Film Reviews by Alphaville

As with the Harry Potter films. you need to see superhero films in sequence to avoid plot confusion. This one, for instance, opens with Superman dead. Given that proviso, Justice League has more gravitas than most comic book fare and Zack Snyder directs with the same flair and grandeur he brought to 300.

Unfortunately the material he has to work with is the usual juvenile nonsense. Our band of heroes (Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman et al) have to stop animated baddie Steppenwolf finding three ‘mother boxes’ that will make the world a ‘primordial hellscape’. Not to worry… Aquaman has a pitchfork. Must have been Friday afternoon in the writers’ room when they came up with that scenario.

There are too many characters to care about and the inane plot and dialogue make the film sag between bouts of cgi action. But if you fast forward through the dull bits there may be enough here to while away an hour or so, even if the fisticuffs do become repetitive. In the DVD Extras the producers threaten there are more episodes to come.

With more cardboard Marvel superheroes than you can shake a stick at (Thor, The Hulk, Dr Strange etc.), you have to feel sorry for the numerous star actors who have so little to work with. As if that isn’t bad enough, they spend most of the time off-screen while their cgi avatars battle it out. Never mind. Take the money and run.

Within five minutes the Hulk is in a fisticuffs contest with big baddie Thanos. He’s the first to be mighty enough to wield two infinity stones, you see, so the whole Marvel stable is required to subdue him. In other words it’s the bog-standard superhero plot.

The only interesting character, the ambivalent Loki, is killed off at the beginning. And when you think it can’t get any more ridiculous, the Guardians of the Galaxy turn up with cgi animals that make Basil Brush seem an invention of genius. The usual confrontations are dutifully ticked off in a manner that surely even retarded fanboys must tire of soon. The ending, if you last out the 2hr+ bore-a-thon, is completely unresolved, setting up the next instalment in the franchise. Please make it stop.

This superior sequel is an exercise in tension. The CIA starts a Mexican drug cartel war as retribution for a terrorist attack. It’s complicated, with plot and dialogue so dense that you may even find subtitles a help to understand the military small talk. The plot gradually focusses in on agents Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro, who find themselves being forced by circumstances onto opposing sides. There’s plenty of action, although the tone, underpinned by a grumbling score, is tense rather than gung-ho. You might wish the leads would occasionally show a bit more fear or excitement, but pay close attention and you’re in for a thrilling couple of hours.

Casey Affleck mumbles his way through another film. As if it’s not achingly slow enough already, full of static camera shots, held far too long, sometimes without even a person on screen. If you’re looking for a movie (i.e. which moves), this barely counts as one. With such a poor attempt at audience engagement, it’s hard to care about the content. Affleck dies and becomes a ghost that no-one can see. He wanders around draped in a sheet while we watch his widow silently wander around the house and eat food. According to the film blurb, it’s a meditation on life and grief. Yeah, right. At least Affleck’s death has stopped the mumbling. But wait… there are flashbacks… the mumbling has started again! This reviewer gave up at this point. It’s anti-cinema at its worst.

In snowy northern Norway a snowplough driver exacts revenge on the gangsters he thinks have killed his son. Other gangsters get involved and the killings, some of them of the wrong people, escalate until the plot develops into a black comedy. There’s little going on behind the surface, and it does sag occasionally through repetition, but you’ll want to stick with it. There are some nice bleak moments, as in the very last few seconds, and some nice snowscapes to look at until the next killing comes along.

Based on a true story of young German soldiers made to clear land mines from Danish beaches after losing WW2, this is an interesting idea under-developed in the filming. Having the young men brutalised by a sadistic Danish commander is heavy-handed and unpleasant to watch. The tension of the land-mine scenes is lost because of writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s muted direction. His avowed aim of exploring an ‘eye for an eye’ mentality (see DVD extras) needs both more subtlety and more heightened drama to turn this into a riveting movie.

The not-very-interesting tale of an aircraft pilot who gets caught up in undercover CIA operations in Central America in the 1970s and 80s. If you’re unfamiliar with the political scene then – Contras, Noriega, North etc. – this anti-government history lesson, as implied by the sneering title, is unlikely to engage non-US viewers. Tom Cruise does his best with the shallow, corrupt, gun-and-drug-running lead character, but you’re hardly gonna root for him. According to director Doug Liman (on the DVD extras) we’re supposed to see him as a loveable rogue. Er, no, he ain’t.

Liman has made some great films, but there’s little he can do with the material here except adopt a fast pace to try and maintain the viewer’s attention. Played as a black comedy, the film never hits the spot and the jaunty score further distances the viewer from the action. The project obviously got the green light because of its left-wing political stance, but it makes for poor cinema and would be better suited to a short documentary.

Following the ridiculous Pacific Rim comes an even more ridiculous and boring sequel in which giant robots swap fisticuffs with each other and Japanese monsters while bashing into skyscrapers. It’s a juvenile cartoon that makes even the equally ridiculous Transformers franchise seem like a masterpiece.

The very concept of giant robots manned behind the eyes by synchronised pairs of adolescents (yes, really), whose movements power the robot’s movements, is laugh-out-loud nonsensical. Any talent the cast may have is not on view. The fact that some of the dialogue is in Mandarin as a sop to the increasingly important Chinese market shows what this film is really about. For real masochists, the DVD contains a director’s commentary.

