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Wanted is the film you get when you write a script in between shots of vodka, casual matches of Russian roulette and taking turns punching each other in the stomach. Only one of those things doesn’t actually happen in the movie, and that’s the Russian roulette, which is remarkable when you consider the director is indeed Russian. Vodka and stomach punching all round. This is big, loud, stupid fantasy escapism that gets away with it because it’s done with commitment and charisma – something big, loud, stupid things from Hollywood typically lack.
James McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, whose self-loathing voice-over introduces him as a nobody. He carries on his meaningless, repetitive existence, interrupted only by the occasional panic attack, until one fateful trip to the chemist. There he meets, Fox, Angelina Jolie’s alarmingly slender assassin. She’s there to tell him that the father he never knew was in fact a highly skilled hit man, and Wesley has inherited his abilities.
One high speed gun fight/car chase later he has joined The Fraternity, a group of assassin weavers. No, I kid not gentle friend, Assassin Weavers. You see they discovered a secret code in their weavings which was Fate’s way of telling them who to kill. Pretty self-explanatory really. An extended training sequence follows, in which we learn getting punched repeatedly is a viable way to learn combat skills… by osmosis. We also discover the existence of super fast, extra special healing baths that fix all injuries within hours, and coolest of all, how to bend bullets with a flick of the wrist. It’s all based extremely loosely on a comic book, which is to say it has the same name.
The key to the whole thing is they never wink at the camera and mock the enterprise. They just brutally go about their business. McAvoy is strangely refreshing in the geek gone wild role, evolving Wesley’s internal rage into a natural killing machine. Angelina Jolie is gripping, with minimal dialogue, but a lot of attitude. Morgan Freeman is ever so slightly bland as the leader of the pack.
They waste some interesting side characters called The Repairman, The Butcher and The Gunsmith. They’re never developed, instead we get Terrence Stamp appearing out of no where and doing his usual Terrence Stamp dance of grave expressionless-ness. The script writes itself into a corner, and an attack with rats probably marks the tipping point into straight-faced stupid, topped with stupid and some stupid on the side. After that it falls apart.
But until then it’s slick, loud and violent. We get a lot of them these days, but this one has a twist of Russian, and just the vaguest hint of vodka.
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There has been a lot of adulation and hype surrounding the sequel to Batman Begins, so I am going to try and keep this under control. The Dark Knight is the best comic book movie that has been made so far. See what I did there? I qualified it. I left room for someone, someday to make a better super hero movie… one day. Quite rational really.
Let’s wrap up the key points here. Ledger absolutely owns every frame he is in. That’s not hype talking, that’s fact. This is an actor who was mythologized within days of his tragic death, his personality and real life story should overwhelm the character. It is a testament to his achievement that as the Joker, you completely forget you are looking at Heath Ledger. That’s not due to make-up friends, that’s due to performance.
The Joker kicks off this dark tale of the Dark Knight, and his grip on the film never weakens from the opening bank heist. He’s a new kind of criminal – crime isn’t about money for him, it’s about art. His duel with Batman through the length of the movie is harrowing, and utterly compelling. The casualties are unpredictable and moving.
Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine provide a nice reliable backing track, with a layer of Gary Oldman character work added for good measure. Aaron Eckhart is moving and convincing in the biggest personal arc of the story and Maggie Gyllenhaal is now the go-to word for ‘upgrade’, erasing all memory of the Katie Holmes blip from the first movie (Wow Katie, you passed on this for Mad Money… there aren’t enough words to sum up the ‘wow’… ‘ouch’ comes to mind).
Christian Bale has the thankless job of anchoring the whole thing, and doing most of that behind a mask. People seem to underestimate his performance because of that, but if he wasn’t credible as a man who spends his nights dressing up as a bat the whole thing would come crashing down.
Full props to Christopher Nolan for making this as dark and emotionally draining as he did. This is the Empire Strikes Back of our time. My only two quibbles were the length, but then I don’t know what you’d cut – everything built so relentlessly – and the ending which had some oddly rushed logic. Aside from that, I couldn’t recommend this enough for lovers of action.
