Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

I was actually really looking forward to this film. The trailer looked pretty good and the promise of a truly dark adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairytale intrigued me, even after the utter disaster that was Red Riding Hood. Plus, Charlize Theron as the sexy Evil Queen seemed perfect. So, when I sat down at the preview screening, I did so with a sense of optimism.

It begins with setting up the backstory. The King and Queen of Tabor welcome a daughter into their family - Snow White. When she is only a young girl, her mother dies. Her father, King Magnus (Noah Huntley) is distraught and seems destined to be alone for the rest of his reign. When he leads his army to victory against a marauding horde of glass soldiers, he discovers their prisoner, Ravenna (Charlize Theron). Having known her for five minutes, the two promptly marry (to much laughter from the audience). It came as no surprise when Ravenna killed King Magnus, granted her glass army entry to the kingdom's castle and installed herself as Queen regnant. She then imprisons Snow White (Kristen Stewart) rather than killing her, for apparently no other reason than to ensure the film doesn't end after ten minutes. It's here that the first problem cropped up. I wasn't sure where prologue ended and film began. The backstory about Snow White's life and her imprisonment carried on... and carried on... and carried on until suddenly she had escaped and was on the run. All the while, I was expecting the titles to roll and the prologue to come to an end.

Anyway, after Snow White escapes from the castle she gets lost in the Dark Forest, which has echoes of Fangorn Forest. In a visually fantastic scene, she inhales some spores from mushrooms on the forest floor and goes on a drug-induced trip through the trees, whose branches close in around her as she walks on a carpet of dead birds. It's the best scene in the film and it looks wonderful. With Snow White beyond her power, Queen Ravenna recruits a widowed huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) to bring her back, promising that she will resurrect his dead wife. Of course, he finds her and falls in love with her. Things are complicated by a pointless love triangle involving her childhood friend Will (Sam Claflin), son of Duke Hammond (Vincent Regan) but we all know how it's going to end anyway. The Queen's brother, Finn (Sam Spruell) is dispatched to hunt the two down but he's far too camp and silly to be threatening in any way at all. The Queen, meanwhile, seems to be suffering delusions of some kind. Is her mirror on the wall really speaking to her? Apparently not. Are her obsessions with beauty and eternal youth the result of acute narcissism? Perhaps, but it's also hinted that her desires are driven not by her own vanity but by her fear of becoming wizened and powerless in the face of men who become wise and powerful with age. Charlize Theron talked about this in interviews and it certainly gives her character depth but unfortunately not enough. It's only briefly touched upon and it's a shame.

Instead, we're introduced to the eight dwarves. Played by Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Johnny Harris, Nick Frost and Brian Gleeson, they have a couple of good lines (mostly from Winstone and Frost) but they seemed tacked on and pointless. After escaping the forest, evading the Queen's forces and reuniting with Will and his father, Snow White rounds up an army to attack the castle, kill the Queen and end her reign of terror. Snow White's rousing speech to the assembled men was less Aragorn in Return of the King and more Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Ultimately, the ending is fairly satisfactory and the climactic battle is quite good but despite promising much, Snow White is disappointing. Hackneyed, clichéd dialogue and plot holes are the order of the day and the characters' personalities are barely skin deep. Some stunning visual effects and a good performance from Charlize Theron aside, there's not much to this film. Like the Queen's veil of beauty from the original story, it's far too thin. Removing the love triangle, the Queen's brother and the dwarves would have both cut down the film's bloated running time (two hours and seven minutes) and allowed greater opportunity to develop the characters and their relationships.

Disappointment is the name of the game here. Lower your expectations and you might enjoy it more than I did.

5 out of 10.

Red State (2011)

Whatever happened to Kevin Smith? Since he made Clerks II in 2006, his career has been on a bit of a slide. I liked Zack and Miri Make a Porno but Cop Out was quite poor. It must be pretty annoying for him to see Judd Apatow doing so well, having essentially supplanted him in the same time period. I was aware at the time that there had been a controversy over the release of Red State but I didn't pay too much attention to it. I thought the trailer looked good and I decided to watch it at some point. Well, here we are.

