Film Reviews by Alphaville

This Western begins as a beautifully filmed odyssey through the American west, filmed in Oregon and Utah. John Ford made Monument Valley famous, but the underused Goblin Valley (of which there are many more shots on the DVD Extras) is equally photogenic, as is the craggy Oregon coast. Robert Pattinson is on the trail of Mia Wasikowska, whom he intends to marry. It’s a slow trip, but shot so well and with such an offbeat humour that you’re happy to go along for the ride. David Zellner co-stars as a timorous preacher as well as co-writing and co-directing the film with his brother (who also appears), and they make a good job of all three.

However, there’s a major plot point half-way through that turns the film on its head and after that the film tends to go for a walkabout in the woods. Although still very watchable, it loses focus as a story. This makes the sum of its parts less than its individual parts, but it’s still a very worthwhile watch with some wonderful scenes along the way.

Reunited with director Antoine Fuqua, Denzel Washington returns in this sequel to wrong some more rights, and both make an even better job of it than before. With beautiful, smooth, organic camerawork, Fuqua is firing on all cylinders. After a James Bond-style opening action scene on board a Turkish train, we follow Denzel around the city where he works as a cab driver, Scorsese-style. These scenes are infused with appealing warmth, aided by spot-on editing and a seductive score, and ground the character for the action to come.

There’s skulduggery in Belgium, with a terrific action scene involving Melissa Leo, and the consequences cross the Atlantic to engulf our hero, pitting him against pros who are as good as he is. The ambitious Western-style climactic shootout in a deserted stormbound coastal town can’t quite deliver on its promise, but it’s a worthy attempt. This franchise has legs.

The author of Frankenstein gets the full period prestige treatment, with manicured sets, plinky-plonk piano on the soundtrack and stilted dialogue. “How are we to write if we are forced to tend to domestic mundanities,” poor Percy Shelley is made to say. Elle Fanning nails an English accent, but it’s as though all the actors have had the life sucked out of them.

It’s well-mounted and competent, but this should be a fascinating story of a 16yo girl’s burgeoning passion for Shelley, life and literature, and passion is conspicuous by its absence. The writing of Frankenstein comes too little, too late and laden with a modern-day feminist twist (as does the boorish portrayal of Shelley and Byron). The decadence of the Geneva summer when the book was conceived gets an unconvincing U-certificate portrayal that never convinces. Ken Russell’s OTT 1986 film “Gothic” was surely nearer the mark. If only the actors could have been allowed to show some of the animation they show in the interviews on the DVD Extras.

An interesting sci-fi idea takes too long to get to the point and, when it does, lacks drama. After a soporific half-hour, Natalie Portman and her team of sister scientists venture beyond a shimmering boundary into a mysterious zone that’s expanding to take over the world. Unnecessary intercutting between present and past slows the drama down even further. There are snatches of action, in which the scientists (who have now unbelievably become action women) shoot mutating creatures, then the sisters return to swapping bonding stories.

But then… out of the blue comes a spellbinding climax, where everything makes sense, where talk gives way to imaginative visuals and there’s suddenly a perfect electronic score with the best soundscape since Gravity. It shows what the film could have been. If only. Worth watching for that finale, though.

The earth’s running out of resources and it’s up to a space station crew to come up with a particle accelerator that will produce unlimited energy. The problem is, it could open up a rift in space-time that would cause parallel universes to crash into each other. This is the third film in the “Cloverfield universe”, the premise of which is that anything can happen… and things certainly do start to get weird.

Unlike in lesser space action movies, the crew are not made up of morons. Characters, plot and dialogue are all refreshingly intelligent, so we stick with the cast when things start to go wrong. Okay, so there’s nothing new here… apart from exploring parallel universes... but the plot is pacey and the time whizzes by. Quantum entanglement, anyone? A worthy third entry in an interesting franchise and the DVD has a fascinating “making of” feature.

Gird your loins for pure adolescent moron overkill, stuffed with idiot teenagers that are painful to watch. Expect lots of sexting, swearing and partying to forgettable pop muzak, with an inane voiceover to make it seem even worse.

The plot involves someone revealing people’s hidden secrets over the web. The four high school girls at the centre of the film are so intensely grating that when violence erupts it’s them you want to be eradicated. The DVD out-takes worryingly show them being equally moronic in real life.

Called Bullet Head in the US. Three unappealing robbers hole up in an abandoned factory, where a nasty big dog lies in wait. Each time it runs after them, they just manage to close the door in time. Phew! In-between, they bicker and have boring flashbacks. Scenes involving the dog are filmed in short bursts to make it look like its attacking, and there are a lot of dog’s eye-view shots. The result? An atrocious screenplay poorly executed by writer/director Paul Solet. What are Brody and Malkovich doing in rubbish like this?

