Transporter Refuelled; Soon to be a franchise about his dad

In news which will shock literally nobody, the dumbest thing about making another Transporter movie without Jason Statham is leaving Jason Statham out of it. There’s a nonchalance to Statham beating the snot out of people which makes assault and battery weightless and entertaining, and Ed Skrein doesn’t have that. Tragically, he’s an actor, in a role which needs a star. It’s easy to see where the thinking went wrong. Skrein is an actor who can do quiet, so it must have looked like he could step up to Statham’s particular brand of taciturn. And then you watch him explain Frank Martin’s three rules of transportation. Statham makes the three rules seem like the simple way to stay on his right side; Skrein makes it sound like he’s traumatised to the point where he wrote to the rules to keep the world at a distance.

Luckily, Titus Pullo is there to save the day while stealing all the scenes. Ray Stevenson continues to be the coolest thing in whatever movie he shows up in. No wonder Frank junior seems so demoralised; it can’t have been easy knowing you could never be as cool as your dad. He’s still cooler than the title character of the whole movie despite being taken hostage twice in the course of a short movie.

Transporter Refuelled shares a weird feature with Hitman Agent 47, another underperforming movie about murdering people; the good guys drive Audis and the bad guys drive Mercedes G-wagens. I don’t know if Audi insist that the bad guys use Mercedes, or if G-wagens have just become a cultural shorthand for evil in the same way Saabs became a Hollywood shortcut for suggesting the kind of intellectual the audience could have a beer with, but suddenly the G-wagen is everywhere I look.

Car choices aside, Transporter movies live and die on, well, transport. How much fun is the driving? Not enough fun. I always know the car chases aren’t working when I have time to wince at the potential body count for the innocent bystanders. One of the best stunts is in the trailer, with Frank spinning his Audi to knock the valves off four fire hydrants to create a skid pan for the people coming after him. In the movie, it’s over in seconds, and then we get to watch the poor schmuck French police break their necks as they come off the motorbikes, which seemed to take much longer than the cool bit. That’s just mounting it wrong; a proper car chase - especially in a dumb movie like this - should be a joyous, bloodless thing where people get A-teamed off the road without a real scratch. Or it should be so gut wrenchingly tense that you don’t have time to pick up on the body count. This being a Luc Besson movie … 

Thanks to the decision to hire actors, the movie is ironically at its best when people are just talking to each other, though Luc Besson’s plot-on-a-beermat skills don’t leave them with the kind of dialogue which threatens to dethrone Shakespeare. Nor is this one of the Besson movies which can bolster the occasional arguments that he’s a guy for strong female roles; even though the only people in the movie who know what they’re doing are the female anti-heroes, their lingerie’s got more substance to it than their characterisation. Their interchangeable bimbo-osity is hammered home with the recurring schtick of them confusing the real bad guys by showing up in matching dresses and blonde wigs for all their heists, and for all the effort to show them as manipulating and out-thinking all the various male bad guys and good guys, they wind up being hopelessly reliant on Frank Senior and Frank Junior to make any of their plans actually work.

The game plan seems to be to restart the Transporter franchise without the increasingly expensive Statham, but if they’ve got any sense they’ll start a new one about Frank Senior instead.

American Ultra; probably not going to be a franchise

Lets see; Jesse Eisenberg plays an action hero and Kristen Stewart plays someone with more than one expression. That’s enough internet stereotypes being bucked to reboot half teh interwebs, even if nothing else happens. Jesse Eisenberg is a terrible action hero, which is kind of the point of casting him, I think, and this is the first time I’ve seen Kristen Stewart playing an adult role, so I don’t know if she’s levelled up for this movie or has always been perfectly fine and was just getting a lot of grief from people who hate Twilight and needed a face to focus on.

Coming hard on the heels of Hitman: Agent 47 American Ultra could only look good. I’d liked the look of the trailer; it looked like a movie where the super-agent was someone you could actually root for. And so it came to pass. Jesse Eisenberg with long stringy hair is a lot less creepy than Jesse with a haircut (he gets a haircut, so you don’t need to take my word for it or check his earlier movies). He’s marginally less believable as a super spy with his hair short, but that’s less about him, and more about the way we’ve been housetrained to think that superspies will have chins and muscles. With the hair long, he’s completely convincing as a dead end stoner, and he sells the idea of being a stoner who has completely forgotten being the kind of person who kill someone with a spoon. Or with pretty much anything else.