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I wish I knew what to make of Mamma Mia. I went in with such overwhelming goodwill towards the whole thing, and in the end it feels like it failed to match me on that. True, the enthusiasm of the cast and crew is evident throughout the film, but it doesn’t make up for the shocking performances peppered through it, the boxy staging and the fact that some of the ABBA songs wedged into the plot are profoundly ill-suited for those moments.
At least they didn’t try and justify attaching Super Trouper to a plot point – that would have signalled the death rattle of the whole thing.
Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is preparing to get married, and wants the father she’s never met to walk her down the aisle. After stealing her mother’s (Meryl Streep) diary she deducts there are three candidates for the job. She invites them all – Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard turn up – and all hell breaks loose. Oh, and for some reason it’s all set on a Greek island.
As I am still trying to come to terms with the entire thing I am just going to have to break it down into good and bad. Meryl is good. Despite herself, or because of herself, you can’t help but love her when she plays goofy, and her voice is strong. Streep gets all the best songs (Mamma Mia, Money, Money, Money) and sequences – they are fun, clever and they suck you in. The use of an actual Greek chorus is a touch of genius – their off-the-wall contribution adds a lovely surreal element. I would say all the women are well cast – Seyfried does well with a potentially bland and annoying character.
The bad? Anyone who ever asks Brosnan to sing again should be charged. Let us all consider this a valuable lesson, and walk away. I would say ‘no harm, no foul’, but listening to him warble makes me inclined to disagree. He is hazardous with a tune. Where the women fit their roles and find a natural flow, all the men (including Dominic Cooper as the fiancé) are awkward, painful and under-developed. If you told me they accidentally gate-crashed the movie while sailing through the area I would believe you – they just don’t belong.
The whole project could have done with a fresh set of eyes, rather than transferring in the team from the original stage production. A lot of the dance numbers are stagey – they don’t make any really creative use of the stunning setting. Also, taking it away from the over-the-top stage show really serves to highlight how completely ill-suited half the songs are to the plot (Our Last Summer and Lay Your Love on Me were heinous).
It’s pretty, occasionally catchy, and it has a cast I like. Half the people I know who’ve seen it love it, and a good chunk of the rest claim to have died a little while watching it. My problem is I still want to like it, but I just can’t. The first 30 minutes are solid, good fun. The rest – not so much. And because of the restraint I have shown throughout this review I get to say this: I had a dream that this would be good, so I took a chance on it – I said I do. They took my money, money, money but I could not lay my love on it. The winner may take it all, but all I was doing was crying SOS. Waterloo.
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Hancock dreams of being so much edgier and original than it is that you can’t help but smile at it politely as it goes about its business. In between the smiling you’ll pause and marvel at the plot inconsistencies. After that you may well never think of the movie again, unless it’s to ponder the scope of talent that came together to create such a mediocrity.
You can see what they’re trying to say in the opening sequence. Take the flawed hero chestnut and put it on steroids. Will Smith is Hancock, a drunk who swears at kids (that’s the attempt at edginess). He also happens to be a flying immortal with Herculean strength, who goes about saving the day with maximum damage. LA, being the city it is, finds the cost of cleaning up after him far outweighs the benefit of his ill-conceived heroics. Enter a PR guru Jason Bateman, who decides he needs an image makeover, which goes perfectly to plan. Enter PR guru’s wife Charlize Theron who splits her screen time between being a dedicated wife and mother, and having maximum eye tension with Hancock. Except you know there’s more to her than that… because otherwise there is absolutely no reason to hire Charlize Theron. The rest is a garbled back-story, a character back-flip that makes no sense, and some reasonable comedy
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Get Smart is a movie best appreciated by itself. Fans of the television series are just setting themselves up for disappointment if they expect more than the occasional nod towards the 1960’s classic. In isolation (a cone of silence, if you will)) it can be enjoyed as a light action adventure with above average comedy thanks to the casting of Steve Carell.