Lisbeth Salander has become a female icon, but this latest film in the franchise, with yet another different actress, fails to convince. Clare Foy makes a good fist of it but can’t quite reach the level of brooding intensity required for the character. The main problem, however, is the plot. Salander has evolved into a superwoman with unbelievable IT and escape abilities, to say nothing of clairvoyance. In the opening scene, for example, her rapist victim obligingly stands on the exact spot where she has placed a lasso on the floor to hoist him up by his feet. And if you think that’s contrived, wait till you see the ridiculous climax, like something out of Johnny English Strikes Again.

What Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin that everyone is after to fuel the plot is in this case top-secret software, but who cares? The film is moody and downbeat, dampening scenes that should be exciting. The incessant Tom & Jerry orchestral score is even more wearing, matching every action. Even walking across a room seems to require the string section to scratch away forebodingly.

Perhaps it all worked better in the book.

This third outing in the “franchise” has an attractive sheen of old Bond movies about it, with gorgeous Mediterranean locations and a lush score, but Rowan Atkinson’s clowning and gurning is even more spectacularly unfunny than ever. Every joke is telegraphed a mile in advance, with obvious set-ups and lame pay-offs. In its favour, the fast-moving plot does keep you watching in astonishment at its amateurish attempts at humour. The French do spy spoofs better (try OSS 117: Lost in Rio).

If you watch this 2010 Chinese film for some disaster-movie action, you’re going to be disappointed. The 1976 Tangshan quake only lasts 5 minutes then there’s 2hr of soapy drama to sit through. The clue is in the film’s title. It’s competently acted and directed and it means well, but the factual ending at the 2008 memorial to the 240,000 who lost their lives is more affecting than anything in the fictional film itself. It follows various characters over the decades following the quake and is pure soapy melodrama.

The film begins with a bunch of US paras involved in the invasion of Europe in 1944. The chaotic scenes aboard the plane during aerial bombardment are brilliantly realised and the excitement continues on the ground as our band of brothers fight for survival. The fact that Germans and French speak in their own languages rather than in accented English adds to the sense of realism.

Then it’s all change. You’ll know from previews and promotions that there’s something very strange going on the Nazi compound, and this is where the film gets much less interesting. We’re soon into genre horror elements with the standard gross-out shock-horror tropes. The upshot? What could have been a brilliant war film turns into an unpalatable horror film. It’s supposed to be fun, but only irredeemable horror fans will find it so. It ends with a great tracking shot that shows what the film could have been. Pity.

This 2007 light thriller is based on a promising original idea but it never reaches any great heights and was overlooked at the time. Nevertheless it’s a classy production that’s worth a look. Samuel L. Jackson, playing against type as an ordinary Joe, runs a company that cleans up the bodily mess left behind when someone dies. Then one day he has to clean a messy murder scene at the house of a missing politician… Given a good plot, director Renny Harlin can usually be relied upon to get the most out of it, and he does so here. It’s a thriller with virtually no action and a disappointing ending, but it bowls along interestingly enough for its 86-minute run time.

Well-made Aussie movie about a nasty big pig. It’s generic stuff but well above average, with effective characters and a well-drawn bush community in peril. In tone it’s more akin to Tremors than an out-and-out horror movie. The boar itself is a suitably gruesome B-feature monster. Using humour as well as drama, writer/director Chris Sun gets you involved with the ensemble cast and keeps you guessing about which of the likeable characters is going to be gored next.

Don’t be fooled by the posters featuring Bruce Willis and Adrien Brody. Willis makes a few brief appearances as a training officer and blink and you’ll miss Brody’s cameo. This is a Chinese film with 90% Chinese dialogue about the 1930s war with Japan. As in an old Cowboys and Indians film, all the Chinese are heroes while all the Japanese are demons. The acting is awful, the direction is staid and the cgi aerial battles are so precisely perfect it’s like watching a cartoon. An overused effect is debris flying at the camera as if it’s 3D. You’ll hate this film, especially if you’ve been fooled into watching it by the plugging of American star involvement. The whole project is a cynical disgrace.

Based on her previous soporific character study films, Lynne Ramsay is a peculiar choice of writer/director for a film based on a thriller. She even admitted in interview that she doesn’t know how to direct action. So when the plot requires action, she mostly ignores it and merely films the aftermath, deliberately avoiding excitement. For her one attempt at filming a fight scene, she simply waves the camera around maniacally.

When a plot kicks in after the confused opening, it’s about a grizzled Joaquin Phoenix searching for missing girls. Not that the plot matters. This is mostly about following Phoenix around as he interacts with his aged mother, goes shopping, shambles this way, shambles that way... ‘How’s Janice?” asks his mother. “Who’s Janice?” he says. If only Janice from Friends would turn up to enliven matters. Get on with it!

If you’ve seen previous Ramsay character studies you’ll know what to expect. It’s dismal stuff. Dialogue is delivered oh-so-slowly and deliberately, static silent head shots are held to the point of tedium, poor shot choices are everywhere. Like many others, this reviewer eventually ran out of patience and zapped to the final scene, which was clichéd as well as dismal.