Which brings me to the killing. There’s a lot of it, and it’s not quite played for laughs, and it actually works. On the one hand, by the time anyone gets hurt, you’ve got to know the characters a bit and it means something real when bad things happen around them. On the other hand, the staging is crisp and clever. The action is fast and genuinely surprising, and things which ought to hurt have consequences which feel credible. It’s still people being horribly killed for our entertainment, but it’s given both weight and novelty rather than the empty flourishes you get in most of the movies.

For a pretty good worked example, you could put the big fight at the end of the movie up against the big fight at the end of The Equalizer. Both feature highly trained retired superspies killing hordes of armed goons using the contents of a supermarket, but where The Equalizer showed us weary sadism, American Ultra is running on sheer desperation. Mike is there to save his girl and painfully aware that he’s outnumbered and outgunned. It makes all the difference to how the killing plays out.

Also in the movie, and criminally underused, the ever dependable Walton Goggins, who spends most of his screen time playing the kind of interchangeable psycho anyone could play before getting two perfectly judged minutes right at the end, which is really too late. They don’t save the performance so much as make you wonder why the rest of it was ever allowed to happen. Still, since he disappears between one scene and the next, it’s possible that his character makes it out of the whole movie, and he’ll get a chance to show us what he can really do in the sequel which we are totally not going to get.

Hitman: Agent 47; Maybe the other 46 were better

There was a time when Hollywood adapted great works of literature, but now they’re adapting comic books, kid-lit, computer games, boardgames and even text message icons. Hitman: Agent 47 was lucky enough to open in the same season as Pixels (capsule review; the inventor of Pac-Man screaming at the end of the trailer “Someone annihilate this stupid thing!”), but that’s about all it has going for it. Hitman is either an adaptation of a computer game or an attempt to reboot a movie from 2007 which fell flat on its face. Or it’s both, which is pretty much as bad as it sounds.

The 2007 version featured, on the one hand Timothy Olyphant (in between being Seth Bullock and Raylan Givens), and on the other hand Olga Kurylenko (during her “costumes are for frumps” phase). Olyphant had a bad year between that movie and Die Hard 4, and seems to have decided being the deadliest sheriff on TV had worked once, and would do for the next while. I honestly can’t tell you anything else about that movie, other than that there’s a scene where they try to demonstrate how inhuman Agent 47 is by having him completely ignore Olga Kurylenko lying naked on a bed, and just succeed in making everyone involved with the scene look stupid.

Anyhow, even though 2007 should have taught them that if Raylan Goddam Givens couldn’t make it work, nothing could, someone blew the dust off the script and hired Rupert Friend and Hannah Ware to do it all over the hell again. I am convinced that they cast those two actors on that basis that their names made good jokes, and that the performances were pure good luck. Rupert Friend, playing the deadly assassin who turns out to be a friend, does his best with a role which probably only Keanu Reeves could have saved. And Hannah Ware, playing a character who is literally unaware of her destiny, adds at least one dimension to a character who was probably written with less than one. Slumming around the edges; Ciaran Hind, gamely pretending that he cares enough to try to sound like a Ukrainian refugee with lung cancer; Thomas Kretschmann, underplaying the big boss so hard that he disappears into the carpet. Which turns out to be the most dangerous place to be, given that Zachary Quinto spends the back half of the movie chewing any carpet he can find. Also present; a zillion expendable mooks for the name characters to slaughter. Half of them literally are faceless, showing up in armour which always includes gas masks and visors; the other half are only more marginally distinguishable than the identical light grey suits they all wear. Collectively they perform like Imperial Stormtroopers suffering from jet lag.

Other than that, it’s the Matrix crossed with the Terminator; there’s a saviour for humanity who’s being chased by hordes of interchangeable agents and has just one special agent trying to save her. The most novel thing about the whole movie is that at one point they crash a helicopter into an office block and it doesn’t explode. Normal Hollywood standards are resumed a few minutes later when Ciaran Hind blows up an even bigger helicopter with an improvised bomb the size of an asthma inhaler. Consistency is for wimps.

