Mortal Engines: Hester, I AM your father

I blogged on the books some time ago, and couldn’t stop myself commenting on Philip Reeve throwing some shade on Philip Pullman, who is either his drinking buddy or his evil nemesis, and I don’t want to find out which. But they’re drawing level now in a way I didn’t expect, since Mortal Engines looks like being another one shot frachise fizzle just the same way that The Golden Compass sank the notion of a franchise built on the Dark Materials trilogy.

I remember seeing the first trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and feeling a chill; could it be that someone was going to make those books into a movie which would do them justice? Yup. Against the odds, Jackson did just that. Then he made The Hobbit and the less said about that the better. So there I was some months back seeing the trailers for a Peter Jackson production of Mortal Engines and feeling that same hopeful chill. Because once again, he’d got the look right, which is all you can really judge from a trailer.

You have to picture me going into the movie house, muttering “please don’t screw it up, please don’t screw it up” under my breath. Well, you don’t always get what you want.

Mortal Engines looks like 100 million dollars, to the extent that anything can really be said to look like that kind of money. It’s all up there on the screen, for better and for worse. And it runs along efficiently enough as a movie in which things happen. They happen one after another in a logical kind of way, stringing the big CGI setpieces together from the beginning to the middle to the big fight at the end and then the coda.

What it’s not is a GOOD story, or a new story, or a faithful adaptation of the book. It catches some of the look and feel of the world which Reeve created, but then it carves back a more complex story to something that winds up feeling like a shot by shot remake of Star Wars. The rebels are holding out in a fortress. A vast machine is bringing a death ray to blow them up. A rag tag fleet of aircraft have to try to stop it. There’s a key point of vulnerability in the vast machine which has to be flown into by a novice who has weirdly great talent. Gah. There’s even a moment when the big bad is standing on a gantry over a huge drop and tells a key character that he’s her father, and then she’s rescued by a passing aircraft. That was the point when I cracked and said “Hester, I AM your father.” 

What’s vexing about this is that most of the action had to be run in CGI, which means that they could have literally made the action whatever the hell they wanted it to be. It wasn’t one of those deals where the original book had come up with stuff you couldn’t match in the real world. None of this was happening in the real world anyhow. So what they chose to put on the screen is just what they thought would work dramatically as a reflection of the book. I can’t quite see how they could get it that wrong. They had to cut things from the text, obviously, because there’s a lot of incident in the book and there’s only so much of that which you can fit in. But they didn’t have to get the back half of the narrative so jarringly off, and they didn’t have to drop the ball so damn hard in serving the characters. Hester Shaw is a remarkable character in the books, but in the movie they’ve taken all the rough edges off her face and her character. Tom Natsworthy is an idiot in the books, and Robert Sheehan can’t quite sell Tom as an idiot, because he’s not given enough space to do it properly. There’s all that CGI world building to show off, and the running in between the action bits, and then the action bits, and there just isn’t the room for, you know, acting. Perhaps the poorest served character is Anna Fang, who has a great arc in the books for all that she’s often a plot engine, but here she’s just a kick ass martial arts wizard who has two expressions; sunglasses on, and sunglasses off.

So, there could have been three more movies, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to happen. Maybe Netflix will take a run at it in five years time.

Ralph Breaks the Internet

I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet a couple of weeks back, on the back of good internet buzz and the fact that I liked the cut of Vanellope’s jib in the trailers. And it was fun, I guess, but it didn’t exactly drive me to the keyboard to try to set my impressions down.

A couple of weeks on, I’m not sure what to say about it as a movie. It passes the time well. Vanellope is fun. The bit with all the Disney Princesses is smart and doesn’t wear out its welcome. The Easter egg in the middle of the credits...

Actually, that’s probably the bit which stuck with me. That little bit is simple, perfect, and silly. Ralph just keeps stuffing pancakes into a helpless rabbit until things go horribly wrong. It’s weightless and funny and reckless, and I found myself wishing the whole movie had been that way, even though it would probably have been just like wishing that I could have a movie which was all about the minions from Despicable Me.

Instead, it’s another one of those movies for kids in which an awkward doofus messes things up and then learns a valuable life lesson from all the things which went wrong. Which is - I think - also what happened in Wreck-It Ralph, the first movie. That might be why I didn’t bother with it at the time. 

And that’s somehow all I have to say after only a few days have gone by. It’s fun while it’s happening, but I’m struggling to think of anything I’d say to a friend to get them fired up to go and see it.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

I am not a fan of the Millennium Trilogy, largely because it has two characters who - for completely different reasons - infuriate me. So what was I doing at the movie adaptation of the fourth, gun-for-hire, Lisbeth Salander novel?

Claire Foy, that’s why. I was prepared to give it a shot for Claire Foy, another of the new generation of performers who just hypnotise me; Foy, Kiernan Shipka, Millie Bobby Brown, the one and only Chloe Grace Moretz. There’s something in the way they look at a camera which makes me want to look back. Plus, the trailer had some cool stuff in it. Death by airbag. Motorbikes on ice floes. Hand-of-god sniper fire.

Well, it’s all there. Except Claire Foy, who appears to have been given very simple direction. “Claire” the director said “You’re the only native English speaker in the cast. Don’t upstage the Swedes. They’re doing their best.” Claire duly dials everything way down. Way, way down. The poor old Swedes are not blasted off the screen. Heaven help them. I’m not saying they took Lagercrantz’s novel and ran the dialogue through Google translate to get the script, but I’m going to need proof that they didn’t. At one level, fair enough for Claire Foy. She’s playing someone with either autism or some kind of emotional development disorder, depending on exactly what you choose to believe Lisbeth Salander’s damage is. This was always going to be a role with not much talking and even less emoting. That just left the poor old Swedes having to explain the plot using whatever they’re given by the scriptwriter. God help them.

And yet it’s a surprisingly OK movie. The plot is straight up stupid hacker McGuffin nonsense like I thought they’d stopped making any more, but it hangs together and stuff happens in a logical sequence. If you want to believe that it’s possible to write a programme that can control the world’s nuclear missiles remotely and that it will fit into 2528 bytes of code, this is your movie. If you think we need a female James Bond, this could be right up your street; whoever did the title sequence seems to have thought this was a Bond movie, and Lisbeth Salander still has that screw anything, hurt anything, break anything, do anything, unstoppable by anything, balagan that Bond movies run on.

In that sense, nothing has changed. Salander can do whatever the plot needs her to do, and Blomkvist is still every woman’s dream date. Heaven help us, they held back two or three minutes of run time just to hammer home that his editor Erika is still splitting hr time between her husband and Blomkvist, easily my least favourite bit of the first three books. If none of that took the enamel off your molars ten years ago, you’re going to lean right in on this movie and eat it all up.

And stuff can kind of work, if you’re ready to suspend all disbelief. One of the best setpieces in the movie is Salander running down the guys what have kidnapped the moppet who lies at the heart of all the McGuffinage. She’s just been injected with god only knows what after losing a fistfight hard. She walks it off by grinding up and snorting random drugs that fell out of the bathroom cabinet, then staggers out in the open air, kicks a dead cop out of an unmarked Volvo, and chases down the BMW getaway car, dividing her time between driving the car, shaking off the drugs, programming the in car navigation system to track her target and using her smartphone to hack the BMW so that she can trigger the airbags and run it off the road that way. At sixty miles an hour. On drugs. It’s ridiculous, but Foy kind of sells it. It’s a pretty cool chase scene. It’s just - well read that description back.

Salander is not like the other children, is what I’m saying. So not like them that it’s best to think of it all happening by magic. Which is cool and all, but it does take the suspense out of things. No matter how battered she might get in the moment, she’s still going to overcome all opposition by laser guided planning, improbabl computer skills and concentrated essence of bad ass.

And Claire Foy is genuinely good enough to sell the idea, at least some of the time. Weirdly a lot of it is in the walk. She’s absolutely tiny, and she walks like she just washed out of ballet school, but something in that stride conveys absolute determination. Pity no-one else is keeping up with her.

 

Overlord; where zombies dare

Overlord is very like itself, in that something which ought to have been dead years ago has lurched to life because people are meddling with things they don’t understand. This is not something which ought to work, and yet, rather crazily it does. Mostly, it’s because it’s not messing around. The Allied characters are walking cliches but the actors lean right into it and make them work. The Nazis have no redeeming features, which jars in today’s world of antiheroes and shades of grey, and then you think to yourself; hang on, these are actual Nazis doing hideous experiments on innocent people. By this stage, anyone with a higher impulse would have shot himself out of sheer embarassment. 

And yes, you’re going to sit there in the early going thinking things like “Hang on, there weren’t any racially integrated units in the 1944 US Army.” or “How would an aircraft be flying in daylight over the Allied invasion fleet ahead of doing a night paradrop?” Snap out of it. We’re about to watch Nazi zombies. If ever there was a time to remind yourself it’s just a movie, this is it.

And yes, you’re going to be reminded that this is a job where JJ Abrams had an input. The McGuffin involves red goop, just as damn near everything in JJ Abrams' world seems to do. What are you going to do? JJ gonna JJ.

The important question is, does it work? Well, the projector threw a rod at my showing, which pretty much wrecked the last act; we kept seeing bits of the ending out of sequence as the projectionist gamely wrestled with the software and tried to get things back on the rails. But that didn’t ruin anything which went before, and I’d say if you got a straight run at it, it would just be simple fun from one end to the other. Shane Black could do a lot worse than take a look at Overlord and see how you can throw together a “motley crew of military screw-ups take on monsters” movie. The paratroop platoon gets cut down to a manageable number of stereotypes in jig time until there’s just four soldiers struggling to figure out how they’re going to blow up a radio jamming station before the sun comes up. 

