65; the future is capitalism, and so is the past

 I don't have much to say about 65 as a movie; it stands on its own as proof that there are things that not even Adam Driver can save. There are dinosaurs. There are dinosaur killing asteroids. There is Adam Driver apparently using his USMC firearms training for the first time on screen. These is the numb gratitude that it's all over in 93 minutes, even if it feels like more.

No, I have come here after a year and a half of keeping my thoughts to myself about more than 65 better movies solely to bitch about the politics.

The whole point of 65 is that it's happening way in the past, but that human looking people are roaming the stars banging into our own little sky pebble long before we even existed ourselves. So that we can thrill to watching them getting nearly schwacked by dinosaurs, which is way less thrilling in practice than it must have seemed in the elevator pitch. 

But before we get to that, the scene is set in the most dispiriting way possible; Adam Driver's character is living in a society which can fly from one star to another as matter of routine, but he's forced to take on a long haul flight so that he can get the money to pay for his daughter to be cured of a treatable wasting disease. Just let that sink in; the cure exists, and the society is one which has figured out try star flight, which requires the kind of energy theory that makes money almost obsolete, yet instead of the community just saving her life, he has to do a dangerous job just to pay for it. And it's presented in those terms, he gets paid more than average so that he can directly pay for treatment.

Yup, corporate America is spelling it out for you; going bankrupt in an effort to save your life is just the way things are, in all time and on all planets. It's the way things have to be.

But just in case you miss the message that modern America is the only way a future society can ever be, as soon as Adam crashes into a completely unknown world, the first thing that he does is to find himself a machine gun so that he can shoot whatever he meets.

Science Fiction is supposed to show us that other things are possible. 

Free Guy

I went into Free Guy as I often do, thinking “Please don’t suck, please don’t suck.” For a lot of different reasons, one of them being that Ryan Reynolds is nowhere near as good at picking out movies as I’d like him to be. The Hitman’s Bodyguard? I had to watch the opening credits of Deadpool a lot of times to get over that one.

Well, the good news is that Free Guy  doesn’t suck. It’s a fun movie with a lot of heart in it. Ryan Reynolds is good at playing likeable people; it’s pretty the much the whole schtick of his public persona on Twitter, for a start. So making him the most likeable thing in the movie isn’t just pandering to his ego all Tom Cruise stylee, it’s using your materials efficiently. It’s also a brave actor that decides to go up against the one and only Jodie Comer and hope to be the most interesting thing on screen. And the writers know what they’ve got; within ten seconds of her showing up, there’s a joke about accents. Sadly, there aren’t many actual accents after that, but then if they’d let her go full Villanelle, it would have been The Millie Show with a free guy thrown in that no-one was even looking at.

And that would have scuppered the movie. A few years back Zak Penn wrote the screenplay for Ready Player One, a great looking movie that I really didn’t like, and Free Guy suggests that either RPO went wrong after it was written, or that Penn’s learned something from the experience. Of course it helps when you don’t have a set text to stick to. But all the same you can see a lot of recycled ideas; it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to me that the same writer had been involved in both things. First time the agent of change is outside the game trying to get in, second time he’s on the inside, maybe trying to get out, but in both movies the big point is massive on-line game world at the mercy of an unhinged techno-bro who just sees it as a way of making money.

The big difference is where the heart lies, because while the engine of RPO is essentially the idea that one person can win the world and change everything by starting a war, the engine of Free Guy is that one person can start a movement in which everyone comes to see that they’re free to live a fruitful life, not just fight for victories that only mean something to the people pulling your strings.

And with the cast they’ve got, we can all have fun watching it. Reynolds has always been good at casually competent guys trying to be better at something they’re not being given the space to concentrate on. (Honestly, watch Deadpool again with that in mind and look at how much of the time offing villains seems like a distraction to him rather than the point of the scene). Taiki Waititi is a famously likeable man who can nonetheless play villains whose very ridiculousness is part of their intimidation factor. Nothing’s more frightening in reality that an insecure idiot who’s stumbled into a position of power. Jodie Comer is, well, Jodie Comer, a woman who can put a spin on “Good luck with your life time supply of virginity.” that ricochets off the back of the screen while she’s walking away without looking back. 

