Film Reviews by Alphaville

If you’re into this repetitive franchise, it’s beyond criticism. If you’re not, you’ll be gobsmacked at how anyone could be. With its farcical premise, incoherent plotting, clichéd characters and ludicrous dialogue, it’s an object lesson in the dumbing down of action films.

See cars change into robots! Again! See explosions! Again! See a cgi fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron! Again! See humans on the run cry ‘Go go go’! Again!

Director Michael Bay’s back catalogue clearly shows he has the visual imagination to shoot stylish films. If only he’d put it to better use, but when the franchise makes so much money from lobotomised filmgoers, why bother? He’s gone down the George Lucas route. Makes you weep for the future of blockbuster cinema.

Star-crossed lovers play will-they/won’t-they against the backdrop of Armenian genocide in Turkey during WW1. The aching score sets the mood and there are moments both poignant and exciting. However, the film wears its earnestness on its sleeve and in places becomes burdened with its message. It aims for an epic quality but is perhaps best judged on its parts rather than the sum of them. If you’re in the mood for a good wallow, it’s a smoothly filmed piece of entertainment with a message worth airing (Turkey denies the outrage to this day).

To get anything other than initial laughter and growing boredom out of this film, you have to be able to take these motion-captured cgi apes seriously. Unfortunately that means you’d have to have a lobotomy. Top Ape Caesar is angry because Top Human Woody Harrelson, here slumming it, has killed his wife. Since when did the apes adopt human marriage rituals? Which marriage rituals? Who were the bridesmaids? Did the best ape give a speech? Who baked the cake? Where’s Top Cat when you need him?

Andy Serkis voices Caesar as though delivering a funeral oration, pronouncing every word so slowly and with such import that it’s best to fast forward his speeches to give them some approximation of realism. Indeed, after 10 minutes of this rubbish you might want to fast forward the whole film because there’s little plot and no surprises. The fact that most if it takes place in darkness further adds to the ennui. With so much cgi on view, do you think there’d be explosions at the climax? Tick.

Pity director Matt Reeves. To think he once made the innovative Cloverfield before getting embroiled in this embarrassing franchise. Most critics who like the film do so because the apes look real. Is that all it takes? Okay, we’ll give it one star for animated ape hair.

This is a dreadful mixture of superhero origin plot, comedy and virtue-signalling. Watching it is like being bludgeoned into submission by an anti-war demonstrator. It starts as a generic origins movie with the standard cgi combats. See over-edited fight scenes! See wonder woman jump high in slo-mo! Hear the bombastic orchestral soundtrack!

At first it’s no worse than other superhero origin nonsense, but it soon degenerates even further into an old-fashioned World War 1 spy movie with wonder woman just along for the ride. Who knew that WW1 was started by Ares, the god of war? Cue lots of bog-standard derring-do and attempts at humorous asides.

This would be harmless enough, but what really makes you want to put your foot through the screen is the incessant virtue signalling. The anti-war hectoring is heaped on with a trowel and alleviated only by time-outs to tick boxes on racism, sexism and even North American Indian rights among others.

What the film desperately needs is a worthy bad guy, but only at the end does Ares turn up with a few silly cgi flash-bangs. Even then his main function is merely to ram home yet another anti-war message with endless exposition about how awful human beings are. By the time the end-credits roll you’d have to have a heart of stone not to want to punch something. And even then end-credit readers are submitted to a soundtrack that features a mind-numbing ballad by a warbling clone.

Wonder woman’s message for mankind? ‘Only love can save the world.’ Yep, that’ll do it. Superhero films in general set the bar extremely low, but this one plumbs a new nadir.

Although laughably compared to House of Flying Daggers, this is one of the most poorly filmed of all Korean historical epics. ‘Non-stop action’ raves the Sky movies site. Cue an opening half-hour of boring exposition with acting of Carry On quality. Sometimes you wonder if critics have seen the same film.

The bow-and-arrow action is repetitive to the point of tedium and filmed in fast-edited close-up shakycam with ugly zooms and pans thrown in to add to the visual confusion. The DVD making-of extras show the cameraman stumbling around with the camera on his shoulder as if he’s shooting an old 8mm family holiday. ‘It makes sure to get your blood pumping’ says the Cinema Paradiso review. Yes, with anger at having wasted time on it. This is shoddy am-dram film-making.

This is emotionally cold but grown-up sci-fi, intriguing both visually and philosophically. It’s a pity the characters are so bland and earnest, with actors delivering their lines in such a stylised flat manner that they’re difficult to engage with. Much of the film is shot in darkness with lots of intense whispering. Even the futuristic cityscapes, although beautifully rendered by cgi, are never as thrilling as in animated versions of the manga.

It comes over as a downbeat mood piece that needs more pace and characters to root for. The plot only really kicks in half-way through, when Michael Pitt appears as an adversary to our heroine Scarlett Johansen (a human mind in a robotic body). This adds some much needed drama to proceedings but only leads to a silly climactic fight with a ‘spider tank’.

In summary, the whole is less than the sum of its parts but there’s much to look at along the way.

Unaccountably playing at Cannes, and despite being liked by some critics, this bog-standard, one-paced Korean gangster drama soon palls. Noirish and pulpish, with no action to relieve the who-cares-anyway gang in-fighting, it’s a long 2hr haul to the end credits.

