Philip Kerr: Prague Fatale

I've complained in the past about the way that the second coming of Bernie Gunther jumps around too much in time, and that the links between his post war life on the run and his pre-war experiences strain the limits of credible coincidence. I'm confident that, like most of my subjects, Kerr doesn't scrutinise my every word with the care and attention of a man reading the IKEA instructions for defusing a nuclear bomb chained to his own right ankle, but obviously someone had a word with him about the time structures, and Prague Fatale displays a comforting respect for the Aristotelian unities of time and place. Coincidence continues to be a serious problem. But that's not the weirdest thing about the book.

In many ways the most interesting thing Reinhard Heydrich ever did was to get himself assassinated just when he was poised to become - perhaps - a heck of a big deal in the Third Reich. Based on what he'd done to get himself to the position of Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich may have been one of the few people who could possibly have made World War Two even worse than it turned out to be; this was the man Hitler called "the man with the iron heart". Everything you need to know about what might have come next is summed up in the warm and cosy decision to name the first phase of the Final Solution Operation Reinhard in his honour, what with him having chaired the Wannsee Conference and everything (the second most interesting thing he did, I suppose). His assassination is one of the great nazi-centric what-ifs of the war, along with the musing over what might have happened if Hess had had any kind of plan when he jumped out of that plane into England. 

Characteristically, Kerr goes right ahead and treats the assassination of Heydrich as an epilog. It's always been a big part of the Guntherian schtick that he's the Zelig on the edges of the small things which happened in nazi era., and you almost have to admire Kerr for passing up the opportunity to Zelig Operation Anthropoid. Instead of putting the focus on the single most dramatic event of Heydrich's life, Kerr opts to give Bernie a locked room mystery to solve in Heydrich's commandeered residence, six months before the assassination. He packs the house with Heydrich's associates and then has one of his adjutants fetch up dead in a locked bedroom, apparently shot but with no gun in the room. Gunther spends the remainder of the book blustering at various unedifying nazis as he tries to figure out who might have done and it and why. It's like horrible nazi-fied version of every Poirot book ever, a parallel hammered home with sledgehammer subtlety when Heydrich announces himself to be a fan of Agatha Christie.

Mind you, none of this happens until the reader is well into the book; the first third or so are devoted to Bernie's investigation of an apparently random murder of a railway worker and his growing infatuation with a night club hostess; readers of any other Gunther book will not need to reach for the smelling salts when it becomes clear that all of these things feed back into the plot of the main event, even though there's really no way in which they should. While the main event turns out to have been a well-considered manipulation of Gunther's well known dogged insubordination for higher ends, that just makes it even more ridiculous that the other baggage would have tied into it. 

I'm now wonderfully behind on the whole Gunther thing, since A Man Without Breath has been out for ages and I haven't chased it down. I got Prague Fatale because it was in a pile of discounted books in Chapters, and I suspect that I will do the same for the next one; they're not bad books, they're just not essential reading.

David Wong: This Book is Full of Spiders

This Book is Full of Spiders is a sequel to David Wong's first published novel John Dies at the End, but does neither of the obvious things which happen in a sequel; it doesn't just copy the schtick from the first book and it doesn't ramp it way past bearable. Given that John Dies at the End was borderline incoherent in its commitment to being out of its tiny mind, this was a good thing. John Dies at the End was originally published a little at a time on the web, and between the way that it reacted to the audience reaction and the fact that Wong's main writing gig was the Cracked website, which rates non sequiturs and dick jokes higher than narrative coherence, it's the novel equivalent of the driver strapping you into the passenger seat, flooring all the pedals at once and then wrenching the steering wheel off the column and frisbee-ing it out the window. Amping that up to 11 wouldn't have been good for anyone.