Jodie’s the only person stretching herself in the movie, playing both sides of the virtual divide. Her game persona is pretty much Lara Croft with a breastplate and an Aussie accent (wonderfully, the avatar who calls her out on her Aussie accent is played by Ryan Reynolds' go-to butt-monkey Hugh Jackman), all sass and swagger and “ain’t no-one got time for this”. In the real world her character is softer and more beleaguered, and Comer sells both facets without breaking a sweat.

If I’ve a niggle with the thing, it’s that even though the most important role is played by a woman, it’s still a man’s movie. It’s not just that Guy is the focus of the action, and does most of the important hero stuff. It’s that even though Millie is Guy’s motivation for doing everything that he does, her role in that is essentially passive and all down to the decision of another man, her coding partner, Keys. (another stealth performance from Stranger Things’ Joe Keery’s knack for against the odds good guys). Guy comes to life because his original coding was based on Keys’ crush on Millie. I was niggling on that when we smashed our way to the rom-com ending where those crazy kids finally got it together, and while I really liked the way that Ryan Reynolds sold his bit in the reveal, I would have been just as happy without the pay-off. I’d have been happier too if they’d found a better way to nuance the idea that for Guy to getr Molotov’s attention, he’d have to “level up”. Men ought to be better, but being better is not a transaction. Something which Ryan Reynolds gets across really well in the rest of the movie, so I’m blaming the writing here.

It’s a niggle. In a movie which most of the time takes an idiotic premise and makes it work better than any video game movie I’ve ever seen. In its best moments it reminds me most of The Lego Movie: both are majoring in good natured anarchy where anything can happen and most people are doing their best. And I like its core message of rebelling against routine to be a good person instead of a bad ass. Most of the audience had probably paid for their tickets by doing stuff they didn’t much want to do that didn’t make the world any better for anyone they cared about. I don’t imagine a dumb video game movie is going to change that, but if it gets even a few people thinking...

And if it doesn’t, it’s still a fun movie with a positive message. I’ll take that. Signs are, I’ll take it again in a couple of years, since apparently they’re trying to figure out a sequel….

Riders of Justice; please don't remake this with Liam Neeson

Fun things to ponder; when they hired Mads Mikkelson to be the face of Carlsberg, did they make the calculation that hardly anyone had noticed him playing Hannibal Lecter for three years, or did they think, hell, it’s funny having a cannibal as the quirky face of our product?

Having watched Riders of Justice I now realise that I don’t understand the Danish sense of humour well enough to call it, but it seems way more likely to have been “Hannibal as our spokesmodel? Cooooool!”. There are positively Korean levels of mood whiplash going on at all times in Riders for Justice, which lurches in and out of farce, nerd-mockery, ultra-violence, the philosophy of coincidence and the weight of bereavement as if there aren’t any real differences that matter between any of them.

And somehow it works; each different thing the movie tries to do is done well enough to land, and the characters make enough sense that they can hold all the different tones together somehow. Yes the three computer geeks are walking punchlines, but they’re also somehow kind of compelling as people. Well, OK, maybe not Emmenthaler, who’s a bit too one-note. But Otto and Lennart have a kind of space integrity to their stumbling.

It’s a lot of different kinds of movie all at once. It’s a vengeance movie, it’s a found family movie, it’s a very black comedy, it’s a movie that’s thinking about how nothing really means anything and how we’ll do almost anything to avoid accepting that, including wiping out an entire biker gang.

Mostly though, if you’re in the English speaking world, it’s a movie that has you sitting there thinking “They are totally going to remake this in English with Liam Neeson.” Because it’s a nordic movie about a strong silent man with a set of special skills taking revenge on a gang of criminals who murdered his wife. Hollywood law pretty much requires a US remake with Liam Neeson playing Mads Mikkelson’s role.

