Tuesday 31 January 2012

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Sometimes all it takes for a film to rise above dozens or hundreds of similar films is a gimmick. With (500) Days of Summer, that gimmick is a nonlinear narrative. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom Hansen, a depressed and lonely greeting card writer who meets Summer, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype played by perhaps the archetypical MPDG, Zooey Deschanel. We are told straight away that Tom and Summer broke up and that this is the story of what happened. The film skips back and forth over the span of their 500 day relationship, examining their differing attitudes to love, commitment and their relationship.

Gimmick aside, (500) Days of Summer is your standard bittersweet romantic comedy. Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel are very good as the doomed lovers and the shifts back and forward make for a refreshing change, but it's all been done before: boy finds girl, boy looses girl, boy moves on with new girl. There are, however, two stand-out scenes in the film.

The first is an absolutely fantastic and completely spontaneous song-and-dance number after Tom and Summer have sex for the first time. Tom emerges from his house, smiling and strutting down the street to You Make My Dreams by Hall & Oates. Fountains burst into life and strangers high-five and shake hands with him before a brilliantly choreographed flashmob-style dance erupts around him accompanied by a marching band and a pair of animated birds. As the number ends and everyone drifts away, Tom smiles at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and bringing to an end the ultimate "just had sex" scene.

The second is a scene later in the film. Tom and Summer have drifted apart, but she has invited him to her flat for a party. He puts on his finest, wraps her a gift and sets off. "He believed that this time, his expectations would align with reality", the narrator tells us. The screen splits in two, with the left-hand side labelled "Expectations" and the right-hand side labelled "Reality". They occasionally match up, but mostly they are the mirror opposite of each other. His expectation of sitting and talking quietly with Summer is contrasted with the reality of sitting at the opposite end of the table from her, making inane small talk with her friends about the job he hates; his expectation of looking out over the city with her contrasts with his reality of gazing out over the balcony, alone, as Summer chats with other guests and his expectation of the two of them moving somewhere more private and kissing is overwhelmed by reality. As the camera pulls back and turns to show reality from Tom's perspective, expectations is slowly wiped away and the split screen ends just as his expectations are overtaken by reality - she has become engaged to another man. Heartbroken, Tom storms out, walking off down the road and stopping in the middle of it. As he stands alone, his back to the camera, the image is painted over with a black and white drawing of the scene and then everything else is erased, leaving a single black figure standing in the shadowy, foggy remnants of the drawing, before he too, fades. The scene is accompanied by Hero by Regina Spektor, a haunting song that makes for the perfect accompaniment.

(500) Days of Summer is a fairly ordinary story lifted up by strong performances, an unusual narrative structure and two really memorable scenes. The whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. Here, the whole is made greater by some of the parts.

7 out of 10.

Sunday 29 January 2012

Spartacus: Vengeance 2.1 - Fugitivus

Andy Whitfield's death less than six months ago was a tragic end for a promising actor and Spartacus fans like myself will always remember him as the original Spartacus. In fact, I have seen some fans claim online that the series should have ended and Liam McIntyre shouldn't have been cast. I don't agree and neither did Whitfield, who gave the casting of McIntyre the thumbs up and wanted the series to go on. McIntyre has a difficult job to do. How did he get on in the first episode?

He does OK. Apparently the first scene he filmed for the show was the scene just before the halfway point where the slaves burst into a brothel and slaughter the soldiers and other men they find inside. It's an appropriate way to ease him in: a fight scene full of blood, breasts, severed limbs and gratuitous sex. McIntyre's not as muscular as Whitfield and lacks presence somewhat, but otherwise he does well and at times I forgot that it was even a different actor playing Spartacus.

The story's pretty straightforward: Spartacus and the rebels are conducting a guerilla campaign in and around Capua. Glaber is despatched to quash the rebellion. He protests but because of his patronage of Batiatus and his delivery of Spartacus he has no choice. He takes a newly-pregnant Ilithyia with him (pregnancy hasn't stopped her taking all her clothes off, fortunately) and they discover Lucretia, half-mad and apparently with no memory of anything since the drought at the start of the first series. Crixus and Spartacus disagree over what they should do - Spartacus wants to kill Glaber and take his vengeance on Rome, Crixus only wants to be re-united with Naevia - and Varro's widow Aurelia is preparing to leave to be re-united with her son.