The Five Points Trinity Church, run by Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), is a church so virulently homophobic and extreme that they make the Westboro Baptist Church look moderate by comparison. When sex-starved high school kids Jared (Kyle Gallner), Travis (Michael Angarano) and Billy Ray (Nicholas Braun) arrange a hook-up with a local woman, they think they're going to lose their virginity to her. Unfortunately for them, she turns out to be Abin Cooper's daughter Sarah (Melissa Leo) and the trio are drugged, abducted and taken back to the church, which is inside something resembling a military compound. After witnessing Abin Cooper preach his message of hatred and intolerance to his extended family, the kids watch on as the family executes a gay man. Knowing that they are next, they try to make a break for it. Meanwhile, acting on a tip-off from local sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root), Special Agent Keenan (John Goodman) of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrives outside the church to arrest the Cooper family on suspicion of possessing illegal firearms. He's half-right. The family don't have some illegal firearms, they have an entire armoury of them. The situation quickly deteriorates and erupts into a massive fire-fight.

For a film that's supposedly a satire of homophobic, far-right Christians, it's pretty low on the satire and for a film with a huge gun battle between the government and said tooled-up Christian nutjobs, the action is surprisingly disappointing. Also, I note that it's listed as an action-horror film. There's nothing about this film that makes it a horror. It's more of an action-thriller if anything. Furthermore, in the last twenty-five minutes just falls apart. It descends into stupidity and then there's a change of pace so abrupt and jarring that it made me crick my neck. Kevin Smith's skill as a writer is well-known but he's a pretty poor director and it really shows here. The talented cast do quite well and Michael Parks is the pick of the bunch as the hate-filled preacher but he can't quite lift this film out of middling mediocrity.

Red State is an interesting idea that certainly has legs. Unfortunately, Kevin Smith wastes it. It's not acerbic enough, shocking enough or sufficiently well-made.

5 out of 10.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012)

At the preview screening for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, I was handed a free copy of the novel the film is based on, which I immediately decided I would give to my mother. That should tell you all you need to know about the target audience.

Ewan McGregor plays Dr. Fred Jones, a fisheries expert for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. One morning he receives a nicely-worded email from Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt). She works for a consultancy firm that represents Sheikh Muhammad (Amr Waked), an eccentric Yemeni businessman who dreams of bringing salmon to the deserts of Yemen. Dr. Jones replies that such a project would be "fundamentally unfeasible", repeating as such to his wife Mary (Rachael Stirling) and his boss Bernard (Conleth Hill a.k.a. Varys from Game of Thrones). When a terrorist attack at a mosque in Afghanistan threatens to bring another round of bad news for the government, the Prime Minister's press secretary, the highly strung Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), decides that they need some good news from the Middle East for a change. Drawing blanks, she eventually discovers the Sheikh's salmon fishing proposal and orders Bernard to proceed at full steam. Dr. Jones is ordered to meet Harriet. He does and again rubbishes the plan. Bernard, acting on orders from on high, gives Dr. Jones an ultimatum: be seconded to Harriet's firm and work on the salmon plan or be sacked. His marriage strained and his wife working in Switzerland, he reluctantly accepts.

Harriet, meanwhile, is in a relationship with Captain Robert Mayers (Tom Misom), who is stationed in Afghanistan. Dr. Jones arrives on secondment and she manages to convince him that the Sheikh's vast wealth and the presence of a dam means that the project is "plausible". They meet the Sheikh and Dr. Jones is slowly convinced that he and the project aren't quite as crazy as he first thought. Things almost fall apart when Captain Mayers is reported missing in action but the two go to Yemen to oversee the final stages of the project. Just before he leaves, his wife returns from Switzerland and confronts him about his relationship with Harriet. He admits that he's falling in love with her and they separate. In Yemen, the project initially seems to be a success before it is sabotaged by terrorists and fails. Captain Mayers, recently rescued from Afghanistan, makes a dramatic reappearance just as Dr. Jones declares his love for Harriet and she has to decide who she wants to be with as he must decide whether he wants to stay in Yemen and see the project to completion or return home to Britain.

Not only had I never read the novel of the same name, I had no idea that it wasn't written in prose but as a collection of interviews, official documents, diary entries and emails. While the narrative structure of the novel is quite interesting, the same cannot be said for the film. It's typical rom-com nonsense: utterly predictable and about as strenuous as lifting a spoonful of ice cream from the bowl to your mouth. McGregor and Blunt are pleasant and have a nice chemistry between them but they're never believable as lovers as their off-screen friendship seeps through. The "culture clash" between the two of them is suitably summed up by their names: Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and Fred Jones. Unfortunately, that's as subtle as the film gets, resorting to crude metaphors to convey messages about love and faith. Really, the only bright spot is Kristin Scott Thomas' brilliantly acerbic press secretary, from whom almost all of the laughs come.

Ridiculous, fluffy, sugary, silly, predictable nonsense. The cast at least look like they had a good time making it and if this is your sort of thing, you'll spend an enjoyable hour and forty-seven minutes watching a film about bringing fish to a desert.

5 out of 10.

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.