And - and hear me out here - Neeson would nail that bit. Mikkelson’s really good as a father making a mess of, well, everything except being mean to Afghans. Neeson could take that bit and do it all over again his own way. The man is, even when he’s not trying, an actor. But Hollywood would screw everything else up. Otto and Lennart would become young hipster hackers. The ache in the middle of the movie would be replaced by simple anger. They’d probably hire Jack Black to play Emmenthaler. And so on. The whole delirious knotty mess of “What tone have we got now?” would go out the window. Hollywood doesn’t have it in it to run with Lennart becoming the world’s worst therapist to an orphaned teenager while Otto explains that it will be fine; after all Lennart’s had 4000 hours of therapy with 25 different therapists; there’s nothing he doesn’t know about how to talk to them.

So, with any luck at all, Riders  will stay just enough below the radar in Hollywood that it can be its own bonkers self, unsullied by a remake. In my own small way, I’m helping that obscurity by talking about it on the world’s most unread blog for post number 600 of something I never thought would get more than dozen posts before I got bored with it.

Freaky

Freaky is a perfectly effective horror spoof that left me thinking about why horror movies were so popular in the 80s. It’s not because people were really that into seeing teenagers getting horribly murdered, or even because there was some anti-sexual undercurrent in 80s life which meant that English-speaking societies wanted to send a message that anyone who had illicit sex would die horribly. I appreciate that if anyone was reading this, they’d be jumping up and down to point out all the semiotics studies which correlate teen slasher movies to the AIDS pandemic and various other moral panics. Yeah, sure, right. Might even be true, for semiotic values of true. It would, perhaps, have had something to do with why some people bought some tickets. But.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Movies get made and distributed for money. So if you want to understand why Hollywood does something, look at the margins. Slasher movies are just efficient.

Watching someone do a very expert parody of a slasher movie hammered the point home for me. Slasher movies are cheap to make. They have small casts, shot in easily controlled environments, doing essentially mundane things. At intervals, someone dies horribly. Which is a little expensive, but it’s usually very controllable and involves practical effects that have been around for years. There’s nothing that’s hard or expensive to do; no big crowd scenes, no car chases, no explosions. Just a small group of kids being whittled down by a looming bad guy who’s got enough of a drop on them that most of the kills don’t even require fight choreography. Film-making doesn’t get much cheaper than this. No wonder they made so many of them in the 80s. Anything else would have cost more.

Do not get me wrong. It wasn’t that Freaky bored me so much I got to thinking about other things like the economics of movie making. It was that watching its own efficiency and appreciating it for what it was got me thinking about how efficient the originals were.

Above all and anything else, Freaky is well scripted. I don’t mean that it’s got good dialogue, although it does have that going for it. I mean that the plotting is clever.

Here’s the basic plot-line; your stereotypical slasher movie goon unintentionally swaps bodies with one of his teen girl victims. That’s it. Teen girl stuck in the body of a killer goon, trying to figure out how to get her body and her life back, goon stuck in the body of a girl and trying to figure out how many people he can kill at homecoming weekend.

The cleverness in the plotting is that this is a comedy, more or less, so there has to be the prospect of a happy ending, more or less. For that to work, everything that happens has to be plausibly attributable to the goon so that if the teen ever gets her body back, she’s not going to be spending the rest of her life in jail anyway. Freaky pulls this off so well that you can see them doing it and enjoy the thought that went into it. The plot is put together just so; it’s got all the beats and fakeouts of the originals, tweaked just enough both for comedy and the sensibilities of a more critical era, but like all good homages, it also tells a satisfying story.