The very misleading title and trailer may lead you into expecting another Honk Kong shoot-em-up, but this is something different. It’s a charming little film in which an ageing ex-Triad boss (the always reliable Anthony Wong) falls for a younger woman (the always watchable Charlene Choi), even though anyone can see it’s she and his younger brother who are made for each other. Not until a dramatic plot point at the hour mark does the tone become darker as old adversaries must be faced. The whole makes for an odd combination of genres. Does it work? Not entirely, but it’s worth a look to find out.

After a promising prologue we jump 10 years and it takes an age to develop a plot about Jon Hamm negotiating with kidnappers in Beirut. Cue lots of shots of local colour and political machinations, all of which lose their impact by being set decades ago in 1982. Any twists can be seen coming a mile off. He’s given a tracking device in his trouser belt, but when his fellow agents follow it into a tough spot.. and the tension builds… he’s taken it off and is elsewhere. There’s an equally ridiculous plot point that plays on characters’ names. It does become more interesting as it develops but it’s woefully let down by a lack of imagination in the pacing and plotting.

This comic take on the X-Men franchise opens promisingly with self-mocking credits, but as soon as the bad-guys-who-can’t-shoot-straight show up we’re in familiar cliché territory. As ever with Marvel, it’s juvenile brainless fare, with nothing going on beneath the surface. It ends with the bog-standard cgi climax. Yawn, yawn.

Nevertheless, the film deserves a couple of stars for at least trying to be different, with an R rating for pointless swearing, a comic sex scene and an out-of-place torture scene. It even makes jokes about other Marvel efforts and breaks the fourth wall, as when superhero Ryan Reynolds moves the camera lens to avoid us having to see him kill someone. A few of his barrage of wisecracks and self-references work, but his sniggering voice-over soon grates. The DVD Extras even feature a cringe-making gag reel that shows how scatter-gun improvised the ‘jokes’ were.

The biggest cheer of the film is reserved for when the chief baddie calls Ryan ‘relentlessly annoying’. Many a true word… It certainly strips the film of any drama that might persuade the audience to care about what’s going on.

Other reviewers must have been watching a different film. Unusually in the Marvel universe, this is better than the original. A Marvel film with layers of drama and real heart. There’s a plot that actually engages, there are in-jokes that are actually amusing and there’s mercifully much less of the Ryan Reynolds voiceover that made the original so annoying. Josh Brolin, meanwhile, adds some much-needed depth as a Terminator-type baddie from the future who is worthy of a darker film. Who’d have thought?

Typical in-joke: when the plot takes an easy way out of a hole, Reynolds’ quips ‘That’s just lazy writing.’ When the film is about to lurch into a typical Marvel cgi borefest, he warns us: ‘There’s a big cgi fight coming up.’ His X-Force team of hopeless misfits is a riot and features a micro-second appearance of Brad Pitt as the Invisible Man. And the best superpower ever? Luck. Perhaps this kind of self-denigration is what has put some Marvelheads off.

Orlando Bloom joins a Chinese cast struggling with their English in this ho-hum by-the-numbers actioner. He gets kudos for doing his own stunts but otherwise it’s one big cliché from start to finish. Judging by the out-takes shown over the end-credits, it was more fun for the cast.

A bucolic fantasy in the Ghibli tradition, this features gorgeous landscapes and cityscapes with a central plot that completely lacks drama. Two teenagers – a country girl and a city boy – swap places and inhabit each other’s body while asleep. They lead double lives and communicate through journals.

There’s scope here for humour, but director Makoto Shinkai doesn’t do humour. Nor does he do drama, with voiceovers that are subdued to the point of whisper. The result is a drawn-out affair too low-key for most Western tastes but worth watching if you love beautiful animation. In the DVD Extras Shinkai describes how he wants to ‘depict scenery overflowing with emotion’. You want to live in a Shinkai landscape and this is his most beautiful film yet.

In this neat and seductive little film – Jim Jarmusch’s best for ages – a few centuries-old cultivated vampires eke out their existence in the dark corners of the world while contemplating the mess ‘zombies’ (i.e. humans) are making of the planet. Typical of Jarmusch’s off-kilter take on life, it’s not like any other vampire film you’ve ever seen and will be too languid for anyone brain-fried by the Marvel universe. Don’t be put off. The tone is elegant and languorous. The plot is quirky and tense. The dialogue is funny and thoughtful. The menu includes iced blood lollipops. Like all the best films, it sucks you in until you don’t want it to end.

Tom Hiddleston is excellent as a reclusive floppy-haired electronic musician who once wrote an adagio attributed to Vivaldi. He still lives the romantic life he learned from Byron and Shelley. Both he and his music are really cool, man. (Check out the soundtrack by Jarmusch’s band SQURL on YouTube.) Tilda Swinton is Tom’s enigmatic wife, who is ‘quantum coupled’ with him even at a distance. John Hurt has a cameo as Christopher Marlowe, who apparently really did write Shakespeare’s plays. Mia Wasikowska is the headstrong younger sister who’s about to put them all in danger (Don’t go clubbing with her!).

Can they survive in the modern world? Even zombies will be rooting for them.