Carell is the master of making mundane statements hilarious with a mere twitch of his face or a vocal inflection. He plays Maxwell Smart (Don Adams’ former domain), a bumbling analyst desperately vying to become a field agent for CONTROL (the kind of bizarre, but far more credible agency the CIA would be if Alan Arkin truly did run it). When circumstance thrusts him toward the promotion he’s only dreamed of, he’s partnered with a deeply unimpressed Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). The Chief (Arkin) assigns them to track down a couple of nuclear weapons stolen by KAOS, before they get the chance to lob them in the direction of the US. Cue shenanigans, sight gags, dance-offs, betrayal and most memorably (for me) a sword fish
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Sex and the City gives fans of the show everything they’ve been asking for. Whether they’ll actually leave satisfied is up in the air. People who never got on board the original escapades of New York’s favourite foursome of designer walking product placement need not apply.
The film begins with a neat set of opening credits, including an update of the television theme. They’ve made a smart move by acknowledging the passage of time and not picking up from exactly where they left off. It allows the movie to have a hint of being its very own entity, while still tying it back and refreshing us with the characters situations
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a mediocrity, wrapped in an enigma tied up in a bow of expectation. I know, I died a little on the inside as well. That’s not to say that Indy 4 is horrid, far from it. There are plenty of mediocre films around, they’re perfectly watchable, they just also happen to be flawed and uneven. We accept mediocre films and give them fabulous box office rewards. I embrace mediocrity like the irritating little brother it is – loveable, but occasionally grating. I do not embrace mediocre Indiana Jones.
The movie opens perfectly. We’re straight in to the action, with Harrison Ford in whip-cracking form and classic retro villains all round. The period detail is right, and the political tensions of the day (reds under beds, the cast of Grease brawling in milk bars) provides a nice subtle score against which everything is set
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I have found it impossible to get worked up about Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day in any way. It’s a really nice movie, and yes I mean that as a back-handed compliment. It’s sweet, inoffensive, and peppered with a few lovely subtle moments. It’s also oddly bland.
In the 1930’s the titular Miss Pettigrew, brought to us by the vaguely befuddled Frances McDormand, is a failed governess in desperate need of a job. Failing that, she’ll take a meal. Improvising wildly, she finds herself in the service of aspiring actress Delysia Lafosse. We follow the pair over 24 hours as romance, hijinks and other screwball events follow – all of them inevitable
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Made of Honour is Frankenstein’s romcom – it may walk and talk, but you can’t help but stare at the stitching marks. So many brilliant and mediocre films have been born into this genre’s cannon that writers everywhere must surely be banging their heads against walls in the fight to come up with an original idea. But in most cases, as in this one, it is apparent they have given up before the muse descended upon them (or not even tried at all).
I am an unashamed lover of the romcom, but even this uneven offering tried my patience. Patrick Dempsey plays uber bachelor Tom, whose only real commitment is to his friendship with Michelle Monaghan’s Hannah. Only when Hannah finds herself a strapping Scotsman and gets engaged does Tom wake up and smell the cliché. He’s in love with her. Have I ruined the twist? What follows are his varied attempts to win her, a trip to Scotland, a tree throwing competition, and then (bizarrely) an overt affection for dogs becomes a major plot point… and suddenly you’re walking out of the cinema
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Robert Downey Jr is a golden god. The problem with the heroes in so many comic book adaptations is that their everyday personas (Clark Kent, Peter Parker) are so insipid it neuters their alter ego. It seems that aside from doing a gritty re-imagining of Batman, the only certain solution to that problem is to cast Downey. Hence golden god status.
Iron Man sounds cool and relevant (playboy weapons dealer develops super suit to fight the evil he has unwittingly created), but it could have gone the other way (Jumper style selfish git, puts on expressionless super suit to protect equally expressionless face). The key to what makes Iron Man work is the casting, and the general attitude of director Jon Favreau. That attitude is smart-arsed conviction, as previously seen in the script he wrote for Swingers
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Comment by Jess Paine
on Indiana Jones: 4 times as old
Wag The Film