For any of this to work, two things have to happen. One is that you’ve got to spend enough time with the larger cast that when they start getting murdered it feels like it matters. Which is one of those places where slasher movies save money; there’s lots of stuff which just establishes character - or the lack of it - and which is really cheap to film

The other is that your two leads need to sell the body switch. I’d had my doubts about Vince Vaughan convincing me that he was a teenage girl trapped in a lumbering body, but he did better than I expected. Kathryn Newton actually does the real groundwork as Millie, because by the time the swap happens, we’ve got to know Millie and we’re primed for what Vince is going to do to try to imitate her. And Millie’s been so beaten down as herself that when she starts gooning it up the audience is pretty much rooting for her to kill some dudes in her cool red leather jacket. 

All in all, it’s a lot more fun than a movie ought to be where people get skewered, sawn in half the long way, flash-frozen, beaten to death with toilet seats and choked by having a champagne bottle hammered down their throats. Not all of them have that shit coming to them either. Some of the fun is Millie in the Butcher’s body enjoying the idea of having strength on her side for once in her life. Some of it is the Butcher in Millie’s body finding out how hard it is to murder people when you’re only five foot four and flimsy. As I say, a lot of the rest of it is watching the setups which mean that when the cops are trying to make sense of this, the Butcher will be more in the frame than Millie. The scripting and plotting are nimble enough that none of that seems forced. I always like good writing.

But the simple question about this, if you’re wondering if you’re going to like it, is this. You’ll know in the first five seconds, when a huge smash title comes up saying just “Wednesday, the 11th”. If that makes you burst out laughing, you’re going to have a great time. 

Glass

So, there we were at the end of Split, being told that it was a stealth continuation of Unbreakable. And thus, fast forward two years, and Glass gets the whole band back together. Second Samuel L Jackson related post of the week. Say this for M Night Shyamalan, he thinks nothing of getting back Samuel L Jackson and then giving him nothing to say until half way through the movie. Jackson’s Mr Glass is practically a prop until the third act, when he shakes off his catatonia and starts talking. Up until then the stage directions are “Drool. No, not that much."

This leaves the heavy lifting to James McAvoy, who once again brings way too much personality to the role of The Horde. In one way, it’s great and creepy, and in another way, it’s just … off. Bruce Willis continues his late career streak of somehow not quite phoning his performance in, because actually picking up the phone would be more work than he’s feeling ready for.

And I’m not being quite fair. Shyamalan has two problems. The first is that he started so audaciously strong that he gets judged by the good stuff. The second is that he keeps trying to pull that off again, which isn’t possible. So he’s getting in his own way. Including by thinking that there’s any point in him doing cameos in his own movies. When Hitchcock did it, it was fleeting; a nod to the fans. He didn’t give himself lines and a backstory.

Shyamalan’s got a second wind since he started tanking in big budget movies. Small budgets work better for him; he’s got less pressure and expectation, and low budgets mean you have to be clever with the script and the actors. You have to suggest things which big money productions just show people, and suggestion is always a better way to pull the audience in. Glass is on the pricier end of his low budget renaissance, but it’s still on a shoestring, which works out for him. It’s fun that he keeps threatening a big finish with buildings and gen-pop in hella peril from a superhero showdown, and then stages the climax in a hospital car park with the property damage limited to dents in a police car and a van. It’s somehow even more fun that this was the plan all along.

Still, he’s still pushing away at the twists, heaven help him. Sarah Pauley is the one person in the movie with a regular job, and she seems to be objectively terrible at it. She’s the shrink who’s got just three days to talk The Horde, Mr Glass and whatever David Dunn calls himself this week into not believing that they’re superheroes. This does not go well. It goes so not well that if they had prizes for worst prison psychiatrist ever, her face would be on the statuettes. How the hell did she even get the job? Ah, well, there’s a twist there. She was not, in turns out, trying to do the job well in the first place. Good twist. Then there’s the twist on the twist, and I was going, ah now, give me a break.

Mileage may vary on this. In a way, watching Mr Glass win in the end is quite fulfilling. It’s a jump too far for me, but it might work for other people. The one thing I do hope is that the real twist is that this isn’t Shyamalan setting up a whole bunch of new movies. Whether you like what he’s done with this 20 years-in-the-making trilogy or not, he’s pushing his luck if he doesn’t quit while he’s ahead.