Of course, John Dies at the End is not a bad novel, or I wouldn't have bought the sequel with my own money. I like Wong's comic style, and in some of his longer pieces on Cracked, he comes across as the kind of person I'd enjoy having a beer with; his sense of what a person ought to do seems close to my own hard-earned belief that if you haven't made the world a little better for someone at the end of each day, you shouldn't have come to the party in the first place. And dick jokes, because as Col Stars and Stripes would say, if you can't have fun, what's the point?

John Dies at the End is so difficult to describe I'm not even going to try; it's best to imagine that Tristram Shandy has been invaded by The Naked Lunch and narrated by Bill Hicks; that doesn't really tell you what happens, but you now know the kind of metaphors to expect if you go and read it. Anything can happen, and it won't have much to do what happened in the last chapter, except in the vague sense that it will be happening to the same characters. I think one of the core theses is an effort to answer the question of what the X-Files or Supernatural would have been like if the two demon-hunters had been small-town fuck-ups and knew it. Anyhow, it's very funny and occasionally very disturbing and sometimes both at once.

This Book is Full of Spiders is recognisably set in the same small town (a nameless midWestern Hellmouth) with the same protagonists (John does not - in any permanent sense - actually die at the end of the other book). It's just a much more solidly, almost deterministically, plotted book. There's a structure of progressively more high-stakes acts, but more than that, everything which happens is building into what happens next rather than getting blown off as a hallucination before swerving off in another direction. It's actually a pretty impressive job of work from Wong, since he's constantly laying groundwork without showing his hand. Just to make it harder, he structures each of his three acts as a countdown to something horrible; chapter headings announce that it's so many hours to the massacre at the FFirth Asylum, or the Aerial Bombardment of [Undisclosed], and then the characters stumble around in an atmosphere of gathering doom until it dawns on the readers that David and John have once again managed to orchestrate a magnificent worsening of an already terrible situation without even noticing it. At the risk of adding yet another comparison, David and John are rather like Vorenus and Titus Pullo in the opening episodes of Rome, getting on with their own mundane business while the audience slowly figures out that they've just precipitated the downfall of Pompey or the assassination of Julius Caesar. For those of you immune to the charms of popular culture, substitute Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

From the purely technical point of view of the writing craft required to make this happen, Wong is playing a blinder, not least because he's doing it almost all as first person narrative with a narrator who's self-aware enough to know after the fact just what a farrago of sheer ineptitude he's describing, and he still manages to pull off his twists each time. Throw in the fact that his characters are fun and human and that Wong's a genuinely funny writer with the knack of burying opinions just when you didn't expect a real insight in among the dick jokes, and you've got a pretty good book.

The Lone Ranger; we have a new John Carter of Mars

Damn, Gore Verbinski's Lone Ranger  is actively terrible. Apparently Verbinski, Armie Hammer (who, it turns out, is not a product of the Victorinix company, if for no other reason than their products can do more than one thing and aren't made of wood), and omni-mistake Jerry Bruckheimer have all gone on the road complaining that the critics all focused on how much the move cost and how long it took rather than on whether it was any good. Guys, the critics were doing you a favour. The movie, just viewed as an actual movie, is the next best thing to - well, I was going to say a war crime, but this is a bad week for that comparison. You could have run a pretty respectable war for what it cost to produce Lone Ranger, but lets try to keep the waste of money in perspective. For example, it only cost HALF what it looks like it will cost to build a children's hospital in Dublin and it didn't take anything like as long as to produce as that's taking, though I've had several painful surgeries which honestly didn't feel like they were taking as long as Lone Ranger took in the cinema.

Still, put the money to one side, and just look at the movie. It's two and a half hours long, or to put it another way, at least an hour longer than its plot, which is a dumb as a bag of hammers, John-Ford-asking-is-that-all-you've-got tale of corruption on the railroads and the white man screwing over the red man, a theme which was last fresh some time around about the time they set the framing device, in 1930s California.

The framing device, of Tonto playing dress-up and explaining the story to a kid at a Wild West show in 1930-something adds about twenty minutes to the running time and exactly nothing else. Well, it gave Depp an excuse to clown around in ageing make-up, and it jolts the poor bloody audience out of the story at around about the points where they will eventually break this thing for commercials when it gets shown on TV. In fairness to the production team, it probably didn't have to cost much, though I bet they still found a way to make it cost more than space flight.