It’s not gonna be easy, and that’s before they realise that the radio jamming station’s on top of a hell-mouth and they’ve got to deal with Nazis and Nazi zombies just to get to the station. Good thing they’ve got luck, a plucky French villager and a corporal who’s killed half of Italy to tell them what to do. Corporal Ford’s the best thing in the movie, 100 proof cool from the moment he tells the platoon photographer to get out of his face til the moment that he throws the head Nazi’s SS cigarette lighter back in his face. Everyone else on the Allied side is likeable, but Ford is the size the movie really needs.

So, there you go. Things can still surprise you. I wouldn’t have said you could make a cross between Where Eagles Dare and Frankenstein as anything other than a spoof, but Overlord showed me that you can drag those things out of the 1970s and play them straight, and it will still work. Just keep it simple, hire a cast that respects the tone, and get on with it.

Widows; with men like this, why would you want to be anything else?

The key insight in Widows is that men are just the worst, though I’m not sure anyone was still on the fence about that one. If you just watched the trailer, you’d think it’s a movie about four women carrying on where their villainous husbands left off. Well, yes, there are women in it, and they’re planning a robbery. But the camera spends a lot of time checking out what the men of the world are up to. The robbery plan is tangled up in political infighting in Chicago, and we spend as much time listening in to the two horrible sides of that fight as we spend with Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriquez and Elizabeth Debicki and eventually Cynthia Erivo (Cynthia’s on a roll; she was the most surprising thing in Bad Times at the El Royale and she’s holding her own here against her three co-robbers).

And what an awful bunch of men we’ve got. The robbers which made the widows are no great loss to the world when they get themselves shot to pieces and blown up in a botched robbery; their destruction is such a “no-one could walk away from that moment” that as soon as it happened, I started a clock in my head for the moment when at least one of them would turn out to have just done that. Well, a stately jog, as it turns out, but I didn’t let that make me think I was wrong. Then there’s the two sides of the political race; Colin Farrell’s ghastly white sixth generation ward heeler pitted against Brian Tyree Henry’s crime-boss who’s decided politics is the logical next move to a life of criminal ease and unlimited money. Daniel Kaluuya gets to wipe out all the “Awww” he got from Get Out by playing Henry’s brother as such a walking blemish that when he finally gets got, your main reaction will be that it didn’t hurt anything like as much as it should have. Over on the white and privileged side of things, Colin Farrell has an equally ghastly family member in the shape of Robert Duvall’s grisly fifth generation ward heeler, all rage against minorities and disappointment that his son isn’t an entirely shameless monster.

Because, own this; Colin Farrell’s whiny privileged political manipulator - and part time murder plot organiser - is probably the most likeable man in the movie, apart from Viola Davis’ driver. For #MeToo players, check out the queasy undercurrents in Lukas Haas’ character, who rents Elizabeth Debicki for sex when it suits him, and gives an all too convincing performance of a creep who thinks that he’s a nice guy because he doesn’t actually threaten women into giving him sex. I sat there fuming, because in such a uniformly horrible male cast, there was a real risk that there would be people in the audience who’d think that Haas was playing a relatively nice guy. Tragically, he doesn’t get hit by a bus. I like to imagine it happened off screen.

Thank goodness for the women. They’re not written as great people either, but at least they don’t leave a slime trail wherever they go. And they have spirit. I wanted them to win; not just to make it out alive, but to win. And the movie needs that angle to work at all. The robbery takes a matter of minutes. The planning is occasionally fun, but it’s not often tense. So it will work only if you buy the characters and want to see what happens to them. That, above all, is what McQueen gets right in directing the movie. He has a great cast, and you want to know what’s going to happen to them. And even the small victories are glorious in their way. When Debicki goes out to buy guns without a clue, and figures out how to borrow a clue from someone else, you share her glee at carrying it off. Of course, equally when she’s being used by Lukas Haas, your heart’s in your boots as you look for an exit. Somehow, the stakes feel highest for Debicki’s character, and it’s not just because there’s something so frail and ethereal about her; it’s that she’s coming into the game with the least of all the players and has so few options. Every victory counts.

And I can’t tell you if she wins or not; the movie leaves me guessing. In her last scene, she has an absolutely perfect coat, but I’ve no idea how she got it, or where she’s going next. Probably not a sequel; this is not that kind of movie.

Slaughterhouse Rulez

I was under no illusions about Slaughterhouse Rulez; the poster made it clear that the cast was people I’d never heard of, plus Nick Frost and Simon Pegg playing nerds out of their depths, and Michael Sheen playing smug evil, a job he does with the same worrying conviction that Gerard Butler brings to being a scowling murderer. Please, I find myself thinking, let this be really good acting.

I assumed the cast were going to get wiped out to the last man and just hoped that it might try to be funny along the way. I wasn’t too far off the mark. It’s a determinedly cheap movie that mashes If into a monster movie with a side order of a swipe at capitalism in general and fracking in particular. I can sort of see why they went with a monster movie. The swipes at the public school system are funnier and more interesting, but there’s no very obvious place to take that kind of thing narratively, so just as Chandler wrote his way out of dead ends by having a guy walk into the room with a gun, enter the monsters. The writers had made all the points they wanted to about class warfare and cruelty for the sake of cruelty, and there was a certain need for action.

It’s best not to think about the action too much. As usual, the Aristotelian unities are not respected; I defy you to make sense of how the locations are connected or the way in which time passes once things get weird. And as always, the monsters don’t make any sense. They’re big, carnivorous and come from underground. What the hell were they eating underground? How does that ecology even work? And if they’re popping up out of the fracking works, why isn’t the rest of the ecology popping out ahead of them? 

So there you are with a public school full of posh swine being cruel to each other. That kind of thing gets pricy if you want to get it right, so cleverly they put most of the action in a couple of rooms, and then set the main action around a bank holidy when most of the kids and most of the teachers are off the campus having fun somewhere else. So that they can get away with a vast public school with only a dozen speaking kids, a matron, a headmaster and just one teacher. This freed up just enough money for some CGI for the monsters, and you’re away at the races.

Pegg, Frost and Sheen are their usual dependable selves. They’re such good performers that they can make something out of almost anything. Sheen’s fleering headmaster is theatrically unpleasant, but the moment where he delays the getaway from the monsters because he insists on pulling on his driving gloves before even starting the car is a perfect character moment. Of course he’s the kind of clown who has a Skoda AND driving gloves, and even more of course, he’s the kind of person who has to complete all his little rituals no matter what else is going on. Same with Pegg; of course he’s completely inadequate, but in a crunch he’s still trying to do the right thing and be the person he thought he always had in him.

However, the standout performance is Asa Butterfield’s tortured quip machine Willoughby Blake. The ostensible hero of the piece is Finn Cole’s Don Wallace, who’s there as the audience surrogate; bluff decent northerner who doesn’t even want to be there and has to have everything explained to him. But Will is both much more fun and much more of a hero, albeit a very unwilling and frequently downright spiteful one. He provides a mordant running commentary on everything else in the movie, but his perfect moment comes as the survivors are legging it and they realise they’ve left someone behind. “We’ve got to go back for him!” and Will deadpans reflectively “Do we, though?” and keeps right on going.

A Star Is Born

It’s wrong that one of my takeaways from A Star Is Born was the meanspirited wish that they’d done the blocking for Greg Grunberg so that we never saw his face. Grunberg is a likeable guy, and I think it says a lot that he keeps showing up in movies that his more successful friends from Alias make, but they had a great thing going on early in the movie where you hear him talking, but his face is never in shot. He’s Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper)’s driver, and he’s just a voice that Maine isn’t even really listening to as he drives around looking for a bar. He gets into shot just once, when Maine sends him to talk Ally into flying to a concert, and I really wished they’d shot that whole scene from behind him so that we still never see Greg’s big likeable face. That would have been a nice touch. Also, Lady Gaga seems to keep finding a new version of her face in every scene she has as Ally, so the more scenes the merrier, really.

So that’s just me. Back in the mainstream, the high point of the movie is that first duet between Maine and Ally. Bradley Cooper, god bless him, went off and got himself trained to sing and play the guitar properly. I don’t know if Lady Gaga went off to learn to act, or she’s just been doing professionally weird stuff for so long that she had nothing left to learn, but she sure didn’t need to learn how to sing. That short scene gave me goosebumps. I’d read reviews, so I thought I would be a bit immunised. Nope. You can tell yourself you’re ready, but it’s still a hell of a song. 

For the rest, it’s all down to the cast. And Lady Gaga is great. Not just dancing bear great, but genuinely selling the part. It seemed crazy to be talking about Oscars until I saw it, but eh, you know? Why not. There will be better performances this year by women, but I’m not sure that many of them will be as surprising.

It’s otherwise a pretty solid movie; this is the fourth time around the block for the basic plot, and it’s all down to whether you care about the characters and how you’re going to feel about the world going to hell for the older man as the younger woman passes him out. Don’t go for the happy ending, because there isn’t one, but for the way in which we get to the sad ending.

And, I’m sorry to say, don’t go for the music. Everyone’s doing their best, but apart from Shallow, that first duet, the music’s serviceable at best. Which is a bit jarring, when you know what Lady Gaga does musically in her day job; I kept waiting for the madness, and we got another helping of pop. Of course, if they’d leaned right into that, the music might have eclipsed the plot, and then why not just have a Gaga concert movie.

One last thought which I couldn’t escape. Jackson Maine’s a hard living hard drinking soft rock musician, and we’re shown his world of success in which he just shows up dressed however the damn hell he pleases and does what he wants. And then Ally becomes a star in the making, and we watch Maine watching her rehearse for a musical number; he’s looking wistful as we see the shadows of the rehearsals, and it really hit me. If you’re a guy, you just show up. If you’re a girl, you have to have a costume, and backing dancers, and you have to look good. But the tragedy we’re supposed to buy in is the melancholy of a declining career, not the way the world works against half the people in it.