The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight is a very honest piece of work, in that it advertises its intentions right at the start. The opening credits take forever, and do nothing to advance the plot. I wonder why this is two hours and 48 minutes long, I thought as it started. Because it’s not afraid to indulge itself in boring your arse all the way off your body. The smart move at this point, before anyone says a word and six or seven minutes of snow have filled the screen, is to look over at the person who suggested giving it a shot and say “How about The Villainess instead?” I did not make the smart move. I never do.

The thing about Tarantino is that no matter how much his movies go wrong in general, there’s usually at least one scene that’s worth looking at again. Take Inglourious Basterds, which is kind of a hot mess, but still has two electric scenes with Christoph Waltz to balance out all the Basterd related nuttery. With The Hateful Eight, Tarantino had finally got enough creative control to do whatever the hell he wanted, so he made a widescreen movie where all the key scenes play in a confined space, and all the key players make you wish they’d died before the cameras started rolling. 

There’s no law that says that the characters in a movie have to be likeable. But if they’re not, they’d better be funny, breathtakingly charismatic, or have at least one facet which will make you care if they live or die. In one way. Tarantino gets this, because the characters who last the longest are played by the two most effortlessly charismatic actors in the cast, Samuel L Jackson and Walton Goggins. It’s a pity that they’re not funny or any kind of fun. Without those actors, they’d be just about unbearable. Even with them, I was thinking of one of my favourite ever Walton Goggins lines, from Predators, where he glibly announces that he was supposed to have been executed two days ago. This is another movie where that would have worked out fine.

The thing which really baffles me is that Tarantino went so nuts about widescreen. It’s one of a handful of movies shot in the last thirty or forty years in 65mm for projection from 70mm stock, and for the life of me, I can’t see anything in the movie which needed that kind of shooting quality. Tarantino was so determined about this that he forced a load of US cinemas to install 70mm projectors so that people would see the film as he’d imagined it. Peter goddam Jackson didn’t do that. Michael Mann might have released a few prints of Last of the Mohicans on 70mm, but that was shot on 35mm, and Last of the Mohicans is a genuinely gorgeous movie that made want a widescreen TV so that I could watch it on DVD properly. When I was watching The Hateful Eight on Netflix, there was no point where I thought to myself “I wish I’d seen this in a cinema so that I could really see this properly.” There’s nothing going on at any time which needs that level of splendour.

And I can’t help wondering. If Tarantino hadn’t been trying to make a good looking movie, would he have made something I actually wanted to watch?

The Favourite

This thing is going to get a lot of awards, because it’s a costume drama, and it’s weird, and it has knock-out performances from Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, but I sat through the whole thing trying to figure out how accurate it was.

Which is missing the point. This is a movie which has a bit in the middle where Tories are pelting a naked man with pomegranates. No explanation is ever offered for this; it’s just something which is happening, and Emma Stone runs around the edge of it, and that’s it. Weird stuff happened in the court of Queen Anne. Maybe they didn’t have TV or Facebook and it was just a matter of passing the time. Or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos is just nuts. That would fit with what I know about his prior art.

Anyhow, sweating the details of whether the Marlborough campaigns were planned and supported that way, or whether the British Prime Minister really was inseparable from his racing duck, is kind of missing the point. The Favourite is a movie about people being selfish and beastly to each other and how little good it does in the end. As I type this I find myself thinking that Yorgos Lanthimos could have done an interesting job of The Death of Stalin. The movie works because the characters pull you in. Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne is pathetic and yet subtly monstrous. Rachel Weisz’ Sarah Churchill is ruthless but somehow the only sane person in the palace, and Emma Stone’s Abigail is whatever she needs to be in the moment if that’s what will get her long term security and a place in society.