Then we've got the best part of an hour devoted to introducing us to Tonto and the future Lone Ranger and all the major villains, including a massive train wreck (which is totally not a metaphor for anything in the production, or it is, and I just want to be slightly bigger than that). And we didn't need that. I don't even know that we ever again need to see an origin story for anything, ever, but the lead up to Armie Hammer becoming the Lone Ranger is actively more stupid than the lead up to the A-Team becoming the A-Team, and until now I hadn't known that bar could be crossed without black magic, the sacrifice of first-born children and the opening of a a threshold into the alternate dimensions of Shoggoth. The good news is that you've seen most of this nonsense in the trailer, so that at least the rest of the movie might seem somewhat fresh, but when that's the good news….

Anyhow, after an hour which for most people was probably spent playing Angry Birds on their smart phones, the movie finally gets to the point where it should have just kicked off; Armie Hammer waking up with a crowd of dead folks around him, with Johnny Depp looting his body. That's a good opening in most of the trailers I've seen for this movie, and it would be a pretty good media res moment for the movie itself; any back story (a way over-valued resource) could conveniently be handled by flashback and exposition, something the rest of the movie hardly stints itself on in the first place. However, I don't want you to come away with the idea that if you just hacked the first hour off the movies, what would be left would be any good. We're a long way from being able to make that claim.

Firstly, you've got an Armie Hammer problem. I have probably missed his best work (I fear for humanity if I've just seen it), but Lone Ranger seems to be his try-out reel to fill the crater left by Taylor Kitsch in John Carter of Mars. Then you've got a Johnny Depp problem. A lot of people have complained that his acting in this movie is an insult to Native Americans, but honestly, after Sand Creek, the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee and every other damn thing that's happened to them, I hardly think they need to take a moment out to be aggrieved about a stupid caricature from a wealthy actor who probably meant well. I'm more concerned about the way it's an insult to Captain Jack Sparrow. Johnny Depp was potentially one of the great actors of his generation, but instead chose to play a complete f***wit because it was both hilarious and incredibly lucrative. And as long as he chose to do that, he owes it to the audience to be at least that funny all the time. Tonto is about as funny as the measles. When the character's being played for laughs in the first place, that's just unforgivable. 

Tchah, in other words. Who else isn't doing their best work? William Fichtner. I just saw him being ghastly in Elysium and forgot to give him a shout out for sheer creepiness. Butch Cavendish is a brute's brute, but that's by no means the best possible use of an actor who's always been good at suggesting a little more than just brutality. Tom Wilkinson is hiding behind a beard, wisely, but pulls off a fair to middling capitalist scumbag. Helena Bonham Carter, out in public with Depp but weirdly without Tim Burton to chaperone, plays a saloon-bar madame with a scrimshaw leg which must have seemed hilarious in the pub (actually, even the phrase "saloon-bar madame with a  scrimshaw leg" seems much funnier to me as I type it than it proved in practice). Ruth Wilson is the damsel in distress; lord knows I don't want to see anyone typecast, but using Alice from Luther as a damsel in distress is like using Milla bloody Jovovich to play Pippi Longstocking.

However, I will say this. The last half hour or so is bloody wonderful. There's trains, but you can't not admire a chase involving not just two trains and endless slapstick, but the Lone Ranger riding not just along the roof of one train, but THROUGH the train. The whole thing is scored to the William Tell Overture, as it bloody well should be, and for as long as that's jaunting along, it's enormous fun. Because it's exactly as stupid as it set out to be. Everything is ridiculous and larger than life and silly, and it would take a heart of stone not to enjoy it. But that's 20 minutes of good fun beached in 149 minutes of over-done mediocrity. So this week's top tip, FWIW, is to wait till this thing is on TV, and then tune in about half an hour before the NEXT programme. You'll laugh your socks off, as long as you remember to change channels as soon as the chase ends.