It's a decent episode and hopefully things are only warming up but it does feel quite methodical. Also, it misses Batiatus. It really, really misses Batiatus. He was easily my favourite character and without him, I think Spartacus could really drag. His scheming and politicking was the driving force behind the last two series and John Hannah played the foul-mouthed blaspheming ludus owner with relish. I wish they could have found a way for him to come back too.

6 out of 10.

Saturday 28 January 2012

Is Anybody There? (2008)

Bill Milner has quite a career ahead of him. Nominated for four young performer or newcomer of the year awards for Son of Rambow, Is Anybody There? and Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and playing Young Magneto in X-Men: First Class, the sixteen-year-old already has an impressive body of work to his name. In Is Anybody There? Milner stars alongside some fantastic actors: Sir Michael Caine, David Morrissey, Anne-Marie Duff, Leslie Phillips, Sylvia Syms, Peter Vaughan, Thelma Barlow, Rosemary Harris and the late Elizabeth Spriggs.

Milner plays Edward, a lonely young boy whose parents (David Morrissey and Anne-Marie Duff) have turned their house into a struggling old people's home. Confronted by death and in the presence of the slowly dying, Edward has become fascinated in the paranormal and he keeps a diary of "paranormal happenings", in which he sadly makes daily entries of "no recorded evadense". When a resident dies, Edward recovers his recording equipment from the old man's room so he can listen to his last breaths and try and hear his ghost leaving his body, a practice his father later remarks is "how the Yorkshire Ripper must have started". Edward's morbid fascination with the recently departed is not driven by a desire to kill things but by a need, a desperate need, to know what happens after you die. It is the new resident, retired magician Clarence (Michael Caine), who clashes with Edward over this.

Ordered by the council to move into the home, widower Clarence is deeply unhappy and he and Edward clash immediately. When Edward saves Clarence's life after he tries to kill himself, the two make up. After Edward takes it upon himself to confiscate Clarence's belts, stand watch underneath his window and give him some helpful leaflets (including "Coping with bereavement" and "Information on cervical smears"), the two, helped along by their mutual disdain for the house, become closer. To satiate Edward's desire for contact with the dead, Clarence arranges a seemingly successful seance in the basement, leading Edward to happily write "A MANAFESTATION!" in his diary.

When the two take a trip to an old storage room Clarence owns to pick up some of his old equipment for a performance for Edward's birthday, Clarence gets confused and gets into a minor collision with another vehicle. As the two push the campervan back to the house, Clarence starts to get irritated with Edward's repeated talk of the afterlife. When Clarence says he'd come back as a badger because being a person is a pain in the arse, Edward asks him to come back and see him if he dies, prompting Clarence to tell him, "You don't come back, son! Once they've gone, you can't talk to them!" and laments that he was never able to tell his wife he was sorry before she died, revealing that she divorced him because of his infidelity and confessing that he even missed her funeral. Edward storms off but at his birthday party, the two reconcile and Clarence performs his show, which goes well until he gets confused again and accidentally severs a fellow resident's finger. After his father questions his friendship with Clarence, Edward shouts that he wishes Clarence was his father and plays a recording of his father making sexual advances towards their young helper, Tanya (Linzey Cocker), prompting his parents to separate. After the two take a trip to the graveyard where his ex-wife is buried, the rapidity with which Clarence's dementia is overcoming him becomes clear.

The ending is quite predictable and overall the film does feel like it's going through the motions, but two great performances from Cain and Milner really lift the proceedings. It's a pity that the likes of Leslie Philips and Rosemary Harris are underused, being often little more than background characters, but they are most welcome. Morrissey and Duff are very good as Edward's parents and the film is directed capably by John Crowley, full of touching moments like the scene where Clarence speaks his ex-wife's name into the mirror as the camera focuses one by one on old pictures of the two. Is Anybody There? might not be the most original or ground-breaking drama, but it does what it sets out to do and if you don't raise your expectations too high, you'll have an enjoyable ninety-four minutes.