Venom

Venom must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but I spent most of it wondering if Tom Hardy genuinely had nothing better to do. I spent most of the rest of it wondering who was playing the female lead, and felt qite grumpy when I realised it was Michelle Williams. I know she had better things to do, because I’ve seen her do them.

So, it’s another superhero story, and there’s an origin story and the fate of the whole world is at stake, and there’s lots of CGI for no very good reason and because there’s lots of CGI everything happens at night to make that easier, and well, why do I ever go to these things any more? Because nothing else that was on that night was any better, and there’s some degree of quality control in Marvel’s world. And Tom Hardy is rarely unwatchable, no matter what else might be going on.

Even so, it’s nothing like a must see movie. And as is so often the case, I found myself unpicking the logistics. Why WOULD there be a comet full of weird lifeforms which could live symbiotically with humans? How would the energy budget for that even work? Comets aren’t enormous, and they spend most of their time in eccentric orbits far from the sun. How would a comet support enough of these things that they could conceivably take over everyone on Earth, which seemed to be the big plan here?

And then there’s the terrestrial technology. I can never understand how miracle stuff just exists in superheroes as if it isn’t even a thing. It’s as if the people who make movies are utterly uninterested in the real world, or don’t know the difference between fact and fiction. The big bad in this movie has a huge biotech company which has somehow made enough money to build a space rocket to go looking for life elsewhere in the solar system. Which would make him some sort of cross between Elon Musk and Craig Venter, if somehow Craig Venter had got cosmically rich. Hmmm. Ok, handwave the biotech. Who knows? Maybe you could commercialise biotech on a heroic scale without there being any visible impact on the day to day lives of the US population, other than the endless stream of homeless people you kidnapped for experiments.

It’s the rocket which intrigues me. It starts the movie crashing, but before it did that, it somehow got out to a comet and then came back to earth. Even if I’m in a good mood and stipulating that the comet was near the earth when all this happened, so that I don’t have to worry about trip time to the Oort cloud, there’s still the energy budget to move a manned vehicle with five or six people on it out of earth orbit and into a matched orbit with a comet. Then come back. Basically, if someone’s figured out how to do that, all in a vehicle smaller than a bus, they’ve also figured out how to solve the world’s day to day energy problems. And there’s no way that happened without the US economy noticing some side effects. At least when Jurassic Park movies clone dinosaurs, there are congressional enquiries about the responsible use of the technology.

Finally, there’s the symbiotes. Which kill all their hosts so long as they’re homeless people without any lines, but get WAY easier to live with once they start pairing up with the big names. Venom piggybacks Tom Hardy like it isn’t even a thing, but when the going gets tough, he can jump onto a dog, and then onto Michelle Williams and they get through it with less fuss than if they’d had a shampoo and set. I know we’re the audience for superhero movies, but show some respect for our intelligence.

And in the end, it’s in the cause of showing us a superhero who’s dark and edgy and might not really be all that nice. Forget about it. Deadpool has been there ahead of you, kissed all the girls, drank all the bourbon and is passed out in a haze on the nice bedlinen.

Bad Times at the El Royale

Bad Times at the El Royale is one of those movies which is fun while it’s happening and then falls apart when you think about it. Which is a bit disappointing. I will watch most things with either Jon Hamm or Jeff Bridges in them, and I’d really liked The Cabin in the Woods which was Drew Goddard’s last outing. Actually, it’s comparison with Cabin which shows what went wrong; Bad Times isn’t crazy enough to get past its contrivances.

The biggest problem after the fact is that there’s way too much going on. Half a dozen people show up at a hotel which straddles the California/Nevada border, and shenanigans ensue. That’s fine. What’s not so fine is that every single one of them has an ulterior motive for being there, and it doesn’t make a lick of sense that they’d all have arrived the same afternoon. No amount of Jon Hamm and Jeff Bridges being charming can make that work. Hell, no amount of Chris Hemsworth being the world’s funniest, creepiest own-brand Charlie Manson can make that work. 

But while it’s underway, you don’t quite notice. These are good performers playing well. Everyone has something to do, and everyone has at least a few moments which really register. Early on the plot whacks an expensive movie star, just so that you get the message that this is serious business and anyone can die at any time. And not many of the rest of the cast get out alive. 

Along the way they all land their characters, and each of them turns out to be hiding some kind of a secret which turns their introduction upside down. Each of these reversals works on its own; indeed the final one is pretty much heartbreaking. It’s just that there are too many of them happening all at once, and in a movie which has been so painstaking in setting everything up so that the pieces spin against each other, it eventually gets baffling that there’s no clever explanation for how so many people with problems all turn up at the same hotel in the same few hours.

Despite all the good work done by Jeff and Jon, the standouts are Cynthia Erivo’s Darlene and Chris Hemsworth’s Billy Lee, playing the best and the absolutely worst people in the whole movie. Hemsworth, in a way, is more surprising. I didn’t realise he had it in him to play a charismatic bastard, but if there’s any justice in the world, he will spend the next five years doing nothing else. Apart from anything else, anything that lets him boogie while threatening to murder everyone in the room probably deserves some kind of UNESCO world heritage status.

Hunter Killer; Peak Gerard Butler

Gerard Butler is the best thing in Hunter Killer, so you can imagine what everyone else is like. It has two female speaking parts, although it only lurches to two when a previously silent crew person suddenly chips in with about five words ten minutes before the end of the movie. I had a picture in my mind of one of the producers suddenly realising that there was only one female voice in the whole thing, and demanding that someone, anyone, get a line which wasn’t delivered in a macho rumble.

The movie is another one of those Hollywood techno thrillers where one bunch of guys are doing stunts and hurting themselves in the wilderness, while meanwhile there’s intrigue and wickedness in a situation room a millions miles away, featuring actors who ought to be doing something more useful. But who can resist an offer of two week’s work looking menacing from a chair? Not Gary Oldman, that’s for sure.

So, Gary’s minding the home fires, and Gerard is running the titular submarine, and then there’s four guys I’ve never seen before doing a mini remake of Lone Survivor as they try to rescue the Russian premier from an attempted coup. Apparently they originally wanted to shoot all this in Alaska, but Bulgaria was more convenient. On the one hand it doesn’t look remotely like the Arctic circle, and on the other hand it’s not all that far from the location where the Soviet Union almost did have a military coup of sorts. Gorbachev wound up stuck in a dacha on the Black Sea for a couple of days at one point during the great perestroika experiment while the old guard had a wee think about his plans. Whether 1991 was an inspiration for this movie, heaven only knows. It takes a long time for some properties to make it to the screen.

Anyhow, it’s a perfectly professional munging of “special ops against all odds” with “submarine sneaking around the place” and I doubt anyone would have missed it if it had never happened. It passed the time, but not so fast that I didn’t have time to notice all the dumb stuff. The chronology doesn’t make any kind of sense; the movie kicks off with a couple of submarines being sunk, and then the US sends another sub to rescue the survivors. It’s OK, according to the Washington navy guy, because they’ve got one nearby with a crack commander just assigned to it. Cut to “The Lochaber Mountains” in Scotland (Bulgaria again), and Gerard Butler is hunting deer with a bow, as you do. This is your crack commander, and he’s about 2000 kilometers from where he needs to be. I’m not sure how long it takes a nuclear submarine to get from Scotland to the Kola Peninsula, but my best guess is “longer than it takes for everyone is a sunk submarine to die waiting for rescue”. I might not have bothered with that, but they hang a lampshade on it by having Butler’s deputy greet him at the docks by wondering how long it took him to get to Faslane (Scotland) from Plymouth. That’s pretty much typical of the care which has been lavished on every aspect of this movie.

What I did like was a throwaway line as  everything in the movie comes to a head; the US and Russian fleets are heading straight at each other and at any moment they’re going to start shooting if somehow Gerard and the Special Ops guys can’t save the day. To give you a sense of how tense it all is, one of the naval experts in Washington announces that they’re closing “to visual range”. There hasn’t been a fleet action since the end of the second world war, so to some extent no-one knows what a modern naval battle will look like, but one thing everyone agrees on is that waiting until you’re in visual range was out of fashion by 1943. You might think “Eh, only military nerds will care”, but who do you think the audience is for something like this?

A Simple Favour

I imagine I wasn’t the only person who saw the trailer for A Simple Favour and was fooled by the insistent French pop soundtrack into thinking that it was a remake of a French original. It’s not, thank heavens. It’s comforting proof that America can take a book and adapt it into a perfectly good movie by the simple expedients of keeping the cast small and talented and letting them act.

I’ll be honest; I was on board as soon as I saw Anna Kendrick in the trailer. I don’t know why Anna Kendrick is magic, but she just is. I pretty much didn’t care who else was there, or whether Paul Feig was directing it; I knew that Anna would somehow make her own bit special and that would somehow be enough.

It would have been, but everything else works too. Blake Lively is delightful. Anyone could have torn up the screen delivering bitchy one-liners, but she also manages to make you see the scared person hiding behind the bitch. And there’s other people, but they don’t matter all that much. This is a whole movie about a terrible friendship between two women, and the men are, at best, things that get kicked around the room by the plot.

And what a plot. What makes this a great little movie is not that there are two fun female characters owning the show; it’s that for once you also want to see what happens next. This is not just a hang out movie with two mismatched buddies. This is a mystery movie where you can’t tell who the villain might be. Emily has everything that Stephanie could possibly want; magnificent house, dreamy husband, a killer wardrobe [1] and approximately all the attitude in the world (Emily’s voicemail message is a magnificent “This is Emily Townsend. Leave a message or fuck off.”). Emily disappears, and within a matter of days, Stephanie has moved into the magnificent house and the dreamy husband’s arms, and ...

Was Stephanie planning this all along? She’s such a repressed dorky little thing that it feels like it would be a perfect reverse for her to have targeted Emily and moved in on her world. And Anna Kendrick shows these little moments of fire and determination to get her own way. Maybe she’s the real predator in this world.