PS: I don't know why I didn't think of it at the time, but the last words of the movie go to Johnny Depp after the Lone Ranger has reared his horse up and screamed "Hi-yo, Silver away." "Never do that again." says Tonto; and still the cast went on the road saying the critics were being unreasonable.

Hugh Howey: Dust

Let's put any grumbles I might have about Dust into context right at the start; within a minute of knowing that it was available as an ebook, I'd downloaded it, and by the following morning, I'd finished reading it.

Dust is one of those books that I read with trepidation. Wool impressed me a lot. I wasn't quite so sure about Shift, the prequel/follow-up; as I said at the time, it answered a lot of questions from the first book without giving me the strong characters which had been such an important part of Wool. So for Dust, I was on tenterhooks. I wanted to know what was going to happen to all the people I'd got to know in the other books, but more than that, I kept worrying about whether the resolution could possibly live up to the set-up. So this was one of those books which I kept putting down in the middle; as each crunching development thudded into place, I'd stop and ponder it a bit, trying to think how I felt about it and whether it was good enough for what had come before.

Well, it's stronger than Shift, not as good as Wool. It answers most of the questions, but not always as well as I wanted. To some extent this is just because there are no answers good enough for the great mcguffin of lunacy as the heart of the plot; the conspiracy which lies at the heart of the whole trilogy couldn't possibly work. People don't work that way, and neither do machines. The closer you get to the punchline of something like that, the harder it is to keep the suspension of disbelief going. The mystery is always more compelling than the answer. Even apart from that, as we get closer to the answers, Howey keeps snatching them away, trying to keep them just out of sight, holding off the reveal for a little longer and then slipping it into the next chapter as something which the characters have come to terms with and which the reader hasn't properly seen yet. Occasionally, this elliptical approach has very elegant results; one character has been set up very carefully so that his moment of self sacrifice can be spelt out with a single line of dialogue to the character he's saving; the reader understands perfectly, but the character can't make sense of it at all. It makes what might otherwise have been a very rushed sequence far more affecting than it had any right to be.

But that said, it's a very rushed book. The action in Wool unfolded in weeks; the action in Shift in days spread out over decades, even centuries. In Dust, the action is back to weeks, and for the first time it feels as though Howey was writing to a deadline, trying to get everything onto the page as quickly as he could. The strength of most of Wool lay in the feeling that everything had marinaded just enough; I complained at the time that the ending felt rushed, and the whole of Dust has the same problem all the way through; characters and situations which would have been teased out and given space in Wool are thrown quickly at the page and are gone almost before you have time to think them through. 

Mostly these days, you're waiting and waiting for a book to appear, so it seems ungrateful to complain that Howey has delivered a workable trilogy to me within four months of me knowing it existed. But Wool took time; it simmered slowly from 2011 to 2013. For once, I wish I'd had to wait a little longer, so that Howey would have had time to give Dust the same depth and power that Wool had.

Elysium: Action movie, not a call to action

Elysium is not a subtle movie. Neill Blomkamp doesn't do subtle. District 9 was an impressive science fiction action movie which stopped just short of holding up flash cards to remind the audience that apartheid was a thing which had been completely real within the lifetime of every single person watching the movie. Elysium throws a boat-load of action at the screen, but this time Blomkamp is taking a swing at something which is going on right the hell now and probably not going to be solved within the lifetime of anyone who sees the movie. Sadly, it's not that likely that a big action movie is going to drive any kind of big action in the real world.

Elysium is about the gap between the haves and have-nots; the haves are up in a luxurious space station, and the have-nots are stuck down on earth, which is one great big slum. Turns out, in Elysium-world, the poor aren't always with you. You can keep them at arms' length while you live forever in orbit, thanks to medical boxes which can just make anything go away (leukaemia or having your whole face blown off are both sorted out within a matter of seconds). Elysium, the space station, is a paradise; earth; well to get the look right, they did principal photography in a rubbish dump in Mexico City. 