7 out of 10.

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

I liked Machete. It was silly and over-the-top but what were people expecting from a film where Danny Trejo goes around hacking people into bits with a machete? So, I was looking forward to Hobo with a Shotgun as well. The story couldn't be any simpler - hobo sees injustice, takes a shotgun, shoots people with it.

With a premise that simple, how did they manage to swing and miss? Don't get me wrong, I knew what to expect and I mentally lowered the bar before I watched it, but it still somehow couldn't clear it. I like b-movies and schlocky, cheap, gory horror and exploitation films, but Hobo was just... boring.

Machete was 1 hour 46 and yet it skipped along nicely, but Hobo, despite being a full 20 minutes shorter, really seemed to drag. I found myself checking to see how long was left after only 45 minutes, which is never a good sign. Somehow, a film about a hobo shooting bad guys with a shotgun just isn't as much fun as it could be. John Davies and Jason Eisner made a fun trailer, but for some reason they weren't able to translate that into a full feature. The replacing of David Brunt with Rutger Hauer is a good move and Hauer growls and grumbles throughout (sometimes so much so that I had no idea what he was saying) but the cameos that really spiced up Machete (Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan, Steven Seagal, Tom Savini, Don Johnson, Cheech Marin and others) are sadly lacking in Hobo.

It's suitably gory but completely directionless and often dull. For the half an hour before the hobo picks up his shotgun we have to sit through scenes with the bad guy (Brian Downey) and his two sons as they terrorize the city with their sunglasses and 80s costumes and get introduced to the Hooker With a Heart of Gold character (Molly Dunsworth). Yawn. Even when the hobo begins his rampage we have to suffer more of them. Get rid of them and give us more of the crooked cops! By the time The Plague turn up on the hour mark I was checking the time once every five minutes. I have no idea where the idea for The Plague came from but it's as stupid as their costumes. Somebody should have told them that scrap metal armour went out with Ned Kelly. Then comes the big finale, or, more accurately, the big let down. Unfortunately, the film's faults don't stop there. The constant erratic palette changes see the film move from deep red to green to dark blue to blood red to blue to red again to yellow. It's jarring and obnoxious and really fucking annoying. Finally, Hauer aside, the acting is really weak and the script isn't much better. It's a shame because it's a complete waste of one of the best trailers from Grindhouse.

Ultimately, it's a very scattergun effort from Davies and Eisner. Hauer's good, there's some half-decent gore and the torching of a school bus full of children to "Burn Baby Burn" is worth seeing but the rest is mediocre at best.

5 out of 10.

Wednesday 18 January 2012

The Iron Lady (2011)

"OK, I've got to thank everybody in England that let me come and... trample all over their history." - Meryl Streep, when accepting the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama.

For a biopic about one of the most partisan and controversial politicians in British history, The Iron Lady is strangely... apolitical. I'm not a fan of Margaret Thatcher. I don't think she's the devil incarnate or the worst Prime Minister in history and I do accept that she did some good, but the overwhelming majority of the decisions she took were terrible ones that ruined lives. Of course, you might not hold that view. You might think she's the best Prime Minister since Churchill (as she is referred to during the film), but if you come into this film expecting to see her decisions and thought-making process really scrutinised, you'll leave disappointed. If you expect to see a film that details the reasons for the polarised opinions of her premiership, you'll leave disappointed. If you expect to see a film of any real substance, you'll leave disappointed. In trying not to annoy anyone, writer Abi Morgan and director Phyllida Lloyd have made a film that will annoy everyone.

For the first half-hour or forty minutes, the film almost never leaves Thatcher's house. The 84-year-old former Prime Minister is shown buying a pint of milk and a paper from the corner shop and taking them back home to eat breakfast with her husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent), whom she chastises for putting too much butter on his toast and complains to about the price of milk. Thatcher's assistant walks in and Denis vanishes just as she tells an empty chair to eat its egg. Her husband is dead and she is hallucinating. The film is set in 2009, shortly before the unveiling of her official portrait in 10 Downing Street and portrays a sad, lonely woman struggling to cope with the loss of her husband and the oncoming dementia.