Or maybe not. Go see the thing yourself and find out. What makes it a good movie is how hard it is to guess which way it’s going to pan out. And when it does resolve, the resolution makes sense. It’s true to what we’ve seen of these people. The movie’s very honest about the way you can’t trust people; again and again the characters tell each other stories while the action cuts away to what actually happened, just to underline how hard it is to catch a lie in a voice even when you’re being shown a lie.

And there are so many incidental pleasures, including a wonderful Greek chorus of bored parents from the school where Emily and Stephanie meet. They’re all too believably fed up with both of them, and they’re used just enough that you’re always pleased to hear from them. 

Perfection’s in the details. In its own way, A Simple Favour is perfect.

[1] None of it is ever going to fit Stephanie, who’s a mouse beside Emily’s jungle cat, but still …. 

The Predator

The story goes that the original script had a one minute cameo at the end in which Arnie showed up in a helicopter to tell everyone it was time to fly off into the sequel. It could have been shot in in an hour, just like Arnie’s cameos in Expendables movies. And Arnie, who in some ways is the laziest actor alive, turned it down. To me, this suggests that for once in his life, he read the whole script.

Not even the first Predator movie is anyone’s idea of a masterpiece, so it’s not as though I was waiting with bated breath for another attempt to keep the franchise going. But then they attached Shane Black to it, and I got stupidly optimistic. Iron Man 3 isn’t actively terrible. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys are genuinely good movies. The Long Kiss Goodnight might be one of the best stupid action movies ever made, and The Last Boy Scout is the last time it didn’t hurt to watch Bruce Willis murdering everyone with worse dialogue than him. All right, then, I thought to myself.

No. All wrong. The Predator is a stupid, incoherent mess that looks like someone killed Shane Black, scrabbled through his dustbin for any bits of paper that didn’t have coffee grounds on them, and then went down to the studio with a rubber Shane Black mask and the hope that no-one would ask why he smelled of latex. It’s full of bits of what I think of as the single transferable Shane Black script; moppet driving part of the plot, bad parental relationships, smartass anti-heroes, even smarter-ass sidekicks, steely government conspiracies made out of evil, and as many people suffering from PTSD and psychological issues as the plot can accommodate. It’s just that it all feels like the Walmart own brand version instead of the high spec version we liked in the past.

Holding it all together, or rather not holding it all together, is a plot that sounds like someone heard two five year olds playing in the next room and tried to write down just the squeaky bits while the room they were in had a wolverine in it. Nothing makes any real sense from scene to scene; the characters need cars, and then they’re somehow IN cars, but there’s no way to figure out how it happened or if it even matters. It’s all so disconnected that I kept getting jolted out of even the bits I was liking. 

What’s good? Well, if you can make out the dialogue, which is always being swamped by other things, there’s a lot of fun there. And the characters are fun. Obviously, don’t get attached to them. It’s a Predator movie. Pretty much everyone you meet is there to get ripped apart, but they’re funny while they last. Which in some cases is surprisingly long. I counted four survivors, one of them only by inference. The other three are so obvious I don’t even feel like it’s a spoiler to announce that the last people standing are the hero, the moppet, and the feisty chick. Because of course they are. And say this for Shane Black; he can do feisty chicks. In other Predator movies the female characters are pretty much passive plot coupons, but give The Predator this much; its women may be a minority, but they’re survivors who can think for themselves.

One thing which really doesn’t work is something which should have worked. It’s a clever idea that this movie is part of the continuity of the earlier films, and that the shadowy government is getting its act together and knows at least some of what it’s up against with Predators. That’s good. But then it goes too far; the government knows things which it couldn’t possibly know. They keep referring back to things which have just happened in the movie without any witnesses at all and with no time for anyone to have tried to analyse it - not to mention that after the Predator gets loose, the analysts are so much confetti and their secret analysis base seems to be burning down around them. And yes, if the movie was going as fast as it needs to, I wouldn’t have had time to think of it.

But say this for Shane Black. We’ve seen a lot of movies lately which have been full of references of earlier better parts of the franchise, and man it’s got old fast. Black keeps most of the references fleeting, and when he rolls out a catchphrase, he makes the most of it. “Get to the choppers!” yells one of the characters, and after a cut, our motley crew of actual lunatics are on big old Harleys.

BlackkKlansman

Blackkklansman is a movie too heartfelt to be fun, even though it’s got a lot of funny moments. It’s bookended by reminders of what hate looks like; it opens with a montage of Alec Baldwin making a racist propaganda film in the 1960s, and closes with footage of the real events of the last couple of years, hammering home that this is something which hasn’t gone away, no matter how much it might feel like the characters in the main action have managed some kind of local victory against racism.

The movie’s set unobtrusively in the 70s, getting most of the setting and costumes right without making a big deal of it, but there’s a constant undercurrent of echoes of the present day, to the point where it almost wouldn’t be surprising to have someone look right out of the screen at the audience and say “Y’all know this isn’t really set in the past, don’t ya?"

The weird thing to me was not that it made racists ugly and repellent, but that it made everyone human. The racists were repellent, but for every one of them there was at least one moment where they did something that was just the stuff that people do, those moments of affection and trust which make the hatred even harder to understand. And strikingly, it doesn’t make white authority figures either fools or monsters. For the most part, the white cops who surround Ron Stallworth are a believable mixture of decency and obliviousness, people doing their best and finding it hard to understand how anyone wouldn’t. Adam Driver, who plays Stallworth’s white beard, pretty much steals the show whenever he gets a scene to himself, and the rest of the time is utterly convincing as a guy who just wants to get his job done and is being dragged against his will into giving a damn about it. John David Washington, who plays Stallworth, has an easier job as a smart guy who can’t believe how dumb the world is, but like his dad Denzel, he has an effortless charisma which lets him hold his own against the likes of Driver.

Lee also does something which needed to be done, and which I haven’t seen much before. In a movie which is largely about how terrible white people can be, he takes a long, long take in the middle to show the audience how beautiful black people can be. Stallworth goes to a Black Power meeting early in the movie, and the camera pans endlessly through the audience, catching their delighted reactions to the speaker. It’s black faces in a darkened room, and from a purely technical point of view, lighting it must have been the biggest challenge in the whole movie. Film is optimised for white faces, and exposing for black faces is always trickier than it should be. Lee’s work here is masterful, and does something for everyone who watches it. 

Afterwards, I was mulling over the persistence of the Klan and the way in which bigots always seem to feel that they are being outnumbered and overborne by the people they used to oppress. And it struck me that in one way, bigots are right to feel outnumbered. At some level they know that while white people are the majority, assholes like them are a tiny minority. There are, indeed, far more black people in America than there are white people awful enough to say out loud the things which Klansmen say. The problem, of course, is that the white majority stays quiet in the face of the Klan. There’s nothing new about this. It’s a long time since Edmund Burke pointed out that for evil to prosper, all that is needed is for good men to do nothing. But perhaps people need to stop thinking of themselves as good people when they do nothing. Perhaps it’s time for them to accept that if they do nothing, they’re not good people at all.

M R Carey: The Boy on the Bridge

No-one is going to buy this unless they’ve already read The Girl with All the Gifts, and so everyone reading it is going to feel their heart sink a little as they realise that we’re back in the Rosalind Franklin, the armoured mobile lab which shows up in central London in Girl and becomes Miss Justineau’s prison. We all know that Rosie winds up abandoned in the middle of London with its crew dead or missing, so we know that the forecast for the people in this book is …  not promising.

Just like Girl, this is a book that I read in short stretches, tip-toeing through the prose and pausing at intervals to steel myself in case the next chapter turned into Benjie’s world of blood. Rosie is doomed, and the suspense is just how doomed the crew are, and to a lesser extent how Rosie winds up abandoned in London.

How Rosie winds up in London is almost irrelevant; Carey dashes it off in a couple of pages after the main action of the book has unfolded. What matter is what comes before. The heart of Girl was the three cornered relationship between a child, a mother surrogate, and a weary soldier as they cross a devastated landscape. In and around that were other tensions; ambitious scientists with no morality left and semi-expendable grunts trying to keep the world at bay. Carey’s used essentially the same template, but put new characters into it.

Melanie has become Stephen Greaves, a teenage genius who might just be smart enough to figure out how the fungal infection works, but is so damaged by childhood trauma that he can’t explain it to anyone. Miss Justineau has become Samrina Khan, a scientist who has replaced Stephen’s mother in every way that matters, and Sgt Parks has become Col Carlisle, the military leader of the expedition. They occupy the same spaces on the emotional board of the book, and yet they’re nothing like the characters from the first book, and they work out their redemptions and sacrifices in very different ways.

It’s a very satisfying book, especially for a prequel. It fills in points that the earlier (but later) book didn’t bother with, but it doesn’t make a point of explaining all the back story. What we’re told is what the story itself needs, nothing more. That’s something I can really respect having sat through Hollywood’s notions of how a prequel ought to work. But what made me put the book down at the end in complete satisfaction was the ending, which closes out both the story of the survivors of this book, and the story of the survivors of Girl. Harder hearts might argue that the ending is pat and sentimental, but for me it gave the good guys the ending they deserved.

The ending might even, for all I know, be some kind of sequel hook. What’s been done will stand on its own, and I thought the same thing when there was just Girl. So if Carey comes out with a third book one of these days, it might really be something.

Equalizer 2; the Sequeliser

I didn’t really like The Equalizer all that much, but I am encouraged to see that what I kind of liked in the first movie was what I kind of liked in the second one; Denzel’s Robet McCall is better company when he’s good humouredly watching the world around him and sticking his thumb on the scales from time to time to let the little guys get a little more than they might have coming. Everything else just underlines why making the Equalizer into a movie was a mistake. The Equalizer doesn’t do big movie length projects; he does small neighborhood stuff. Ramming a big plot into the movies just hammers home how much they should have stayed as episodic TV.

