Film Reviews by Alphaville

A detective deals with a ‘creepy’ neighbour and investigates an old case. After a startling opening this becomes a more pedestrian mystery drama before exploding into action again towards the end. It’s overlong and too sedate for much of its length, with characters behaving in an unbelievable way. Only an undercurrent of serial-killer tension maintains interest until the plot picks up again. It may remind you of Audition.

When it breaks out in its last hour, it’s certainly dark and, as the title suggests, creepy, but again the characters’ behaviour never rings true, making gruesome scenes seem more ridiculous than involving. Nevertheless, dark and interesting.

Ignore the negative reviews and settle down to be captivated. If you don’t thrill to this, you don’t get film. This is a real MOVIE and M. Knight Shyamalan’s best since The Sixth Sense. Even if it didn’t have such a fascinating theme, it’s a pleasure to spend a couple of hours on a gorgeous Dominican Republic beach, beautifully filmed with dazzling camerawork, for which Knight credits Kurasawa. The idea is that the camera remains independent of the action and only captures it obliquely ‘by chance’ (see DVD Xtras). Hard to visualise, but it really works. Film is a visual medium and this is a feast for the eyes.

Unlike many writer/directors, Shyamalan also knows how to tell a good story that remains intriguing right up to the very end. You’ll probably know from the awful title, DVD blurb, trailer etc that it’s about a beach that ages you fast, so plot development is rapid and ensures there’s never a dull moment. Imagine Summer Holiday as a sci-fi thriller, a mystery, a morality tale, a family drama and with elements of horror all rolled into one.

Shyamalan’s ambition is so massive that, if anything, too much is crammed in, which perhaps leaves some holes for nit-picking critics to carp at afterwards. But his accomplishment is equally massive. Consider this: what would it be like to be fully grown at the age of 6?

There are few films these days that keep you glued to the screen every second of the way. This is one of them. Excellent set of DVD Xtras too.

Something evil lurks in the woods. Cue our hero and heroine to wander into them and meet a silly bad man. Even a good director would have trouble with such a hoary old plot (written by director Ben himself). If you’ve seen a Wheatley film before, you’ll know how long drawn-out they can be. This is no different. Surely even die-hard horror fans will hit the FF key before long.

Surprisingly boring silly comedy adventure that plays like the kids’ theme park ride from which it originated, complete with cgi running of jungle rapids. Dwayne Johnson hams it up. Emily Blunt is miscast for light comedy. And there’s a pantomime villain. All played out to incessant bombastic orchestral muzak. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has made some good films in the past but he won’t want this on his cv.

This never-dating 2008 action thriller pits a charismatic cop against the sympathetic kidnapper of a 5yo girl. The cop is tormented by a car chase that ended badly while the partially-sighted kidnapper is doing the job for money for his paraplegic wife (equally sympathetic). Your loyalties may sometimes even switch to the baddie, despite the fact he’s going to kill the little girl.

Director Dante Lam films with a restless camera and boundless energy. A bit too much shaky-cam to begin with, but it soon settles down into engrossing visuals. The plot is brilliantly put together and only reveals its full complexity in an ending you’ll never guess. The action sequences, on foot or in cars, are exciting. The dramatic scenes in-between are not the usual fillers but emotional rollercoasters that drive the plot forward. All-in-all, one of the best Hong Kong actioners of all time.

Ordinary Joe turns out to be not so ordinary when he’s burgled. A different take on the ‘one man fights back’ genre, with a nice line in black humour and a counterpoint easy-listening soundtrack. The action scenes are brutally realistic and escalate to a deliberately OTT climax in order to have, as the director puts it, a fun finish. Unless you’re immune to Tom-and-Jerry violence, this is great stuff. Plus a great set of DVD bonus features.

After the terrific original film, second-time around this just seems like silly games-playing. The characters are cardboard and the set-ups are drawn-out and unimaginative. Attempts to instil excitement by having he characters shout “Hurry!” and “Come on” soon become wearing. The whole enterprise feels like a second-rate rip-off.