Streep is magnificent, absolutely brilliant and utterly convincing as Thatcher, both as the ambitious and power-hungry young woman and as the frail and lonely old woman (the even younger Thatcher played by young actress Alexandra Roach). She effortlessly conveys Thatcher's hubris and hunger for power and easily evokes sympathy for the confused old woman pining for her beloved husband and desperate to see her son Mark, now living half a world away in South Africa. It's such a pity that the rest of the film can't live up to Streep's performance. Thatcher is trapped inside her house and the film is trapped inside the confines of Morgan and Lloyd's limited ambitions.

When we finally leave Thatcher's house, we're taken along a frustratingly erratic and brief look at her political career - from her beginnings as a grocer's daughter inspired by her father's passionate oratory, to a stuffy dinner with local Conservatives looking for a prospective candidate, to Denis' proposal and a holiday with her children Carol and Mark to her first day in the House of Commons, a dispatch-box clash with the Labour Shadow Minister, her decision to run for the leadership of her party, clashes with Ministers over the budget, the Brighton Bombing, her decision to go to war over the Falkland Islands and the decisions that cost her her colleagues' support - the poll tax and the European Union - to her final day in office.

The glimpses of the past are brief and do nothing more than tell us what happened. For example, Thatcher and her then-Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Stewart Head) are confronted by Michael Heseltine (Richard E. Grant) and other Cabinet members over their newly-leaked budget. The "wets" are concerned that she is cutting public spending too quickly and urge her and Howe to slow their plans. Thatcher replies, "Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it." What medicine? Why does the patient require it? Why was the response to her policies so visceral? These questions, and many more, are never answered, or even asked. Her decision to close hundreds of mines is all but glossed over: she says they must be closed, and we see stock footage of the Miners' Strike and then protesters attack her car. In a way it's an appropriate metaphor for her Premiership: barrelling along and sweeping aside ordinary people as she goes inexorably onwards. The tens of thousands of people who were put out of a job by the pit closures go unmentioned, as does the devastation on local communities. What of her mass privatisation of nationalised industries? Barely mentioned. Former Conservative Prime Minister and then-elder statesman Harold Macmillan derided Thatcher for "selling off the family silver" but apparently we needed more scenes of her imagining her dead husband so that never gets a mention. Neither does her legacy of greed, deregulation and neo-liberalism that would cause a massive financial crisis 25 years later.

The mass unemployment, the gap between rich and poor growing inexorably, the devastating blows struck against British industry that are still being felt to this very day, her savage deflationary policies that cost real people their lives and livelihoods are all cast aside. When one Minister questions the fairness of the Poll Tax, she gives him a lecture on social responsibility and tells him to shut up. It is that, and her bullying and humiliation of her closest ally, Howe, which leads to her downfall. The film implies that but for her colleagues' cowardice, she could have pressed on with the Poll Tax, which was apparently as necessary as the "medicine" she gave to the economy at the start of her Premiership. Brief clips from the Poll Tax Riots are shown, but again, the underlying reasons are completely ignored. It's incredibly frustrating.

As the film draws to a close, Thatcher packs up her dead husband's clothes and banishes the memory of him. As he walks away, she calls after the hallucination, tears streaming down her cheeks. It's a touching moment, but by this point the scenes between her and Denis had been so over-done that they'd lost almost all their impact. Then, the film ends. It's a truly unsatisfying ending to a wasteful and pointless film.

Watch The Iron Lady for another tour de force from Meryl Streep. Once again, she does not play the character, she lives the character, but that's all it really is: a hollow film supported entirely by Streep. Take her performance away and you'd have nothing more than a second-rate biopic that goes through the motions, piles on the fanciful imaginings of an elderly widow, throws you some flashbacks and some facts and says "make up your own mind".

6 out of 10.

