Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

Slow moving, slow plotted story about an investigation into the trafficking of Asian women in an Australian desert small town. Everything is as pared back as the landscape. It’s s-l-o-w. Even the score, minimal at best, is built around a plaintive piano, as is often the case in films enamoured of their own self-importance. Don’t be fooled by the DVD cover picture of our two cop heroes firing rifles. There’s only some brief out-of-character action at the climax.

The flat desert landscape is lovingly photographed, the two leads are good and there’s the kernel of a good story here, but it’s a long haul to the end credits. Shouldn’t a ‘mystery thriller’, as the writer/director calls it on the DVD extras, be dramatic?

British actioners with the pizazz of Hollywood are thin on the ground. When one turns up, it’s to be applauded. Mercifully unsullied by British cinema’s love affair with social realism, this is escapist fare far superior to recent staid Bond efforts. Dominic Cooper struts his stuff as an SBS operative, there’s a ruthless baddie and an MI6 mole. The action includes a car chase in Rome, a boat chase in London and stunts with a double decker bus. Simon West (Con Air, The Expendables etc.) knows how to direct action (see DVD Extras for a ‘making of’ feature). Sure, it’s derivative, clichéd and by-the–numbers, with the usual orchestral muzak score, but it’s more fun to watch than most British films. Go, go, go!

Spoiler: FF8 begins with a car race between two cars. Vin Diesel wins it. In his vest! Who’d have thought? No. 8 in the franchise and it’s still breaking new ground! It sets new records in the cliché count. It reaches new heights in inane dialogue. It pulls out all the stops in finding new ways to shoot scantily clad pneumatic young women. The bald stars’ stunt men are at last given their due by having their appearance in action scenes made obvious. The thunderous score achieves new levels of bombast. Oh, and there’s a lot of car mechanics to add to the intrigue.

The plot revolves around Vin going rogue. Surely not. You’ll be on tenterhooks to find out why. New to the franchise, he even attempts emotion in a couple of scenes. It’s ground-breaking stuff. There are car crashes, fist fights and flash bangs, especially during the drawn-out climax, which thankfully keeps repeating explosions so that we can see more fire. There’s even a prison riot set to hip-hop music. Really cool, man.

The film looks good and is mercifully devoid of shaky cam. Apart from that it richly deserves the zero-star rating it has worked so hard to earn.

A cleaning lady takes pity on an amphibian man held in a research establishment and plans to rescue him. Guillermo del Toro is a good director, but this overlong slow-burning fairy tale is somewhat less than enthralling. This often happens when directors get to write and make their ‘dream project’, as he calls the film on the DVD extras.

It’s a retread of Beauty and the Beast set to a score of elevator muzak featuring flutes and human whistles. Hearing del Toro discuss it is even more off-putting. Love and water are ‘the most powerful things in the universe’, he opines. Yeah, right. The three characters who plan the rescue are all one person. Yeah, right. It’s set in 1962 because that was a ‘horrible time for love’. Yeah, right.

Vastly over-praised because of del Toro’s reputation, it has a few interesting moments but overall is no more than a disappointing time-passer.

An investigation into the murder of a Native American woman in the snowy wilds of Wyoming’s Wind River Range turns out to be less an adventurous than it sounds. Filmed in Utah, with little mountain scenery, writer/director Taylor Sheridan admits on the DVD extras that his main interest was in the campaign for Native American rights. It’s well observed and watchable, but basically it’s a mood piece with a dismal score that further turns it into a feel-bad evening at the cinema.

Jeremy Renner is fine as the wildlife tracker with detection skills, but Elizabeth Olsen’s out-of-her-element FBI agent has an increasingly irritating manner and voice. Seeing Renner in the mountains only makes one hanker for the similar but more exciting early scenes of The Bourne Legacy, but it’s not that kind of film. Here he merely snowmobiles around the forest.

The film does eventually feature some action to liven things up a tad, perhaps as a sop to the audience, but even this is diminished by the dismal score. And there’s a flashback of the murder that should have been placed earlier to ramp up the meagre tension in the plot. The writer/director has previous with this. There were similar story problems with his screenplays for Hell or High Water and Sicario (see my reviews). Re-edited, with a better score, this could have been a much more successful film.

Another adventurous choice for the ever-watchable actor that Daniel Radcliffe has become since putting the boy wizard behind him. Dan and his fellow backpackers go walkabout in the Bolivian jungle. Based on a true story, the first half is an old-fashioned adventure story of Man v Jungle and it works admirably on this level. The characters feel real, the locations are gorgeous, director Greg McLean keeps the story moving along with pace and you’re drawn along into the adventure, even with a tinge of envy. Of course, things don’t go well.

The second-half turns into a survivalist tour-de-force that, as they say on TV, ‘some viewers may find distressing’. There are some gross-out scenes, but it would still work if not for the sudden introduction of flashbacks and hallucinations that dissipate the tension. To give you some idea of what’s in store, the rea-life character that Dan plays actually came out of the jungle with 13 worms burrowed in his body.

The DVD has a raft of fascinating extras that show the considerable physical discomfort Dan put himself through during filming. A gripping watch that with more focus could have been a classic.