This is the kind of thing where you know it will be stupid going in, and you’re just hoping that it will be imaginative and bold enough to distract you from how stupid it’s being. Instead I got something which allowed me all the time I needed to ponder the rampant insanity of a whole pack of hitmen who always wear black suits, white shirts and red ties and have shaved heads with a bar code on the back. And who all look identical. They’re like a security agency’s wet dream; an enemy which you can programme all your computers to spot on sight.

I mentioned Keanu a moment ago; John Wick was the perfect example of what Hitman  doesn’t get right. Implacable, emotionless killer wiping out hordes of mooks in what you can almost call a violent ballet. The big shootouts in John Wick just work; the shootouts in Hitman feel like they’re demonstrating the efficiency of the rag doll physics in the game engine; oh look, another guy just got shot and fell over a railing into another railing and then into a jet engine, flopping realistically the whole way. Look at the frame rate! Look at the way the blood gushes out when that guy falls into the completely inexplicable meat grinder in the middle of the jet engine factory!

The worst part of the whole experience was the guys about eight seats down from me on the same row, who greeted every splat-tastic death with the delighted chuckle of a toddler who’d been given another scoop of ice-cream. If we actually had the kind of surveillance technology which movies take for granted, it would be a good idea to point it at the audience of movies like Hitman and mark all the gigglers for special handling.

Inside Out

It's hard to think of something to say about a good movie. there have been weeks when this blog has been silent not so much out of respect for great work, but because the only good stories are those of disaster and setback, and Hollywood has for once left me nothing to build on. Pixar are swines that way, endlessly producing movies too good for the likes of me. Inside Out is more of the same.

While it’s unlikely that Pixar are ever going to beat the wordless gut punch of Up's opening five minutes, Inside Out is arguably a better movie overall. Like all the best work the studio has produced, it's really a meditation on loss and how to deal with it, carefully wrapped up in a goofy animation full of jokes. Pretty much the only quibble you could possibly have with the movie is that five emotions isn't anything like enough for the inside of the average grown-up head.

I read somewhere that at one point the script had 26 emotions, and then the law of narrative simplicity cut in, and started slashing right and left until they had something which anaudience could keep track of. They were probably right. No matter that the logic of the initial set up should have given us a positive crowdscene in Reilly's parents' heads, the movie would have been impossible to follow if they'd gone with that. So Reilly starts off with just one emotion, Joy, and develops four more later, and her parents, after twenty more years of life have still only got five; yeah, sure it'snot logical, but we've got a story to tell here. And the contrastsbetween the different versions of Joy, Sadness and Anger in all three heads would have been lost if there'd been a whole crowd of other adult emotions clamouring for space.

The big story works. And as always with Pixar, the incidental details are golden. Sure, the five emotions are in charge up in the controlroom, but all the grunts down in the basement moving things around have just as much life and character as the major players. There isn’t a wasted moment; every second on screen earns its place with a joke or a moment of insight - or more likely, a joke which doubles as a moment of insight.

And in an inspired bit of "always leave them asking for more" the movie ends with a pan around the inside of the heads of a load of the side characters, all with their own takes on the five emotions we've got to know (my favourite being a bus driver, all five of whose emotions are just different coloured versions of Anger). I’ve no idea what a sequel could even be about, but I wanted one right there.

Trainwreck; not the sequel to Unstoppable

Just as with Bridesmaids, there's an impulse to see Trainwreck as a game changer; oh, look, it's a movie with a woman at the centre, written by a woman, which messes with the traditional view of women in a romantic comedy. I am here to tell you not to give in to the impulse.

Trainwreck is great fun and a genuinely good comedy and it might even change men’s minds about things, but this is a man's movie. Specifically, it's Judd Apatow's movie. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I quite like Apatow's crusade to depict men as befuddled but nonetheless capable of emotional intelligence. Just because it's not true to the lives most of us experience doesn't mean it's not a good aspiration to put out there. As goals for men go, being sweet and trying to understand the world around you is a much better unrealistic role model than being a wisecracking murder machine.