Sunday 15 January 2012

Red Riding Hood (2011)

Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of the classic fairy tale is a lot like her preceding film, Twilight: it's a load of tween nonsense. I don't know how, but she took a dark, gothic fairy tale about a wolf who eats people and stalks a girl in a red hood and turned it into boring, bland, clichéd rubbish.

The film begins as it means to go on: Red Riding Hood, here named Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), is spying on some shirtless lumberjacks in the middle of a forest. It's very badly lit, with ridiculous soft focus shafts of light falling through the trees, which for some reason, all have toothpicks coming out of them. The toothpick-trees are only half as wooden as Seyfried and Shiloh Fernandez, who plays Peter, the lumberjack Valerie is "in love with". They have no chemistry. At all. They spend the entire film looking at each other like they've just met. Apparently the two had met before they made the film and didn't like each other and Seyfried only took the role after Hardwicke persuaded her. It shows.

Valerie might be "in love with" Peter, but she's engaged to another man, Henry (Max Irons, Jeremy's son). Oh, what will Valerie do? What will Peter do? "If you love her", Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen) says to Peter, "You'll let her go", I finished for her. Silly, clichéd dialogue aside, we quickly move onto the action. Valerie is told her sister has been killed by a werewolf and we're shown her dead body, which hardly has a scratch on it. She's been mauled to death by a giant fucking werewolf and she looks like she tripped over something. Brilliant, we won't even get some gory deaths to make up for the rest of the film. A band of villagers decide to kill the wolf, setting off straight away so as to ambush it during the day because apparently werewolves burst into flames in sunlight. Just how obsessed with vampires is Hardwicke? Anyway, they set off straight away, and get to its cave in the middle of the night. That makes complete sense. Henry's father is killed and the rest of them come back with it's head just as Gary Oldman turns up.

If everyone else in the film is as wooden as the toothpick-trees, Oldman's as hammy as the pigs they sacrifice to try and appease the wolf. He plays the mad Father Solomon, a man with silver fingernails (remember that) who rants about the wolf and the red moon until the wolf turns up. And it's awful. It's all CGI and it's neither convincing nor scary. It kills some people and telepathically tells Valerie to come away with it. I'm sure someone could have made a good film here. Give any aspiring director the job and tell them that if they make it anything like Twilight you'll stick them inside Father Solomon's giant metal elephant and you'd end up with a better, darker film than this.

Anyway, for the next hour or so the wolf kills people very cleanly and people are accused and suspected of being the wolf. Then, Solomon decides to duel it. Unfortunately, he duels like a little girl and the wolf bites his arm off. The wolf tells Valerie to come with it, she refuses and goes to her grandma's house. Once there, she finds that her grandma (Julie Christie) is dead and her father (Billy Burke) is revealed as the werewolf, like anyone cares. He shares some boring dialogue with Valerie until Peter attacks him with the world's smallest axe and Valerie stabs him in the chest with Solomon's severed arm, killing him with the SILVER FUCKING FINGERNAILS. I'd say it's an anti-climactic end to the film, but that would imply that the film had been building towards something. Either way, it's the stupidest death since Mr. Big swallowed a bullet of compressed air and floated away like a balloon in Octopussy. During the fight with Valerie's father, Henry was bitten, meaning he will become a werewolf, but not before he and Valerie have sex and make werebabies. "If Amanda Seyfried goes topless, would that be enough to save this film?", I mused to myself as the couple started kissing. It wouldn't have been, even if she had done.

Skip Red Riding Hood and watch The Company of Wolves or An American Werewolf in London instead. Gary Oldman's ham can't save this rubbish, although it does at least trundle along despite its runtime of one hour and forty minutes. If it dragged, it would have gotten even fewer points.

3 out of 10.

Wednesday 11 January 2012

Adventureland (2009)

This is the only film I've seen at the cinema where I've come in late and missed the first few minutes. I was going to see it with a friend and were delayed getting there and missed the first three or four minutes. Annoyed, I swore I would never do the same thing again, and so far I have not. Four years later, I finally got around to watching it again, from the start, uninterrupted! Here's the review.