It opens with a car crash followed by a cloying family scene. Yep, it’s the same old story. There’s a new mission afoot, but Vin doesn’t want to do it. Who’d have thought? But wait a minute – drum roll – he’s changed his mind! What a relief, otherwise there’d be no No. 9.

With plot and dialogue as pathetic as ever, FF through it all and cut to the car chases. The first is the best. Bog-standard crashes and explosions of course, but it’s filmed in Thailand with some sweeping drone shots and even a new stunt. Yay! The second chase is set in a mythical Hollywood version of Edinburgh that will at least amuse anyone who knows the city. The third and final chase is filmed in Georgia and is a real anti-climax. Everything in this film is by-the-numbers, but cut to the chases and you might grab half-an-hour of stupid fun.

It’s 20,000 years ago. Our hero is tossed off a cliff by a bison onto an unreachable ledge and is left to perish in the wilderness. Avoid the tell-all trailer. Avoid spoiler reviews. You don’t need to know any more to get the most out of it as one amazing scene follows another. It’s both a thing of beauty and an exciting thriller. A film to wallow in.

Body-swap comedy horror with all the usual tropes is given a twist by swapping a high-school girl with a serial killer. The 10min pre-credit sequence is a pointless gross-out bore and the plot takes a while to get going, but in the second half there’s fun to be had watching Vince Vaughn play a teenage girl.

A Star Wars-type shoot-em-up space opera with humans, aliens (men in funny masks) and lots of cgi explosions. With zero-depth plot and characterisation, and soldier-types shouting “Go, go, go!”, it’s as sleep-inducing as watching flames on a fire. The inter-battle speechifying, shot in claustrophobic interiors, is as boring as in TV series such as Battleship Galactica. In fact the overriding feature of the whole enterprise is its lack of imagination. It’s a sequel to a lower-budget original, but it’s no improvement so let’s hope there’s no more. Written and directed by Luke Sparke. Remember that name.

Ryan Reynolds, as stylised as ever, plays a background character in a shoot-em-up video game who ups his level so he can do more stuff. So its cgi all the way. Admittedly the cgi is more imaginative than in superhero fare, but interest wears as plot and character become sillier and sillier and the jaunty muzak score palls.

Taking up too much screen time, meanwhile, is the real world of game production, with lots of discussions and explanations about gaming and coding to sit through. Presumably this is 5-star manna from heaven for addicted gamers. Not so much for other viewers. Taika Waititi, still thinking he’s playing Hitler in JoJo Rabbit, is excruciatingly awful as the comedy villain programming boss. When the worst thing he can do is ‘destroy the servers’, you know a script’s struggling to find dramatic interest. For once, the cgi is the main reason to keep watching.

Too much of this film is boring palace politicking between Mings and Qings (it’ll help to bone up on Korean history beforehand). Our silent half-blind floppy-haired hero spends half the film living a dull life on a mountainside with his daughter. Given that you’ll be drawn to this film for its action scenes, you’ll have to wait an hour for him to pick up his sword and fully engage with the baddies. It’s ridiculous, of course, but his floppy-haired battle with hordes of baddies, including one lot with rifles, is beautifully choreographed and shot, so much so that the final fight with the chief baddie is something of an anti-climax. Apart from those two fights, the movie has little to offer.

Inspiring and heart-warming drama, based on a true story, about three intelligent black women struggling against casual racism and misogyny while working at NASA on the 60s space programme. It’s crowd-pleasingly manipulative at the expense of truth, but it does do justice to its real-life protagonists and will have you rooting for them all the way.

A disappointingly ponderous shaggy-dog haunted house story. Christopher Smith is one of the UK’s most stylish directors, but he can do nothing with this hoary old nonsense. There’s nothing in it we haven’t seen a thousand times before. Yep, things go bump in the night and our heroine goes exploring in the darkness with a torch.

Unlike the trailer, which revs things up with fast edits and exciting music, the film drags from one dull scene to another with barely a score for most of its length. Scary? No, just a drag from beginning to end. For Christopher Smith completists only.