Still, Robert McCall’s breathtaking sadism is still firmly in place. Don’t kill anyone simply when you can hurt them a whole bunch beforehand. Reflecting on it afterward, I thought to be myself that Denzel could have made a movie which was the equal of his real talent by making McCall a sadistic sociopath who knew he was a problem, and rationed out his moments of sadism only when he felt like he’d earned them. Denzel would have been more than up to the job of someone doing the right thing precisely so that he could reward himself by doing the wrong thing.

Instead he just goes around hurting people in ways that I think are supposed to make the audience give an atavistic “yay!” as various button-pushing low-lifes get maimed or stabbed to bits because they’ve somehow fetched up on McCall’s radar. Quite why Boston PD isn’t hunting him down as a serial killer is never very clear. In one of the early fist-pumping sequences he goes all medieval on the asses of a bunch for frat boy lawyers who’ve raped an intern and then poured her into McCall’s Lyft taxi as though that was all the consideration she needed. He does not cotton to this, and comes back to give them some lessons in what pain feels like. And particularly in 2018, the sight of rapists getting maimed is sort of cathartic. But he leaves his witnesses alive, having told them he’s the Lyft driver who picked up the girl. He even makes a point of asking the last of them to leave him a five star rating. How does that NOT turn into a sub-poena fired off at Lyft to get his home address?

Still, Denzel’s easy going charm makes a lot of it work. One standout is the moment when he pulls the world’s most polite hostage-taking, walking off with the villain-in-chief’s wife and kids as if he’s just cadging a lift instead of taking them hostage to stop the villain and his mooks from stabbing him. It’s elegant, minimalist, classy and - when you think about it - really creepy.

But it’s just a wrong movie. And there’s one moment that tells you who the audience is supposed to be, and why they should all be on some kind of watch list. McCall takes on the last of the big bads in a small town during a hurricane, and one of his jinks takes him through a bakery. As he strolls through, he casually slashes open every flour sack in sight and turns on all the fans he can find. “Ah,” I said. “Expedient flour-air explosive.” And so it came to pass. This is a movie written to please the kind of people who think that they could improvise a bomb out of whatever they can find in their kitchens.

King of Thieves; what's it really telling us.

King of Thieves can’t make its mind up whether it’s a comedy or a drama, which makes it pretty lifelike, but would be a disaster if they hadn’t simplified the problem by hiring a cast of old stagers who could make the characters come to life either way. It’s a movie about a jewellery heist which ends in disaster. Ealing used to do this all the time, making genial comedy out of failed robberies in a time when people weren’t supposed to get away with their crimes but still needed to be loveable enough that you kind of hoped they would. Time moves on, and we don’t be doing that kind of thing any more, so it’s not an Ealing movie at all.

It’s based - I’ve no idea how loosely - on the real world robbery of the Hatton Garden diamond vault in 2015, which was carried out by a bunch of geriatrics who briefly amazed the world by pulling off an apparently perfect robbery before getting caught by police who used modern technology to pin them down with CCTV and phone triangulation.  As brought to life by Caine, Gambon, Broadbent, Courtenay and Winstone, they come off as a bunch of a curmudgeonly old gits who brought themselves down by a mixture of hubris and mutual distrust. They’re utterly believable as a group of old men struggling with both modernity and a lifetime of mistakes and unresolved arguments. It feels true, but you’d hate to be stuck in a lift with them.

It’s also a movie which simply keeps the camera on its stars. Francesca Annis is the only speaking female presence, briefly there as Caine’s wife, whose death seems to have jolted him out of quiet retirement into the notion of one last job. The police circling the gang in the aftermath of the heist are never seen speaking; they wordlessly pass files to each other or sit watchfully in the shadows until finally they pounce, modern, diverse and armed to the teeth. The huge back catalogue of all the old stagers lets the director cut to flashback of the crooks’ heydays, dropping in clips from older movies to suggest what they were like in their prime; to be honest, it’s a gimmick which would have worked better if it had been less flashy. When it’s used for the last time, as the lags walk off to be sentenced, it works best, slow and dignified.

Well, it’s an anti-Ealing. But more than that, it’s a metaphor for something else. The heist is planned meticulously, even though the plan doesn’t quite work. It’s striking that there’s nothing like the same amount of planning for the aftermath. It’s almost as though the gang never really thought they’d get away with it, so they didn’t need a plan for fencing off the loot or sharing it out. As soon as they’re clear, they start to fall out and squabble over the division of the spoils, with no apparent sense of the value of what they’ve stolen or who might be able to shift it for them. And I started to think that it was all just like Brexit; a gang of backward looking people planning a spectacular coup with no plan for the follow up, only to be brought down by mutual distrust and a failure to understand how the modern world works.

The Meg

I will pretty much go to watch anything with Jason Statham in it, because the Stath is somehow awesome despite ticking all the boxes to make him a terrible actor. He pretty much has one expression and one tone of voice, and he tends to show up in action movies with no redeeming qualities other than the Stath his own bad self. IN some ways he’s like a grumpier Dwayne Johnson, carrying along movies which would be absolutely irredeemable without him. 

And on paper, you’re thinking; the Stath fights a giant shark. What can go wrong? Well, let’s establish some baselines here. The Meg is not a good movie, but it’s a less annoying movie than Skyscraper, to pick an example of a movie built around the Rock which just didn’t work. The Meg had an extra 5 million in the budget over Skyscraper, but they share a certain reverence for Chinese people and a largely Chinese setting. Skyscraper has a more consistent look; The Meg has kind of OK underwater CGI, and kind of craptastic looking live action surface work, which means that every time you get out of the water you feel like you’re going back in time to the days when action movies were made with whatever actual props were handy and we didn’t know enough to wonder why everything looked like it had been salvaged by drunk people. 

Anyhow, the Stath has to stop a huge shark from eating all the everythings. This does not go incredibly well. Several speaking parts and quite a few beachgoers get gobbled up before the Meg gets its chips, though dog lovers everywhere will be delighted to see that the dog in peril survives to the closing credits. So does Ruby Rain. I can’t figure out Ruby Rain; any time I’ve seen her in anything, I’ve wanted to see more of her, but I can’t pin down why. She just has a bit of presence and movies seem to give her less to do than she might be up to. Anyhow, she gets about ten lines and nearly eaten two or three times, and I hope she gets more work soon.

People who don’t make it; I was really annoyed that neither Masi Oka nor Olafur Olafsson made it. They were playing the only characters with more than one dimension, and they’re immensely likeable actors. So I was fed up when the both got chomped. Particularly Olafsson. By the time he gets chummed up he’s had a chance to build up a real presence, and as the pieces got moved into place for his demise I was dreading it. About half the cast gets killed, but this was the only death which made me anxious. And weirdly, he’d shown up in last week’s movie; he had a four minute cameo as a tourist in a hostel who deus ex machinas one of the bad guys.

Anyhow, it’s not a great movie, but it’s not a bad bad movie. And having played it pretty straight the whole way through, it closed out on a gag; as the credits rolled, the first word to come up was “Fin”.

The Spy Who Dumped Me

The Spy Who Dumped Me had me with the trailer, because Kate McKinnon was the best thing in the Ghostbusters remake, and I was happy to show up and see what else she could do. Having recently been described as “anarchy in a can” I feel a certain kinship for people who act first, and think so differently that it really don’t matter than much when they do the thinking.

And it’s a fun movie. The front half of it in particular, which is just more and more things going wrong without any really coherent explanation. The back half of it stumbes a bit on trying to tie all the things back together into some kind of a plot, which is a mistake. More stupidity would have been both funnier and and more true to the spirit the movie was setting up.

When the movie works, it works because the leads work. Mila Kunis has become very good at portraying reasonably smart women who can’t quite get it together, and there’s something completely believable in the way that she responds to each new bit of idiocy; Mila has a great “And this now?” face. The idiocy is coming thick and fast too. On the one hand, her best friend is the kind of person who seems like a lot of fun to watch from a safe distance, and on the other hand her ex-boyfriend was a creep with dangerous friends. And yet, you can see how Kate and Mila have stuck together despite the idiocy. I could watch them bickering good-naturedly and making things worse all day. Their friendship makes sense, even when nothing else does.

Meanwhile, the who spy side of things is joltingly crunchy. Most spy spoofs either don’t have the budget for proper stunts, or think that gritty violence would sour the mood. This one definitely had the money, and they didn’t spend it on donuts. The fights are downright nasty, and the body count is as ludicrous as a mainstream movie. Don’t get too attached to comic relief characters; they tend to end their scenes with a messy headshot. Or get crunched into a grungy hostel floor before getting their thumb cut off and put in a lipstick container so that the movie can get a Chekhov’s thumb gag later on. 

Does this pass the Bechdel test? Man I don’t even know any more. On the one hand, it’s a movie with two strong female leads, directed by a woman, talking non stop; on the other hand, a lot of the time they’re talking about things which men have been doing, and there’s a sense in which it does all wind up being about which of a couple of men to trust. On the other other hand, it’s a spoof spy movie; just how much do you want from a dumb movie anyway? At least it felt like a film where women had had some chance to kick the worst bits off the script and make the dialogue sound like the kinds of things which women might say to each other.

And in a move which suggests that she’s entering the Helen Mirren phase of her career, Gillian Anderson shows up in a cameo to class things up and generally make everyone look like they're barely keeping up with whatever game she’s playing. That’s one bit that I think worked exactly the way they planned it.

Ant-Man & the Wasp; Marvel plays the long game

I’m ashamed to say that when I yacked on about the first Ant-Man movie, I completely failed to mention how much I liked Evangeline Lilly’s Hope van Dyne. She was not given remotely enough to do, but she was a fun piece of attitude in every scene she had, and she got to punch Paul Rudd in the nose, which was more satisfying than it should have been. So it’s good news that she’s got more to do in Ant-Man and the Wasp, to the point where you could argue that it ought to be called The Wasp, featuring Ant-Man.