Adventureland is a romantic comedy set in 1980s Pennsylvania. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) desperately wants to join his best friend on holiday in Europe before they set off for university together. Unfortunately, his dad's demotion means his parents can't afford to pay for the trip and faced with no other option, he gets a job at Adventureland, the local lame amusement park. There, he encounters an eclectic range of characters: pipe-smoking Joel (Martin Starr), his ex-best friend Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush), smooth-talking repairman Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the enticing Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), eccentric assistant manager Bobby (Bill Hader) and his wife, manager Paulette (Kristen Wiig) and the beautiful, enchanting Em (Kristen Stewart).

After Em saves James from being stabbed by an understandably irate customer, he falls for her and the two begin a very awkward, stop-start relationship, punctuated by uncomfortable encounters with her father (Josh Pais) and stepmother (the excellent Mary Birdsong), Em's relationship with the unhappily married Mike and Lisa P.'s suspicious interest in James.

Adventureland's strengths are in its performances. It's not the funniest comedy I've ever seen. In fact, I didn't laugh out loud more than two or three times, but Eisenberg is his usual winning self, Stewart is confident in her role, self-assured and at the same time vulnerable and the various supporting characters are well-played. If you're only familiar with Kristen Stewart through her Twilight roles (I'm not, having only seen the first one quite a while ago), you probably already have an opinion of her. If it's a negative one, put that to one side and watch her in this film. If you think she can't act, that she only has "one facial expression" or if you hold any of the other criticisms that have been levelled at her, watch this film. It's also an excellent retro piece, full of classic 80s music (notably Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus", which is played ad nauseum on the theme park's speakers and always reminds me of the excellent "Dr. Zaius" parody in The Simpsons) and various news clips of President Reagan.

The film's ending split my friend and I. He disliked it, saying it was too predictable. I disagreed, saying that their relationship ended appropriately. Either way, if you're looking for a good, well-acted film and nostalgic for either young love or the 1980s, watch Adventureland.

8 out of 10.

Mission: Impossible I - IV

Having seen Mission: Impossible IV - Ghost Protocol at the cinema today, I thought it would be a good idea to review and compare all four films at the same time. I haven't in fact seen the first three since I saw them for the first time. I saw M:I on video in about 2000; I saw M:I-2 in about 2002 and I saw M:I-3 when it came out in the cinemas in 2006.

Mission: Impossible

I can't believe this film is almost 16 years old! It certainly shows its age: the depiction of the internet is very old fashioned. The plot is quite silly, full of holes and double-crosses. What it does have is two absolutely fabulous set-pieces: The first features Tom Cruise's master-spy, Ethan Hunt, being lowered into a computer room to steal data before the analyst can get back from the toilet. It's a scene that spawned a thousand parodies and it's thrilling stuff watching Hunt dangle as the analyst walks back into the room only a few feet below him, catching a droplet of sweat before it can hit the floor and trigger the alarm and the knife falling perfectly onto the table. It's the highlight of the film and it's very, very well done. The second is a fantastic chase scene between a helicopter and a high-speed train and also has the best laugh of the film: a fainting train attendant.

Jon Voight hams it up and Jean Reno is his usual sullen French self. It's preposterous nonsense, but very good nonsense with lots of thrills and explosions.

8 out of 10.

Mission: Impossible II

The weakest of the series. John Woo ruins another film with his pointless and infuriating slow-mo: Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton see each other across a room, cue the slow-mo; Tom Cruise and Thandie Newton's cars spin out of control, cue the slow-mo; Tom Cruise fights bad guys, cue the slow-mo; and, most inexplicably of all, Thandie Newton drives away from Tom Cruise, cue the slow-mo on Tom Cruise, who is stood perfectly still!

The plot's your usual thriller fare: bad guy (Dougray Scott) steals MacGuffin, good guys must take it back. In this case, the MacGuffin is a deadly virus and his motivation is money. It's very, very dull and to be perfectly honest, things go downhill from the spectacular opening scene where Ethan climbs a cliff face with his bare hands and no safety equipment or harness. Even the final fight scene, which is quite well choreographed, is almost ruined by Woo's convulsive and spasmodic direction. Perhaps the most bizarre scene is the one in which Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) is in a van that's blown up, and emerges from it with his eyebrows singed and his clothes covered in smoke.