It's just impossible to resist pointing out the obvious; that a woman has written a movie which is a comic exaggeration of aspects of her own life and it still fails the Bechdel Test. Yes, there's more than one named woman character, and yes, two or more woman characters have a conversation. Many conversations. And they're all about men, either men in particular (which Johnny Depp is the most bangable, or what’s wrong with their father or husband or boyfriend) or men in general (pretty much every conversation around the worktable at Amy's job).

And I don't know what to tell you to think about this; much like the real life it's trying to comment on, it's one of those things which is there, and you've got to decide for yourself whether this is just the way things are, or whether it's an outrage against human decency which cannot stand. I suspect that the whole joke of the movie is that Amy is acting just like a stereotypical man, and all the men are acting like stereotypical women, but that overall joke doesn't land properly because men acting like women, it turns out, is touching rather than ridiculous while Amy acting like a man plays like an extended slut-shaming than a critique of the male outlook. I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve, and so I can't even figure out what they've actually done in gender political terms. Hey; I'm a guy. We don't really get subtext.

It's still a good comedy. Amy Schumer can't really act (when someone is routinely out-acted by Lebron James it's not unfair to decide that acting is not their dominant hand), but it's her script so she's safe most of the time in the hands of dialogue which fits her comic persona. Tilda Swinton delivers either her second or third most terrifying performance (depending on whether you think that she's as scary in Michael Clayton as she was in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe), and Judd Apatow has strong form in getting sympathetic performances out of the most unlikely male casts so everyone over on the male side does a solid job. There's a moment near the end when Bill Hader is trying to explain how arguments are supposed to work which ought to become a permanent part of pre-marriage courses; he almost makes arguments sound like fun, he's so sincere in his belief that they're an opportunity, not something to be avoided.

Above all, it's funny. They had so much good material that the trailer is made out of the jokes they didn't use in the movie.

The Man from UNCLE; the origin story we didn't ask for

The Man from UNCLE is a perfectly OK movie. But.

On the one hand, enough with the origin stories. If Mission Impossible didn’t need an origin story (except in the general sense that apparently Tom Cruise didn’t want to be “Jim Phelps” and so he had to have a personal origin story as “Ethan Hunt”), then neither does any big screen attempt to reboot any other TV show. It’s a TV show. Anyone overcome with curiosity about its background can look it up on the internet. You can probably torrent the whole of the original show in less time than it takes to watch the new movie. Not that I’m saying you should, or anything.

On the other, much more important, hand, what on earth has Guy Ritchie done to Ilya Kuryakin? It’s as though they’d cast Arnie as Mr Spock and told him to dial up the brute factor as far as it could go. It’s nice to see Armie Hammer getting any work after the crater that Lone Ranger made, and my hat’s off to him for making his character sympathetic despite the writing, but if you’re going to revive a TV show character defined by his dry intellect … 

I can only conclude that Ritchie decided that Napoleon Solo was going to be the urbane witty one, so contrast required that Kuryakin be a beast from the planet Mongo. Because audiences are that stupid. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that we might perhaps have managed to tell the difference between glib and deep. 

In simpler terms; if you’re nostalgic about the TV show, don’t go to this movie, which will just annoy you. If you just want to pass a couple of hours having fun at the movies, it’s surprisingly OK. The opening escape from East Berlin is very well done. It’s not just that all the technology is properly retro, but that it’s used intelligently by the characters. It’s always fun to see smart people getting things right, and with good direction and pacing, a clever plan can be every bit as exciting as the farrago of things going wrong which usually passes for action these days. There are other nice touches, like having Kuryakin’s doomed speedboat escape attempt in the middle of the movie happen mostly off-screen while Solo helps himself to someone else’s packed lunch. A pity they didn’t apply the same kind of thinking to the climactic car chase, which is a lot less thrilling than the speedboat chase probably would have been and would have benefited greatly from happening off-screen while we did something else.

