sequences. It’s simple, predictable and expedient. But it works just fine. The film is a good, satisfying sci-fi horror story and has an interesting enough cast (headed by the young Magneto from the newest X-Men film as an awesome artificial human who only falls a little short of being as cool as Bishop and the girl from Sherlock Holmes as the newest Ripley): it’s fun to watch and ticks the right ‘scary’ boxes too.

It has two glaring faults, though. Firstly, there is absolutely no way that Guy Pearce should have played the old man, because he doesn’t look like an old man. He looks like a young man in heavy makeup. Even if you choose to believe Ridley Scott was subverting expectations by making his audience believe Pearce would have his youth restored, that doesn’t stop it being a terrible decision – it always jerks the viewer out of the suspension of disbelief and will make the film look dated much sooner than it ought to. Secondly, there are just too many different types of aliens, and ways aliens could affect people: in the original, you have the perfectly reasonable life-cycle of egg, face-hugger, chest-bursting parasite, full-grown alien. It’s all believably one creature. Arguably you can add the Space Jockey to that. This film has the alien of the final reveal, the Space Jockey race, a black liquid that is apparently alive and when drunk turns into an eye-worm and then makes a person into a space zombie, a squiggly worm with acid blood that spontaneously appears from the black liquid in larger quantities/is made from it - and a monster octopus-foetus precursor of the face-hugger. Apart from the Space Jockey guys, they all appear as a result of the weaponised liquid cargo – but the qualities are just too disparate and unrelated for this to work well. The Space Jockeys are also rather hard to understand here, with a bewildering opening sequence in which one of them drinks a black liquid that is presumably different from that of the weaponised cargo, which breaks him down to a molecular level – and it’s not clear whether this is (a) on Earth, kick-starting the human race as is hinted – which leads to us asking why the jockey sacrificed himself for that end and why they stayed in close contact with humanity for millennia in order to appear in cave paintings but then disappeared and turned hostile, or (b) on another planet, possibly setting loose the weapon and causing an exodus/bringing the Xenomorphs into being. Prometheus makes it clear it needs direct sequels.

There is also quite a bit of awkwardness in the last act when most of the cast needs to be culled. One pilot would be quite enough; two of them going ‘You’ll need all the help you can get’ seemed pretty unlikely. And as for the girl who spent a good minute running around only to get squished, failing to just roll sideways, that was truly lame and she could easily have been dispatched in the next few minutes if it was really considered necessary.

For all these flaws, though, the film overall was very entertaining, had great 3D (especially on the huge Sky Screen) and good performances. Well worth a watch – if not up there with the first two films in the franchise. 

The Dictator

I was of the opinion that Sasha Baron Cohen’s glory days were over and that he was going to settle into a long, happy career doing eccentric bit-parts like those in Sweeney Todd and Hugo. But no, he still has the oomph to carry a film on his own, and it’s considerably better than Ali G in da House. He may have got progressively less original since the days of The Eleven O’Clock Show, but he’s still a very funny man. I had my doubts when I saw the posters of this film and read the plot summary, but the trailers made me think it would actually be worth seeing.

And it was. It was very, very funny. It may not have been very fresh, and the whiff of South Park and Team America was all over it – from the throwaway gags pushing the boundaries of taste to the moment where the whole film is glibly made to look like a sweeping political statement on America – but I still watch South Park and huge originality isn’t exactly necessary for something to be incredibly funny.

Baron-Cohen skewers everyone here, not just absurd dictatorships. Much of the comedy is fish-out-of-water humour about the dictator going unrecognised in New York, which allows not only extremist states to be a target of comedy, but silly idealist lefties. There are some brilliant comedy moments, not all of which were given away by the trailers, and the script sensibly allows for a human element, pathos and love – even if only to subvert it.

The bottom line is that Baron-Cohen remains funny. He may become less so soon – but for now he remains well worth the price of admission. 

Dark Shadows

I was not particularly looking forward to seeing this film. The concept seemed trite and the humour in the trailer was painfully unfunny. I have never seen the cult soap opera, which apparently didn’t introduce any supernatural elements for the first six months of its run, so came without any nostalgic feelings there, and had even forgotten about its existence until friends suggested we went to see it.

So I had low expectations – and it’s likely for that reason I didn’t find the film too abhorrent. I would not say it was good, but it was nowhere near as terrible as many have made out – it was mediocre to adequate, worth a single watch, but never made it to the territory of ‘good’. It was very much like late-80s Burton, but without the idiosyncratic spark. In short, it felt like an inadequate attempt to emulate rather than what it could have been – quintessential Burton.

The basic plot is that a rich young man named Barnabus Collins is cursed by a jealous witch to be a vampire. When she still cannot win his love after murdering his lover (funny that), she locks him in a coffin for almost 200 years, until he is finally dug up in the 70s. Emerging as the classic blood-sucking, pale, undying, burning-in-sunlight, pointy-toothed vampire, he joins his descendants without fitting in. He doesn’t have the winsome, awkward charm of an Edward Scissorhands, though, rather taking charge of the family business and trying to improve the lives of the children. Of course, the rival company who has forced the Collins into near-ruin is run by the witch, and things soon come to a head. Throw in every woman in the piece falling for Barnabus, additional complications from vampires and ghosts and a gig by Alice Cooper and you have a very, very campy vampire story. If the set-up of a very strange supernatural personality forcing his way in amongst a family sounds very Beetlejuice, though, it’s unfortunately never as crazy nor as funny – though the humour is certainly a lot better than it looked to be in the trailer: with context, the jokes are much more amusing and less obvious.