An almost laborious effort. No amount of gun-fights and explosions can save it. Oh, and Tom Cruise's hair looks really silly when it flops around all over the place.

6 out of 10.

Mission: Impossible III

Ah, now this is more like it! A welcome return to form for the series. It's not ground-breaking or original: Philip Seymour Hoffman's bad guy seeks the Rabbit's Foot, a mysterious MacGuffin which will.. err... well, we're never quite told what. It could be some kind of "anti-god", which can apparently devastate entire continents. So, it's a virus? Well no, because it destroys buildings too.

But never mind that, because it's a thrilling ride! From a helicopter duel amidst wind turbines in Germany, to a kidnapping in the Vatican City, to a spectacular, explosive rescue on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and on to a roof-top raid and ferocious finish in the crowded streets of Shanghai, it's a non-stop thrill-ride full of amazing stunts and fantastic fight scenes. Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent and even the romance between Ethan and his wife-to-be Jules (Michelle Monaghan) is handled nicely. J. J. Abrams transfers over his considerable skills from small-screen action fare (Alias, one of my favourite TV series) to the silver screen in what was his first film as a director.

A cracking action film that more than makes up for Woo's tepid effort. Slight criticisms would be that it's perhaps 10 minutes too long and the ending is a bit silly.

8 out of 10.

Mission: Impossible IV - Ghost Protocol

The best of the series? Quite possibly! Following a catastrophic failure in Moscow, Ethan and the entire Impossible Missions Force are disavowed by the President. Their new, secret mission: stop Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), a Swedish/Russian renegade physicist, from plunging the world into nuclear war. Once again, the plot's utterly ridiculous, but Brad Bird's first live-action film following his massive success directing animated features is a complete success. Simon Pegg's return is a welcome one, as is his larger role. It's a pity that it had to come at the expense of Ving Rhames, but Luther does have a cameo at the end to keep up his record of being in all four films.

As the race against time to stop Hendricks moves from Russia to Dubai, the film really excels. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa hotel makes for a fantastic second act. Ethan must climb up the building (didn't see that one coming!) and Agent Carter (Paula Patton) gets into a furious fist-fight with French assassin Sabine Moreau (Lea Seydoux, whom I recognised, but couldn't quite place - it turns out she's in Midnight in Paris and plays one of Monsieur LaPadite's daughters in Inglourious Basterds). From there, it's a foot and car chase through a sandstorm before they're whisked off to India for the final showdown. It's a roller-coaster ride from one set-piece to another. It might be the longest of the series (2 hours and 13 minutes), but it certainly doesn't feel like it.

Another great entry in the series. Go and see it!

8 out of 10.

Tuesday 3 January 2012

30 Minutes or Less (2011)

I loved Zombieland. LOVED it. It's not only one of my favourite zombie comedies of all time, it's one of my favourite FILMS of all time. To say that I was looking forward to Ruben Fleischer and Jesse Eisenberg's second film together is an understatement. I saw the trailer and I was convinced that it would be great.

Then I saw it. What can I say? Well, at least it was short. It has pretty much no other redeeming qualities (except for Bianca Kajlich getting her boobs out). Somehow, a story about a pizza delivery guy having a bomb strapped to his chest and being made to rob a bank is boring. Really boring. Thank god it was only 83 minutes long. Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) and his "best friend" Chet (Aziz Ansari) have no chemistry at all, the bad guys (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) aren't scary or even funny, they're just one-dimensional and silly. The film has no rhythm, the "jokes" fall flat and no-one looks like they want to be there, Eisenberg least of all. I can see why.

Zombieland was a smart, hilarious, well-acted film with brilliant, razor-sharp wit. This god-awful mess is apparently based on a true story: in 2003, a pizza delivery man in Pennsylvania was killed by a bomb that was strapped to his chest as he attempted to rob a bank. Neither story is funny.

3 out of 10.