The first ten minutes are wonderful, then we meet our hero and heroine, who turn out to be government agents so juvenile as to be unbelievable. The only character with any depth is a shape-shifting pole dancer played by Rhianna. If you can ignore character and plot the visuals are nevertheless a feast for the eyes, with more imagination on show here than in all the Star Wars films put together. With so many interesting images to look at the film’s more enjoyable than it has any right to be.

Based on a comic book that director Luc Besson liked as a kid, it’s not intended to be 2001-deep, but if only some effort could have been made to engage the mind as well as the eyes. It’s still worth catching for some astounding scenes, and those first ten minutes are a wow.

Another inconsequential Hong Kong crime drama about rival gangs. You’ve seen it so many times it’s hard to care, especially when directed in such a pedestrian documentary-style fashion.

THE VILLAINESS ***** Bravura cinema

27 years after Luc Besson’s Nikita, writer/director Jung Byung-gil takes the same premise of a bad girl turned government assassin and comes up with a startling, twisting concoction of action and love story. In the pre-titles sequence alone, our heroine dispatches hordes of heavies in a single amazingly choreographed POV shot.

There’s so much to admire here, including some stunning compositions and beautiful scene transitions that indicate a director in love with the possibilities of film. The love story is delicately filmed and engaging. The action pieces are hectic and the restless camera draws you right into it. The frenetic chase sequences will make you gasp and have you wondering how they did it. Wonderful stuff.

There’s so much originality in this movie it must be like seeing Citizen Kane in the 1940s or Breathless in the 1960s. The DVD commentary by a couple of South Korean cinema buffs is equally fascinating and explains how some of the shots were filmed.

A pointless remake that takes a stultifying half-hour just to get the mummy out of the Iraqi desert to London. Much of the rest takes place in darkness, with shadowy zombie-like figures scurrying around. Spectacular set-pieces are few and short-lived. The plot has no sense of pace. Direction and dialogue are perfunctory. All attempts at humour fall flat. The climax is a damp squib.

The mummy herself is never scary or powerful enough to be a contender. She’s just boring. Star Tom Cruise has little to do and you know things are bad when Russell Crowe appears as Jekyll/Hyde and starts pontificating to camera.

Far more interesting, meriting the movie’s only star, are the plentiful making-of extras on the DVD. But if you like zombie-type films, watch Train to Busan instead.

This woefully amateurish film plays like a cheap Hong Kong actioner. It features lots of grunting warriors battling it out in hand-held close-up confusion that’s edited to smithereens. It soon becomes unwatchable but don’t let it put you off wonderful Korean films such as The Chaser.

Divided into seven chapters, this jigsaw puzzle of a movie mixes plotlines and timelines and digresses into the lives of minor characters. All of which adds up to a bona fide indie sci-fi ride with much to admire. Goodies, baddies and creatures battle it out on a well-realised rocky planet. Despite some wordy interludes there’s plenty of action utilising some fun cgi and you’ll want to stick with it until the picaresque ending to see where it’s heading.

The DVD extras include an interesting interview with writer/director Shane Abbess, who describes how he wanted to take the audience on a voyage of discovery in both plot and character. He’s succeeded.

A boy racer drives a heist getaway car while grooving to 50s-type rock-and-roll muzak. This is intended to be cool. Spoiler: it isn’t.

The movie is a lightweight time-passer that moves along snappily enough, but the incessant muzak really irritates. Director Edgar Wright first had the idea for the film 22 years ago and the soundtrack’s even older. He’s responsible for it. He needs to upgrade his musical tastes.

Overall it’s yet another distasteful caper movie that, lacking Tarentino-esque dialogue, views robbery and murder as nothing more than funky fun. Critics who rated it need to look at themselves. The DVD extras also irritate, offering nothing but a hagiography of the director.

Based on an adolescent killing game, Assassin’s Creed has a premise and plotline that are pure hokum. Michael Fassbender is a descendant of a 15th century Spanish assassin and is able to regress to that time to find the Apple of Eden, which contains the genetic code to free will. Yeah, right.

Get past that and any cinema-lover is in for a treat. As an action-adventure film it’s a quantum leap better than the comic book franchises that disfigure modern multiplex cinema. With style to spare, it’s beautifully filmed in real-time in real locations with swooping drone and wire shots. The wirework action would not look out of place in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and there can be no higher praise than that.

Some of the world’s top parkour and slackline experts were recruited as stuntmen and real locations were used instead of cgi to enable the action to be captured in-camera rather than in post-production. This gives the film an epic quality and a thrilling realism missing from Marvel-type franchises. A kinetic chase over the rooftops of Malta is worth the price of admission alone. A mention also for the evocative electronic score by director Justin Kurzel’s brother Jed, which adds to the mystical atmosphere.

Ignore the plot-bound critics and gameboys who judged the film on content alone. It may be nonsense, but it’s pure cinema. It’s a film to lose yourself in, to wallow in the images, the score and the mystical ambience. Even the DVD Extras, rarely mentioned either by professional critics or amateur reviewers, are a cut above average. They include an exciting feature on the location stuntwork that gives an insight into why the action is so compelling. Watch and wonder.