Matt Damon's Max is stuck down in Los Angeles, working on a production line as he tries to get to the other side of his probation for a youth spent stealing cars and doing other naughty things. Then he gets irradiated in an industrial accident, and with literally nothing to lose, gets himself bolted into a robot exoskeleton so that he can pull off a big job and get himself a shot at being illegally smuggled into Elysium to get himself de-irradiated. And that turns into a crusade, as these things do in big action movies; it's never enough to save yourself, you always have to be saving the whole world. Not that the whole world doesn't need a whole mess of saving, but I always wonder a bit when it turns out that only one guy can do it, having backed into the solution completely by accident.

It's more interesting to think of some of the bigger questions in Blomkamp's future. It's our own present turned up to eleven, of course; a one-per-cent floating invulnerably above the rest of us in impervious luxury while everything else goes to hell in a handbasket. Conspicuously missing is any kind of middle class; you're either up there in comfort, or down here in squalor. We see exactly one middle manager down on earth; he seems kind of hassled, as well he might, trying to manage hundreds of employees in a factory which - turning experience on its head - is using human labour to build robots (John Stuart Mill would be puzzled to see that in the future, each worker is making his own robots, almost like no-one really understands any more how mass production works). I'll come back to that missing middle class in a minute; I just want to touch on a couple of other things first.

Elysium's economy doesn't make much sense; it's not clear how it could be self-sustaining up there in orbit with all its greenery devoted to manicured gardens instead of crops, so there ought to be a non-stop parade of shuttles moving produce up there to feed the wealthy. We do see shuttles, and they're impressively efficient by today's standards; single stage to orbit vehicles in all kinds of sizes, including a Bugatti for the very finest flying experiences. Right now getting cargo to orbit requires you to burn tonnes of propellant for every kilo you want up there; if they're got the energy requirement for that beaten, there's really no excuse for poverty anywhere on earth. Not that I am stupid enough to believe for a second that just because humanity figured out effectively free energy, the people in charge would share it out fairly; the fact that Elysium's economy concentrates all the resources in the hands of a tiny minority, even though it could easily be shared around, rings all too uncomfortably true.

It's slightly harder to figure out why they're keeping all the medical equipment to themselves, since the magic boxes can diagnose and cure anything in seconds with no apparent need to load them up with drugs or anything else. On the face of it, they should be dotted around like phone boxes all over the planet, keeping everyone fit and ready to work (and if you were feeling sinisterly inclined, quietly aborting most pregnancies to keep the population under control, a very necessary piece of housekeeping if everyone's going to live almost forever).

What's supposed to be keeping you distracted from all of this is the action and the whizzbang guns and robots. Blomkamp is very good at the look of the near future; hard-worn equipment looks believably hard worn and scuffed, and the technology always looks and feels like the kind of thing people would be using in the not too distant future (though I wondered why all the state of the art displays in Elysium defaulted to orange fuzzes, and everyone's file photographs looked like they'd been scanned through a gym sock). The fights are a bit of a mess, since Blomkamp has bought into the jitter-cam heresy, and shows us all the fights as though they were taking place on a merry-go-round during an earthquake. (it's a long time since  I went running around playing laser-tag, but in my memory it did not feel at any time as though I were having an epileptic fit, even when they were firing off strobe lights and pumping smoke into the room…).

Continuing his hate affair with the South African Defence Force, Blomkamp makes the sharp end of his villainy take the form of white South African mercenaries, who even use the same logo as his horrible MNU mercenaries in District 9. Sharlto Copley, who was queasily wonderful as the much put-upon anti-hero of District 9, gets to be the baddie in Elysium, and makes a nine-course tasting menu out of it. When he gets a grenade in the face, your basic reaction is to wish there'd been two, and later on, it's almost as though Blomkamp thought the same thing.