For the rest, it’s a fun. How much fun will depend on your tolerance for Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer trying to one-up each other with outdated spy tech, which is funnier than it ought to be, but not as funny as Ritchie thought it would be. The whole thing ends with their show reel for the sequel we’re probably never going to get, which is bad news for Hugh Grant’s hopes for a happy retirement and good news for Alicia Vikander fans who will now see her lots of different good movies instead of once very two years in blockbusters.

Mission:Impossible - Rogue Nation; coming soon to a Ryanair near you

RYANAIR announces new premium “Tom Cruise Seating” on selected flights to European destinations.

I am indebted to Scott Meyer for the insight that the Mission Impossible movies should really be called “Tom Cruise: The Dangler”; I had thought that Tom’s schtick was a mixture of running and grinning, but now I see he’s got a sideline in hanging off stuff. Also, as Scott points out, they might as well not be called Mission Impossible in the first place because every damn time the Impossible Mission Force is being disbanded rather than getting missions. These are smarter points than anything I’d managed to come up with; they’re probably smarter than most of the things in the actual movie.

I made the mistake of bringing a little too much movie awareness to Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, [1] so that when I noticed that half the production companies involved were Chinese, I sat through the rest of the movie waiting for a big ticket action sequence set in China. Don’t make the same mistake. As Chinese as it gets is a performance of Turandot half way through the set up, which looks as though the Vienna Statsoper did their stage design by way of a series of pre-dawn raids on Chinese restaurants somewhere in the 19th district. So, no China doesn’t have anything to do with the action, though people who are missing William Randolph Hearst can ponder the thought that a movie about a threat to the American way had to be bankrolled by China. The rest of us can just laugh at the idea that the villains of the piece are “an anti-IMF”, which is going to complicate the marketing in all kinds of German colonies.

It’s important not to expect Mission Impossible movies to make any kind of sense, because that kind of thing would just distract you from the stunts. So, don’t even think about the fact that the McGuffin this time around is the world’s biggest Amex card despite the fact that the Syndicate shows no signs of needing any money to maintain a positively ludicrous level of operational readiness. After all, we’ve all seen how apparently rich people turn out to be completely broke as soon as anyone is crass enough to ask them to pay their bills. The Syndicate probably has the same problems. Though it’s certainly not looking at any kind of pension fund shortfall; like every other bunch of super villains in Hollywood history, the Syndicate’s human resources strategy is long on suicide missions and short on employee retention, and like every other Dr Evil ever, the head villain is one of those clowns who shoots otherwise perfectly useful staff to make a point to the ones he can’t trust. No wonder evil always loses; this is no way to attract and retain the kind of talent a world class world domination plan requires.

Tom gets his dangling out of the way early, hanging off the outside of an Airbus, in a move which no doubt has Michael O’Leary wondering whether he can charge extra to do the same thing for some lucky passengers next year. It’s a pretty cool stunt, even if you don’t know that it was done for realsies. It works partly because it’s a scary looking stunt in the middle of a great piece of workplace comedy as everyone else in the Impossible Mission team argues about how to stop the plane from taking off with all the nerve gas on board. Which is pretty much the template for the Mission Impossible movies these days; everyone who isn’t Tom Cruise bickers entertainingly while Tom Cruise does something physically dangerous that somehow solves the problem everyone else is arguing about. Sadly, that opening stunt sets the bar too high for the rest of the movie, so that the climax feels like a damp squib even though it’s actually a pure Mission Impossible TV show ending, trapping in the chief villain in a glass box by outwitting him rather than by dropping half London on his head the way a Marvel movie would.

Single saddest performance in the movie; Jeremy Renner’s perma-wrinkled forehead seems to be less a matter of acting and more a matter of wondering how the hell he keeps being the fifth wheel in franchise movies. Joint second place goes to everyone in the Syndicate for having a job that consists of being on screen for just long enough to get killed by Tom Cruise. Prize for stealing all of Jeremy Renner’s karma goes to Simon Pegg, who is enjoying the most improbable career ever playing roles which ought to have serious actors in them (like, I dunno, Jeremy Renner) but instead have a nerdy comedian. Knocking it out of the park, I have to admit, but it’s still weird. 

[1] They nearly pulled off a punctuation mark between every pair of words...