The two main strengths of the film are its aesthetic – genuinely beautiful most of the time, and hilariously schlocky most of the rest – and its cast. Of course Depp and Bonham-Carter are present and correct, doing their usual job of overacting in the right place, but there are more interesting choices: Michelle Pfeiffer’s transition from beauty to matriarch is to be taken more seriously after this, and Eva Green from The Golden Compass was compelling in the over-the-top role. Misfires, though, were Christopher Lee in a vampire film cameo that felt very lazy indeed (especially as he didn’t even use an American accent) and the girl from Kick-Ass and Hugo as a two-dimensional grumpy teen. That said, her presence led to some of the film’s bigger laughs. Her final reveal would have been better left out of the script, though, especially as it was part of a particularly soulless CG-fest that made me long for the more inventive effects of Beetlejuice.

The humour can only go so far, though, and the end all gets wrapped up a bit too glibly – so after admitting to his numerous murders, what can Barnubus do now with his new partner for all time? But this film is a superficial and silly one, and works best considered that way. The trouble is that a Tim Burton film used to mean campy, silly, supernatural – but also fantastic. Sadly, that hasn’t quite been the case for a long while. I haven’t wholeheartedly enjoyed a Tim Burton film since Big Fish, and even that was no critical darling. I think it’s time for him to do another Ed Wood. Another clever and intimate film to make him respected again. That or get Neil Gaiman to write him a script.

The Avengers / Marvel’s Avengers Assemble

Happily, this is the only thing Joss Whedon has done that I've really enjoyed. Well, except for that one episode of Firefly where Jayne is seen as done sort of God. Despite an unnecessarily slow first two acts, the payoff was well with it, and though it was really the bare minimum I'd expect from an Avengers feature,

The key is probably that Whedon only directed rather than writing the full script – he tweaked, but he didn’t come up with the concept or the larger part of the dialogue. So we don’t have to put up with his trademark smugness, largely consisting of him using genre tropes and then sneering at them or nudge-nudge-wink-wink laughing at them as if beneath him – and calling it irony. Instead we get his genuinely funny glib one-liners deflating action scenes in just the right way, and a respectful treatment of a property he clearly loves. 

The story is basic, which is necessary for the complex task of bringing so many characters who already have full-movie backstories together. The Avengers featured in the film are showcased – Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow. We also see the antagonist, and his simplistic comic book plan – Thor’s brother Loki means to use the Tesseract to bring a huge army of aliens to Earth and conquer all, the idea being that they will then crown him. So Nick Fury has to get all the prickly superheroes together in one place – gathering them and having them all learn to cooperate forms the bulk of the fairly dull first two thirds of the film. Then Loki fools the lot of them, puts them in disarray and takes the tesseract. From then on, things get fun – the Avengers work together to stop a full-blown alien invasion, including fun flying dragon-eel-turtle things on a massive scale. Iron Man has a moment to prove his mettle – do ho ho! – and then we get a typical teaser for the next film.

Much to my surprise, given that he’s my least favourite member of the team most of the time, and despite the fact it’s inadequately explained why he decides the rest are his allies, the real star emerges as The Hulk. I had never seen the guy they cast as Banner before but he was perfect, much more so than I imagine Ed Norton would have been, and ultimately, having him onscreen with Thor allows for Whedon’s humour to shine through, as an Asgardian god is one of the few characters you can believably have engaged in slapstick scenes with The Hulk without being reduced to a red smear on the ground. And his scene very close to the end was one of the best in cinema history, no doubt about it.

Thin on plot and slow to start with, it was nonetheless what an Avengers film should have been. The personalities were well-balanced, with straight-laced Cap and swaggering Stark sparking off one another brilliantly without getting to dominate, the Black Widow far from a peripheral extra, each character being admirably human – and SHIELD giving the kiddies the lesson that they ought to question authority figures at all times, it may not have blown away my expectations, but it certain exceeded them. 

Cabin in the Woods

I didn’t know anything about this film before I went to see it, apart from that it was horror. My companion told me as we went in that it was also meant to be funny, which I thought to be no bad thing. If I’d known beforehand, though, that it a new work from Joss Whedon and one of his Buffy writing partners, I would have hesitated. That said, Drew Goddard’s writing on Cloverfield hadn’t overly annoyed me, and there were episodes of Firefly that…I didn’t mind.

And this film had all the fingerprints of Buffy on it. That same smugness, the attitude of ‘look, here’s a lame cliché, ugh, we’re so above it – we’re postmodern now, and we show you the conventions of this genre in an ironic way, you know… though ultimately we just end up totally relying on them anyway’. I really can’t stand it – it made me dislike Buffy, dislike Angel, dislike Runaways and worry about The Avengers. And it made me dislike the bulk of this film – until the last 20 minutes, where all hell breaks loose and the rest is gratuitous silliness and fun with lots of references to other horror films – my favourite being Hellraiser.

The rest of the film, though, was very reminiscent of Buffy, only with more ‘ironic’ blood and boobs and tired stoner jokes. Watch for the last twenty minutes of fun, by all means, but if you have the same attitude to Whedon and co as I do, steer clear.