So, there’s that, but the other big improvement over the first movie is that the stakes are personal. Everyone is just trying to do one simple thing. They’re not trying to save the world; they’re not even paying a huge amount of attention to the world. Henry Pym and Hope van Dyne are trying to save Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, Hank’s wife and Hope’s mother, from being stuck in the “quantum zone”. We will pass in silence over the sheer lunacy of the idea that you can be stuck in the sub atomic realm for thirty years and still be intact, let alone sane, and simply enjoy the fact that people in a Marvel movie are pursuing a simple, human-scaled objective which does not involve daddy-issues. They rope in Ant-Man, and then other people get pulled into the mess, and there’s lots of stunts and ridiculous physics, but they never ever lose sight of what they’re trying to achieve, and so the stunts feel like they’re happening in pursuit of the story, instead of the story having been hammered into shape around the stunts.

Which means that it’s a fun movie. It’s not as much fun as Deadpool, but it’s the only Marvel thing I’ve seen which even comes close. The physics of Ant-Man’s world are preposterous but if they keep the gags coming you can forgive a lot of it. Touchingly, they keep trying to salvage the unsalvageable. Hank and Hope have a secret lab which they can compact down to the size of a rolling suitcase. Naturally it get stolen and then chucked from hand to hand, which you’d think would have the same effect as an earthquake, but luckily they remembered to "switch on the gyroscopic stabilisers” before they shrank it! The other nice thing is that they don’t have some implacable villain; the Ghost is someone boxed into doing bad things to save herself, and Walton Goggins' slimy financier [1] is wonderfully small time and inept, while the government stooges are charmingly well-meaning and beleaguered. There’s no-one to root against, just lots of people to enjoy. Michael Pena’s motormouth character Luis is back and just anchors every scene he’s in. There’s something so lived in about his character that he retrospectively makes Paul Rudd’s Scott more believable as a person as well. Rounding out the cast and proving that eventually everyone who has ever lived will be in a Marvel movie, Michelle Pfeiffer joins Michael Douglas. Neither is really acting, but they do class the place up a bit. Michael Douglas may not be acting at all; he’s just a little too good at being a grumpy old man.

So, it’s a fun light-hearted movie and makes a nice change from the last Marvel-a-thon. Right up until it doesn’t. Spoilers, I suppose. You know the way they keep putting credits sequences into the end of Marvel movies to throw in a gag or lighten the tone? What if they kept doing that until we were used to it, and then used one to switch the tone completely in a fun movie? Ant-Man, meet Thanos. It’s brilliantly done. Took them 20 movies, but it was worth it. It has more of an impact than the big dust-off at the end of Infinity War. It comes out of the blue, and it hits people that we’ve got happy to be around. That’s how you do a shock ending. Do more of that.

 

[1] As continues to be the tradition in Hollywood, Goggins is playing someone who should have been executed 24 hours ago, this time for crimes against style.

Mission:Impossible - Fallout; "Does anyone fall for this stuff?"

When Henry Cavill looks straight at the camera after an explanation of Mission Impossible’s mask technique and asks “Does anyone fall for this stuff?” I nearly died. That’s twice in a couple of weeks that a main character has stood in for the audience as the going got downright implausible, and I just felt too lucky. Little did I know that this was also a Chekhov moment, and an hour later that question was going to seem kind of ironic.
Mission:Impossible-Fallout is nonsense, as usual, but it’s usually moving fast enough for that not to matter. It’s a film series which has become simultaneously a rebuke and a hostage to CGI superhero movies. The Mission Impossible movies do their stunts for real, and there’s a real weight to Tom Cruise falling off things which are actually there, whether he’s jumping out of an aeroplane for no particular reason or falling down a rope from a helicopter. This is objectively dangerous stuff, and Cruise’s commitment is borderline troubling; he broke his ankle in a pretty routine [1] building to building to building jump and like a trouper and/or a crazy person, he tried running it off as soon as he clambered back on to the roof. They used that shot in the trailer, and the movie. They also had to shut down the production  for two months so that it could actually heal up.
So yup; it’s as real as nonsense can be, and it really does have an impact. But making those stunts pop has brought the movies to the point where they’re just as much as a spectacle delivery machine as the CGI fakery-fests they’re wagging their finger at. Cruise trained for a bonkers length of time to do HALO jumps so that they could really do a stunt where two people are messing up a freefall parachute jump. But why get a military aircraft to impersonate an airliner so that they could do the jump, when there’s hundreds of commercial flights into Paris every day and the Impossible Mission Force can look like anyone they want to?
I’m being a little unfair. Most of the rest of the action makes more sense in context, and some of it is really exhilarating; the helicopter chase as the end is quite something, all the more so because when you see Cruise flying the helicopter, he’s flying the helicopter. He went off and learned how to do that just so that they could have real footage of him flying solo. That’s brave. Nearly as brave as deciding to have a BMW car chase in Paris when this exists. Cruise does not dethrone it.
What’s a bit of a shame about the big spectacle is that the series continues to be quite good at the small stuff. The interaction between the characters rings true, and there’s always something beguiling about Tom Cruise trying to be a decent person in moments of pressure. There’s a solid tense moment as he tries to talk his way out of having to shoot a Paris traffic cop which underlines what a good idea it is to let Cruise just be an ordinary guy, and a lot of what makes the helicopter sequence work is the way in which Cruise is convincingly out of his depth and trying to keep his own morale up.
So that’s my thought if they do another one. Tom’s my age, and it must be starting to get old togging out trying to top the stunts from the last movie. Why not dial back the stunts and try topping the acting?
[1] routine by Tom Cruise standards; insane by most people's

The Incredibles 2

I need to relax, I really do. The Incredibles 2 is a perfectly fun movie that I sat there ruining for myself because I was trying to figure out if there was anything even vaguely approaching a coherent message in the movie about the role of elites in social improvement.

This is not entirely down to my tiresome tendency to go looking for political angles in wholesome family entertainment; the first Incredibles movie was all about the tension between elitism and the needs of the community, and the sequel picks up literally where the first movie left off. So if I was wasting my time trying to figure out what the hell Brad Bird was trying to say about privilege, it’s only because I was trying to understand a conversation he had dragged me into.

A kid’s movie is probably not the place to sort these kinds of questions out. Should special people get special treatment? What do we mean anyway when we use the word special? Do you deserve to be treated differently because of something which just happened to you without you making any effort? How healthy is it for society to think that everything is all about heroes rather than the mass of people trying to make small differences that add up to an overall better world?

Brad Bird doesn’t have much by way of a thought out answer to those questions, but he’s got a lot of fun stunts with cartoons to keep you distracted while he doesn’t answer them. In a strange way, animation is perfect for superhero movies, because it costs exactly the same amount of money to animate the world exploding as it does to animate the wind blowing through someone’s hair, and so the staging isn’t driven by the need to showcase expensive CGI setpieces. It’s all technically difficult, one way or another, so we get what the story needs from moment to moment.

And yet, I’ve only got a rough outline in my mind a week later of what happens. Elastigirl gets to take much more of a lead in this movie than she did in the other, which is nice because a lot of what Elastigirl does is about thinking of flexible solutions to problems where Mr Incredible has basically got two moves; punch and block. It’s nice to see a woman getting the spotlight, but it’s even nicer to see her being allowed to think her way out of problems and demonstrate that there are other ways to be strong and effective. But I don’t really remember much of the action. It was fun while it was happening, but it hasn’t stuck in my mind.

Which is not without its own irony, since the other theme of the movie is the way in which all the victims of the villainy are enslaved by the flicker of video screens which hypnotise them into doing the bidding of the bad guys. Yup, them devil screens, distracting the genpop from what really matters. Weird medium you picked to warn us about that, Brad. I suppose not enough people are reading parchment scrolls these days.

Still, it’s fun while it lasts. The cast are a winning bunch, though I was confused the whole way through that one key character looked just like Alan Cumming and turned out to be played by Bob Odenkirk. That was someone who had to be up to no good, even before you added in the way he was some kind of tech billionaire of uncertain provenance. The one real twist in the movie was when he turned out to be the good guy. This, by the way, is the exact opposite of how these things turn out in real life.

Skyscraper: "This is stupid"

There is a moment in which The Rock has just finished covering his hands and shoes with inside out sticky tape so that he can somehow spiderman his way up the glass outside of a burning building and he looks straight at the camera and says “This is stupid.” To which the audience can only say, as one, “You think?” 

As John pointed out, in a movie full of feats of strength, The Rock’s greatest feat is somehow carrying the whole damn movie. Whenever the camera comes off The Rock, the air just goes out of the room. Clearly, it’s challenging to hire a cast with more natural charisma than Dwayne Johnson, but it takes something - and I really don’t know what - to hunt down a cast with so much less. He’s playing a guy with an artificial leg, and the leg has both more to do, and more charisma, than pretty much everyone else in the movie.

So; to plotting. Skyscraper has the world’s largest building, and it’s got to be a death trap for someone. What will we do? Towering Inferno? Die Hard? I know, why not both? Because if you try to do both, it’s going to be what actually happens in this movie, and please, let’s never do that again. An insane but somehow likeable Chinese megalomaniac billionaire has built the world’s tallest building in Hong Kong. Which was only possible because he paid a load of protection money to the Hong Kong criminal underworld. And then he tracked all the money (seriously, can I please escape from plots which involve money laundering?) back to the crimelords and their secret stashes, and this is - heaven help us - his insurance policy. 

It’s the worst insurance policy in the world, because all these crimelords sic their enforcer on him to get the information back, and he does it by the simple expedient of setting fire to the whole building to see if that sends the owner rushing to find his stash. So, your insurance policy causes your building to burn down. I’ll just let that sit there.