They’re all great; not great people, but great characters, and somehow more lively and compelling than the fops which otherwise populate the Court and make the decisions which wind up in the history books. As you watch the cabinet wheel and deal, it’s hard to resist the feeling that Sarah Churchill’s doing the only right thing by browbeating and manipulating them. It’s another one of those movies which reminds you that most decisions in history were made by people who were either drunk or hungover, because until recently, booze was safer to drink than water and no-one had invented aspirin.

Just don’t read the real story, because it will leave you a bit annoyed that the script simplified and telescoped a long game in which the players were even more closely related to each other than the movie suggests. 

Bohemian Rhapsody: The Band was already together

There’s a whole lot of might-have-been in Bohemian Rhapsody. What would it have been like if they’d gone with plan A, and Sacha Baron Cohen had played Freddie Mercury? What would it have been like if Bryan Singer hadn’t been chucked off the set before it was all in the can? What would it have been like if Brian May and Roger Taylor had been told they could take their chances with history - but that’s just another version of what if they’d stuck with Sacha Baron Cohen.
We got what we got, and it says something about the movie that the two characters I was rooting for were Jim “Miami” Beach and John Deacon, as Queen’s lawyer and bass player respectively. They were not very rock and roll, and their quiet determination to look after their friends and get the job done struck a chord with me. There’s moment - blink and you’ll miss it - at the Wembley set where Joe Mazzello is standing there waiting for everything else to start. He’s stoically resting both arms along the top of his bass, and there’s something in that stance which recalls generations of soldiers leaning on their weapons, just daring the horde out there to come and get it. I liked Mazzello’s version of John Deacon.

Of course, these are not the big deal. The big deal is Rami Malek doing Freddie Mercury, and the recreation of the Live Aid set.

First off, thanks to Mr Robot, I’ll take a shot at anything which Rami Malek tries; he’s just an interesting actor with an awful lot of presence. And his Freddie is unsurprisingly good, especially when you consider he had to do every scene with a set of comedy teeth to get his overbite to match Freddie. I realised I’ve never heard Freddie Mercury do anything but sing, so I couldn’t just whether that ripe upper class drawl was spot on, but it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t given the trouble Malek went to to get everything else right.

And the Live Aid remake is very very good. It’s not seamless, but it works, and it catches a mood. It’s the best thing in the movie, and it ruins everything else.

It doesn’t ruin everything else by comparison; it’s not that it makes everything else look terrible. It’s that the movie needs the Live Aid set to be a catharsis for the band, a moment of reunion. It needs to be Freddie getting the band back together, in one last ditch squeeze into the Live Aid line-up which will make them give everything they’ve got. Except that it really wasn’t. Pretty much like he did with every other headliner, Bob Geldof bounced Queen into the show by announcing that they’d agreed before he’d even asked them; he dared half the pop stars in the world to call him a liar and themselves a bunch of goons who didn’t care about famine, and no-one called his bluff.

And Queen weren’t broken up at this point; they were still touring and working together, though at a much slower tempo than they had been. They weren’t getting on any worse than they had been, and Live Aid was just another job of work, even if was one they knocked out of the park. In a way, that’s a much more interesting story to tell, but it doesn’t hit Hollywood story beats, so the script just makes stuff up.

There’s been any amount of blowback about the way that the movie handles Freddie’s sexuality, and I’m way underqualified to pick that apart. The one thing I will say is that I find it pretty hard to believe that Freddie Mercury didn’t have a lot more fun than the movie lets us see. It’s fun to be rich and do what you want. You can go on all you like about how empty fame can be, and what it feels like when the party’s over, but while it’s happening, it’s fun. It’s almost like they decided that showing Freddie having one wouldn’t be tragic enough, or might have been too pro-drugs or pro-something else. I dunno. But talk about making decadence look dreary ...


Finally, for the pointless cameo spotters, check out Mike Myers putting in a couple of minutes as composite clueless record producer refusing to greenlight Bohemian Rhapsody as a single because it’s not the kind of song kids will bang their heads to in their cars. If you’re going to do that, the least you can do is have him do this face straight to camera:

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.