Anyhow, there's much blowing of things up and then good prevails, and a moppet in peril is made all better before the whole world lives happily ever after. Sadly, all of this strikes me as a very bad thing. The problem with Elysium is that it does a little bit to make the audience think about the shocking inequality of the world, and then gives us lots of ways to think that there's really nothing to worry about. The happy ending is part of that, but the really sneaky bit is that missing middle class I threatened to come back to.

Elysium has got goodies and baddies. The goodies are the poor teeming multitudes in the rubbish dump in Mexico City, and the baddies are the ridiculously well off rich folk in orbit. Now, clearly almost no-one in today's world lives in that kind of Olympian comfort, so audiences are not going to watch those pricks with any kind of shock of self-recognition. They're not going to see themselves as part of the problem; they're not going to appreciate that just by having the money and leisure to go and see a big budget movie in the comfort of an air conditioned cinema, they're already better off than half the population of this real world we're living in right now. More than that, they're going to think "Well, at least we don't have it that bad, so maybe our real world rich people aren't so bad as they could be." In short, Elysium is the kind of movie which looks subversive, but really does nothing to challenge the status quo. It's an action movie, when we need a call to action.

Kick-Ass 2: should have been one-and-done

I don't often get the chance to say this, but sometimes you need to bench the writers and open up the jumbo can of stupid. Stupid is not usually in short supply, either in Hollywood or real life, so I rarely find myself thinking that there isn't enough of it directly in front of me.

It was only when I was most of the way through Kick-Ass 2 that I realised how important stupid had been to Kick-Ass. Action movies need to be stupid. Partly it's down to the fact that no-one's going to an action movie for a healthy dose of reality, but mainly it's because most of what's happening in action movies is just plain wrong, and you need some stupid to take the sting out of it. If you stopped to think about the collateral damage of the average outbreak of hi-jinks (as some people have about Man of Steel, the climax of which involved more property damage and loss of life than every major incident which has ever happened in real life in the USA, all put together), you'd get all shaky and upset, so it needs to be somewhat ridiculous so that you can take a long calming breath and remember it's all a movie.

What lifted Kick-Ass above mere stupidity was the electric presence of Chloe Moretz as a tiny foulmouthed hurricane of violence, and she's also more or less the only thing which saves Kick-Ass 2 from falling flat on its face. But even Hit Girl doesn't quite work any more; what was shocking and hilarious because a pre-teen was doing it is somehow just worrying when a teenager is doing it. Take away what one little island of cartoonishness and the whole Kick-Ass thesis becomes a rather dreary meditation on the consequences of vigilantism.

Slightly notoriously, Jim Carrey had second thoughts about the movie and refused to do any promotion for it on the grounds that it was too violent, and he wasn't comfortable with it. I'm not sure how those concerns didn't bubble to the surface when he read the script and presumably watched the first movie to see what it was about. But we all have these moments of clarity after the fact - I'm waiting with interest to see his moment of clarity on MMR vaccination, for example. Thing is, I think he's just wrong. Both Kick-Ass movies are hysterically violent, but the second one in particular goes out of its way to make violence not cool. What may be driving Jim Carrey's second thoughts is that his own character revels in violence quite gleefully, and that gets punched up in all the trailers. What doesn't get covered in the trailers is that Col. Stars and Stripes is a more rounded character than that, and when he gets killed horribly it packs a meaningful punch. That isn't true of the dozens of mooks and non-speaking part cops who get arbitrarily wasted in an effort to let us see how horrible the super villains are, but the character deaths carry weight.

Of course, it all depends on what you want to read into it. The superheroes are mostly a bunch of self-deluding inadequates, the super villains are creeps, and almost everyone in Mindy (Hit Girl)'s high school is toxic. There are a couple of reasonable moderate decent guys, acting as various kinds of father figures and they have an impressively high casualty rate. Across the two movies, every single father figure gets straight up murdered, usually pretty horribly. Throw in Wanted and it all gets downright worrying. I can't imagine Mark Millar's actual message is that being a father is suicidal, but if I was his dad, and had somehow lived to have the conversation, I'd be sitting down with him and saying "Son, is there something we need to talk about?"