Why does the Rock care about what’s cooking? Well on the one hand, for reasons which beggar understanding, his one-man-in-a-garage security operation got hired to check the fire safety in the world’s most expensive structure. And on the other hand, his shifty ex-FBI friend’s simple plan to keep The Rock’s family out of the building as the plot unfolds goes straightforwardly wrong, stranding Neve Campbell and her utterly non-identical twin moppets right above the fire line (there is no apparent reason why they shouldn’t have been below it, other than to get The Rock all motivated, but eh…).

Now, you, bless you, probably think that a skyscraper called the Pearl is probably made out of ferro-concrete and glass and just possibly actual pearls. There you go with your common sense assumptions, not thinking like a screenwriter. The Pearl is in fact made entirely of Chekhov’s guns, and our introduction to the building thuds through all the features which we just know are going to be key setpieces in the adventure to come. Wind turbines to power the building; The Rock’s totally going to have to jump through those, isn’t he? Huge atrium garden full of empty spaces to fall through; folks are going to dangling over that drop in no time, aren’t they? Big hall of mirrors at the top of the building; we’re going to redo the climax of Lady from Shanghai before we’re done. I just know it. And oh, oh, I know this bit; key character is told that to fix most technical problems you just turn the device off and on again ….

Not one bit gets missed. This is a film whose biggest surprise comes in casting Noah Taylor to look like a treacherous English weasel, and making it so obvious that when he actually turns out to be a treacherous English weasel, it almost feels like a twist because the audience would have been thinking that surely the script couldn’t have been that unimaginative.

And while I know I was waxing lyrical just the other day about the simple pleasures of the 80s, this movie reactivates one facet which should have died thirty years ago; the gang of interchangeable Eurotrash gangsters. Fine if you’re Die Hard and Alan Rickman’s in charge, but not when you’re making a movie with an even mix of Chinese and US money, and you just want the bad guys not to annoy anyone who might be signing a cheque or paying for a movie ticket. Eurotrash make great villains, because they don’t have any particular ethnicity, and taken as a group, Europeans are both mature and educated enough not to take any of that crap seriously. But we are picky enough to ask for Eurotrash with some class to them. If you can’t get Alan Rickman ...

The Rock’s already made more movies this year than most people see in a cinema in a full year, and we all need to pray that this is bad as it gets. In the meantime, we have learned one useful lesson; you can’t build a whole skyscraper with just one rock.

Hotel Artemis; turns out the future is just like the past thought it would be

Jodie Foster’s last day out was Elysium, which is one of those “has it really been that long?” moments. When you see her first appearance, you think maybe it’s been even longer, since she’s aged up about 20 years so that she can play a 70 year old nurse by appointment to the mafia. She’s wonderfully convincing as a spry old lady with bad knees, because she’s Jodie Foster, so of course she is, but I found myself thinking that she’d been sitting on this property since she was in college and just got tired of waiting to be the actual age to play the main role.

Because Hotel Artemis is straight out of the 80s, in the best possible way. Mostly because it’s a simple little movie which does exactly what it came to do in a nice lean, cheap, 90 minutes and then bows out with a coy “We hope you enjoyed your stay and look forward to seeing you again.” But also because it’s got a vision of 2028 that seems straight out of my teens, when it was a given that the world would have gone to hell in a handbasket by the time I was middle-aged. Every American city would be an urban wasteland ruled by an uneasy mixture of criminal warlords and capitalist goon squads taking turns to loot the poor of all the stuff they didn’t have. It would always be dark, and raining, and people would just live off pollution and drugs. Assuming, of course, that the world didn’t go straight to the apocalypse with a full on nuclear exchange which would leave everyone living on dogfood until their faces melted off from mutations.

The apocalypse duly didn’t arrive, and for a while there, Hollywood’s predictions for the year 2028 were looking increasingly dumb. Fortunately for the credibility of 1980s scriptwriters and unfortunately for just about everything else, those visions are starting to look positively perky, and Hotel Artemis sits pretty comfortably with our darkest imaginings of what comes next.

Back in the 1980s, movies weren’t all that good, but they were - for better or worse - whatever the hell they set out to be. They didn’t need to fit into a franchise or please a four quadrant audience, or pass focus groups. You gave the crew some money, and you hoped for the best. You didn’t often get it, but there wasn’t much money on the line and it’s not like any of us had the distractions we have now; even bad movies could find an audience. 

And for a brief 90 minutes, we’re back in those days. Hotel Artemis is a movie about a bad Wednesday night in a shady hotel in the middle of a riot. It’s not really a hotel; it’s a hospital for crooks. Staff two; Jody Foster’s careworn drunken nurse, and Dave Bautista’s gruff medical orderly. Every time I see Bautista in something new, I appreciate how little movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Spectre use his abilities. The guy is not just a huge slab of muscle with a knack for hamming; he can act. At least well enough for something like this, anyhow. And he’s charming; in a movie largely populated by baddies, you’re rooting for Jodie and Dave to make it. And for Sofia Boutella to kill everything she meets. Good news on that front; she does. And it turns out that I was right to hold out for a movie where they would let her talk; she’s not half bad. Not that anyone came for that; we came to see if she could wipe out half of LA in red ball gown. No, not if, how. 

So Sterling Brown and his sidekicks show up after a bank robbery goes wrong (more thought seems to have gone into the masks than the plan) and before long everything is falling to pieces in Jody Foster’s carefully cloistered world. The Hotel Artemis has rules, and they all get broken by the time the night is done. This would have been enough to be getting on with, but at no extra charge to the audience, we get Jeff Goldblum’s fey crimelord and Zachary Quinto as his useless son and heir. For a woman who hates to multi-task, the Nurse does a pretty good job of keeping all the balls in the air, until they turn into grenades and the pins come out all at once.

And that’s all it’s there to do. Small cast, confined space, everything going wrong in the best possible way. Welcome back 80s. I’ve missed you.

Sicario 2; Soldado. Now with even less Emily Blunt

Sicario ended with Kate Macer completely shoved out of the action, so the only logical place for a sequel to start was with her entirely absent. At that point in the pre-game, someone should have been asking “Wait, what, make a sequel without the thing which made the first movie interesting? Does that seem … wise?” I assume that if anyone did ask that, they just shot him about eleventy million times and carried on with the plan.

The plan was to keep everything else about the first movie and double down on it. Breathtakingly stupid plan to foment trouble in Mexico? Check. Bunch of maniacs telling themselves that you need dirty people to do dirty work? Absolutely. Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro prowling around Mexico with way too much firepower and way too little oversight? You saw the first movie, didn’t you?

Their excuse for making south of the border even more of a mess than it already is could not be more simple. Drug cartels are into people smuggling, people who get smuggled might be terrorists, therefore drug cartels are terrorists, and it’s time to go all Afghanistan on their asses. The trigger for this thinking is three suicide bombers walking into a Walmart and somehow managing to kill only 14 people. I know that there isn’t much by way of performance review for suicide bombers, but if there were, I can imagine their managers trying to explain to them that they really hadn’t reached the exacting standards of their chosen profession. It’s still enough for the US to overreact and pick up the phone for Josh Brolin.

I’ve ranted in the past about the way in which big budget movies seem to run on the basis of working out the action setpieces ahead of time and then demanding that the writers come up with whatever it takes to string those setpieces into a narrative. Coherence is optional. Sicario 2: Soldado is like the small-budget action movie version of this problem; there’s suicide bombers, HALO parachute raids, urban assassinations and kidnappings, rolling ambushes in the middle of nowhere, and nothing which allows any of it to make any sense. “This” someone must have said “Will look great in the trailer.” Reality is this confusing and misconceived, but reality isn’t required to make sense. Perversely, when you make a movie which accurately captures the sheer wilful idiocy of the real world, it just looks stupid, not perceptive.

The puzzle is that the movie is trying to say, and perhaps more importantly what the people behind it thought that the audience was going to hear. Because Josh and Benicio are genuinely awful people, and the government nutbags who think they’re the answer to their problems are genuinely awful stupid people, but if you leave the audience to try to figure that out on their own, you’re going to wind up with a lot of people thinking that Josh and co are right, and that it’s only by being even worse than the people that you’re fighting that you can overcome the evils of the world. Eclipsing the world’s evil with your own is, I suppose, technically beating it, but it’s not exactly solving the problem you said you were worried about.

Why this feels confusing is that Sicario-the-actually-good-movie managed to get this point across, largely thanks to Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer. So it’s baffling that the same writer drops the ball so thoroughly the second time out. And the signs are that they’re planning a third movie. I’d like to say it can only be an improvement, but I think we all know how likely that is.

Ocean's Eight; you'd need an ocean to launder the money

Ocean’s Eleven is not a masterpiece; it’s one of those movies which got a good rap because it managed not to be terrible despite being a remake of a corny heist movie with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Ocean’s Eight is a worked exercise in why that happened. Heist plot? present and correct. Charming cast, working below their potential? Absolutely. Steven Soderbergh? Absent. Ooops.

What nails the point is this movie from last year, when Soderbergh went back to the heist well to tell a simple heist story properly. Robbery in the right place, uncertainty in the right place, and tension all where it should be. He made it all seem effortless, and then along comes this movie to remind us of how much real work it takes to make anything look effortless.

Part of the problem is that Ocean’s Eight isn’t really funny enough. There aren’t that many laugh out loud lines, and the only one I’ve quoted since was “This is a non-stop flight to nowhere with no peanuts.” Finding a context to make that funny took hundreds of bureaucrats crammed into an airless room talking about nothing until it was like that time in the Superman movie when he flew around in circles so fast that time started running backwards. At that moment, when death seemed almost too much to hope for, that line finally seemed funnier than what was going on around me. 

I’m being a little unfair. There’s also a great inspirational speech from Sandra Bullock’s Debbie Ocean, as she reminds the gang that they’re not doing this for themselves, or each other, or the money, but because somewhere out there, there’s a little eight year old girl who dreams of being a criminal, and they owe it to her to give her inspiration. But to balance that out, there’s James Corden, so that’s a wash, really.

