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.