It's popular wisdom that smart people avoid movies with a number in the title. Kick-Ass 2 isn't a terrible movie; standing on its own, it's possibly even not a bad movie, since it's got a plot and characters and character development and an actual message (it's also got the best idea I ever saw for sub-titles - speech balloons!). But it's not a fun movie. There's a load of trailers up on the internet and if all you want is the fun you had at the first movie, you could pretty much catch all the best action beats in the trailers - including both of Hit Girl's best action scenes. Or you could just watch the first movie again.

RED 2: hats, just hats everywhere

RED was huge silly fun, and made enough money that a sequel was inevitable, though - as I expected - they skipped the Moldova caper that closed out the first movie. They did make a wonderful callback to it by having most of the mourners at John Malkovich's funeral be Moldovan (don't worry, he gets better). As with the first movie, you could probably watch the trailers and get the best gags, but you'd miss out on the wonderful slow burn going on all the way through the opening as Mary-Louise Parker conceives a vicious romantic rivalry with Catherine Zeta-Jones. 

As in RED, the women are doing all the heavy lifting. Helen Mirren has huge fun stealing all her scenes, but the real heart of the movie is still Mary-Louise Parker, alternately hounding long-suffering Bruce Willis to take her out on jobs and freaking out about the consequences of Bruce being out on jobs. This includes a wonderful car chase which becomes less about catching the bad guy and more about making sure that she beats her rival for Bruce. With Zeta-Jones in a Porsche and Mary-Louise in a 2CV, it could only be half way to a fair fight in Paris traffic or a Top Gear special, which just adds to the fun. In scene after scene, it's Parker who sells the action with her pitch perfect reactions to the insanity going on around her. When she's not round, Helen Mirren is deadpanning it out of the park (best deadpan line, when asked where she got some bodies to fake everyone's death "From my freezer." ; funniest single scene; pretending to be crazy enough to think that she's the queen …). 

For the rest, it's shoot-em-up, beat-em-up, shoot-em-up some more. Some of it's done well, some of it not so much. There's a great scene where Bruce bashes his way through a squad of interchangeable mooks in a file room, using anything handy to get an edge against heavily armed goons half his age; there's a flair and imagination to that scene which doesn't always carry through. And though they try, there's nothing to equal the wonderful lunacy of the violence in the first movie; no RPG-Magnum duel and Bruce stepping into a skidding Porsche doesn't have quite the panache of him stepping out of a cop car, gun blazing.

The sheer star power of the thing is dizzying. You could go on about how many of the cast have Oscars, or at least nominations, but I think it's funnier that the movie has BOTH of cinema's Hannibal Lecters. Just as in Lecter-ville, Anthony Hopkins gets all the attention, but Brian Cox is always reliably entertaining, and continues his schtick from RED of being the unlikely Russian deus ex machina for those moments when not even the power of cool can get Bruce and co out of their latest pickle. I remember commenting the last time round that Karl Urban's CIA straight-edge put an uncomfortable tinge into proceedings; he's positively cuddly compared to Neal McDonough's gleefully sadistic fixer. Neal McDonough's blue-eyed aryan twinkle makes all his characters look like they're just waiting to be arrested for crimes no-one else has ever imagined, and he's just that little bit too intense for what's really just a comedy with bullets. It's OK for us to think that all this stuff is funny; it seems jarring that he thinks it's hilarious.

Oh; and the hats; everyone gets to wear one or more stupid hat. John Malkovich gets the stupidest, but until his Carmen Miranda number swept any conceivable board of all times and space, it was looking neck and neck between him and Mary-Louise.

 

As I left, the whole front of the cinema was dominated by some sort of PR stunt for the new One Direction Movie, including a bus sent by the Irish Sun. Appropriately enough, they'd found a topless one.