Mostly, it’s just the pacing. It’s a heist movie, so the plan has to be ingenious, and apparently on the edge of going calamitously wrong until it all turns out to be part of the scheme. Instead the robbery goes off without any real problems, and the follow up scam is somehow too weightless to register. You see, they weren’t really stealing what you thought they were stealing. Psych! Except that what they turned out to be stealing supposedly belonged to some utterly scary Russian oligarchs, and there’s no way that they’re going to take that lying down. Which if course is the way in which they made a sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, and look how that turned out.

Anyhow, they get a shed load of money and live happily ever after, which is when I started going “Huh?”. Because a big part of the plot engine is that Helena Bonham Carter’s character (who inexplicably has an in-and-out Irish accent) is broke and being audited by the IRS, so she needs money. But if you’ve got the IRS all up in your business, how on earth do you get away with producing millions of dollars out of nowhere to pay off your tax debt? The IRS don’t run on my business model. I might just take the money, shrug, and say “A win’s a win, what do I care where it came from?” The IRS are going to want a bit more than that ...

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; Claire gets sensible shoes

There were many criticisms of Jurassic World, and I am delighted to report that they dealt with two of them in the sequel. Firstly, Claire finally gets to run around in sensible boots instead of high heels, and secondly, they’ve given up on theme parks. Also, they dropped the mandatory moppet count to one. This kind of thing matters in movies like this, becase by the time you’ve paid for the donuts and the CGI, there’s rarely enough money to pay for writers. If you cut the moppets down to one, you can get just enough writers into the budget to give a single moppet enough personality that you might care whether or not she’s in peril. Not that I actually did, but I almost did.

For the rest, it’s the same problem that I keep grumbling about. There are dinosaurs. They fight, and they eat things. Each other. Bad guys. Unimportant good guys. Goats. Because the Jurassic Park movies are aimed at a PG13 rating, the eating things bit tends to involve a whip pan away from anything icky. Not that I particularly want to see someone being eaten alive by a dinosaur, but it tends to suck a lot of the menace out of having dinosaurs around the place when you never see them do anything. There’s only so much you can do with sound effects. 

The Jurassic movies seem to happen in an alternate reality where Jeremy Clarkson is a strategic thinking guru. The world is dominated by various kinds of billionaires, all of whose planning for anything is Clarkson’s insouciant “What could possibly go wrong?” It ought not to come as much of a surprise that a corporation which thought a dinosaur theme park was a good idea would then put it on an island with a volcano in the middle of it. Luckily for them, the other weaknesses in the plan did for their billion dollar investment before the volcano erupted.

Luckily for the audience, the volcano eruption doesn’t take up too much of the movie; it’s just a framing device to get some of the dinosaurs off the island and into genpop. There is, sadly, still enough time for Chris Pratt to wake up next to oozing lava and have to twitch his way out of its path. Adorably, the movie reckons that as long as something at a thousand degrees doesn’t actually touch you, you won’t have anything to worry about, unlike in the real world, where being less than a foot from lava is a cue for your clothes to catch fire, and then you.

Anyhow, much of the cast escapes from the island, including lots of dinosaurs and Ted Levine’s attempt to imagine what Bob Peck’s character would have been like if he’d been raised in a Skinner box full of rats and scorpions. Ted’s Wheatley is a guilty pleasure in a movie rather short of them. The other guilty pleasure is the slippery Henry Wu, who shows up in all of these movies for a couple of minutes to be the greatest living expert on cloning dinosaurs before vanishing with bags of evidence just before the roof falls in. If the villains had any sense, they’d make Henry the boss. He’s the only sane man on their side.

Then the shadowy corporate goons set out to auction off the dinos to people even more corporate and shadowy than they are, which all goes about as well as every other villainous plan in the Jurassic universe ever has. There is running, and there is screaming, and finally, long after I’d lost interest in the fights, the dinosaurs get out into the wild to set the scene for the inevitable sequel. And in those last few minutes, Fallen Kingdom does the only interesting things it manages to pull off. Firstly, they give the moppet a Sophie’s Choice moment over whether to let the remaining dinos die in a basement, and secondly they set up a problem for the next movie which actually had me thinking, Hmm, I’d like to see how that works out. Which is vexing; the ending is rushed and perfunctory and hasn’t been set up properly by the action (because the action was too busy trying to be action, rather than advancing the plot), and it just left me thinking that if they’d got the balance and pacing right - and had fewer dinosaur fights - they could have had a damn good movie on their hands.

Maybe next time.

Solo: I wanted to see more of everyone else

There’s a telling moment near the end of Solo, when I found myself thinking that I’d like to see what happened next. But not Han Solo. We know what happens next to Han Solo, which takes a lot of the point out of watching what happened to him beforehand.

It’s tempting to say that if Solo didn’t exist, no-one would have missed it, but Firefly and books like Retribution Falls demonstrate that we kind of did want some version of the early footloose Han Solo before he got the pointless promotion to General and all the rest of the baggage. Charming scrappy scoundrels are fun. Not essential, but fun. 

Solo is a bit like that. It’s not essential, but it’s fun. But it’s not like I’ve been wondering these last 35 years just how Han managed the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs. It turns out that he managed it by accident, and kind of ineptly, and that he’s been rounding it down ever since. I was with Chewie when Han tries out the story for the first time, and Chewie made a non-commital roar which I immediately decided meant “Nobody cares.” 

And as with all prequels, the fate of the star is foreordained, so the only interest lies in guessing the fate of all the other characters. Though you don’t need a PhD in advanced guesswork to figure that out; we’re meeting people we don’t see in the later movies; none of them need to be buying any long playing records. Rogue One wrote the playbook for that one; Solo is setting out to be a bit more lighthearted, so there isn’t quite the same commitment to sweeping all the pieces off the board. But after Thandie Newton’s Val blows herself up on a bridge, the movie’s served notice that Han’s going to be Solo in more ways than one before the movie is over.

Which is a shame. We’re getting to meet people who are more fun than Han, at least in small doses, and all we’re getting is small doses. And they’re new, so we don’t know what to expect, other than the obvious. Han and Chewie are going to make it, obviously, and so is Lando, since he’s got the heavy burden of being the only black man in the galaxy far far away to carry through two more movies later on. And no matter how charming Donald Glover makes him, we’re still watching him knowing he has nothing to worry about. Which somehow makes him less interesting that L3-37, his cantankerous droid co-pilot, who was instantly my favourite character in just the same way as K2-SO was my pick from Rogue One. Phoebe Waller-Bridge knocks it out of the park for the few minutes she’s given. Instead of making a movie about Han Solo’s origin, they should have made a whole movie out of L3-37 trying to start a robot revolution and giving sass to anyone who got in her way. Sadly, they can’t, because, character in a prequel movie. Damn.

But after the scorpion conga reaches its conclusion and everyone’s betrayed everyone else the ordained number of times (and left me wishing that Alan Tudyk had been there at some point), there’s a quiet moment as we try to figure out what Q’ira’s game is, and she phones up Darth Maul - of all unlikely people - and at that moment I thought to myself, I’d really like to see where this goes next. Emilia Clarke doesn’t really set the screen on fire as Q’ira and Darth Maul appearing out of nowhere is more confusing than shocking, but somehow, in that moment I wanted more of something I’d been thinking I didn’t really need in the first place.

Deadpool 2: Hunt for the Wilderpeople redux

When you realise that Russell in Deadpool 2 is being played by the guy who played Ricky in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, it’s a short step to wondering how much better the movie might have been if Taika Waititi had directed it. Probably quite a bit better. Taika would have insisted on spending more of the budget on writers. Instead they spent all extra money on CGI, with all the usual results.

While I was waiting for the jokes, I mapped out the ways in which Deadpool 2 and Wilderpeople matched up. Overweight orphan kid with a terrible attitude? Check. Surrogate parental figure struggling with the loss of a loving partner? Check (sorry if that’s a spoiler…). There is no way that any of this is a coincidence. Which just makes it all the more puzzling that there isn’t an open call-out. This is Deadpool we’re talking about. It’s both nerdy and breathtakingly unsubtle.

Instead, it’s a crossover of Deadpool tropes and the inevitable encroachment of Marvel values, which is to say lots of CGI getting in the way of any chance of a performance. The one saving grace is that at least they haven’t caught end-of-the-world-itis. Deadpool 2 is still committed to the idea that you can get the audience invested by ending the world for one person, if you can just get them to buy the person. 

Too bad they had to fridge Vanessa to get the ball rolling. Having done that, they leaned right into it by making the whole opening credits a piss-take of the usual fanboy screams of disbelief when the writers (sorry, The Real Villains) do something horrible just to up the stakes a bit. That’s funny enough to be getting on with, but they pitch it against a series of vignettes of Deadpool clowning up classic movie posters like Flashdance.

That’s still the real strength of these movies; they’re good at mockery and one-line asides to a knowing audience. There’s a whole end credits sequence where Deadpool gets a working time machine and instead of going back in time to save Vanessa - the OBVIOUS thing to do - he just uses it to pay off various petty scores with other superheroes, including the horrible version of Deadpool that featured in The Wolverine, and Ryan Reynolds’ feeling of joy that he’s got the role of a lifetime in the script for Green Lantern. Given that the Infinity War is probably going to get resolved with a big time machine reset, I can’t help thinking that this was all about winding up the first unit.

Whenever Deadpool 2 is in that zone, it’s great fun, but much as the backstory in the first movie got in the way of the anarchy, the front story gets in the way this time round. Deadpool is not supposed to be taking things seriously, least of all himself. Weirdly, the insouciance all winds up belonging to Domino, whose superpower is supposedly that she’s very lucky, but is really that she’s utterly unflappable. She doesn’t get much screen time, but just like Valkyrie in Thor Ragnarok she steals all the scenes they give her.