THE HANGOVER 2- Review

'Four friends go and have a bachelor party ahead of (Name)'s wedding, and wind up having a wild drunken night in (Location). When they wake up the next morning, they have the mother of all hangovers, and find some gangsters are after them, looking for their (Noun). Worse still, they've managed to misplace (Name) and have to find him before the wedding. Oh, and there's a (Animal) in the bathroom.'

The Hangover Part II is, in every respect, mad-lib filmmaking. The structure of this sequel is practically identical to the original film, but this time it's mild-mannered dentist Stu, getting married in Thailand. He reluctantly invites along his best friend Phil and giant man-child Alan, and lives to regret it when they all wake up in Bangkok. Stu's future brother-in-law is missing, and apparently, "Bangkok has him now."

Part of what made The Hangover so enjoyable, for me at least, was how unexpected it was. Some fans are already saying this sequel is better, if the midnight screening crowd at Cineworld in Middlesbrough is anything to go by, and I fully anticipate that those people will say that it's unfair to compare to the original. Worse sequels have had this defence applied, but the similarities are so intrinsic here that it's impossible not to compare.

If this film itself were a hangover, you couldn't have had too much to drink, because prior events in these characters' lives are all too sharp in the viewers' memories. Of course you have to compare this to the original! Expecting otherwise is like expecting someone to like your dog better than any of the other dogs they've ever encountered. If it wags and chases its tail, barks, and has a wet nose, it's still a blimmin' dog. The Hangover Part II is pretty much of the exact same breed as its predecessor, but it's considerably more aggressive.

Director Todd Phillips has been promising that shit gets real when the Wolfpack reaches Bangkok, and that the sequel is wilder, darker and meaner than the original. The middle word there is a particular favourite as abstract concepts go. In all of the things that this one goes further with than The Hangover, it's not really funnier. As mentioned, I enjoyed that film because it was unexpected, but the whole rehash of the original is what lets the comedy down in this one.

The Hangover, in addition to all of its enjoyable performances and quotable dialogue and surreal twists, was a detective story. Our detectives, ably played by Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms, were all hapless and recovering from the biggest night out of their lives, but watching them pull together to solve the mystery worked so well for me because I didn't know where it would go next. Cooper, Galifianakis and Helms are all equally as good here, but in this instalment, I could easily guess where the plot was going.

If your viewing experience is anything like mine, you'll realise this in one of the film's more inventive moments, in which we see a flashback of events up to that point in the film, as re-enacted by young children. It's different, and surreal, and well-executed, but it didn't make me laugh. Some of the best gags are frittered away in the marketing too, like Alan's baldness and Stu's tattoo and the return of Ken Jeong as flamboyant gangster Chow. But the boldness of the film is almost all bravado and no real innovation.

Without the ability to surprise, the film goes in for shock tactics instead. It's harsher, alright, to the point where some will actually be offended. There was no danger of that in Vegas, which is somehow exponentially safer than Bangkok. Also, I know for a fact that a second act twist is lifted wholesale from an early draft of the first film, meaning that the sequel actually mined stuff that wasn't good enough to make it into the original. It's not all bad news though- one of the welcome reprisals of the first film comes in the closing credits montage, and that's easily the funniest part in each film.

The Hangover Part II is remarkably zippy, for a film in which all of the path laid ahead will be predictable to anybody who has seen the first film. I think that comes down to the fact that the performers are still on top form, their camaraderie preserved best of all, alongside just about everything else from two years ago. If Phillips and these guys want to make Part III, more power to them, and I'll see it. But I'd really, sincerely hope that they bring something different along next time. It's More Of The Same, capital M, O, T and S, but if you still really love the first one, I doubt you'll object too strongly to revisiting the Wolfpack.

The Hangover Part II is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Hangover Part II, why not share your comments below? I'm taking a week off next week, but I'll return on June 6th with my review of X-Men: First Class.

 I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

LIMITLESS- Review

After the last few weeks of bombardment from Battle Los Angeles and No Strings Attached, a quick fix of intelligence sounds just as appealing to me as it does to Bradley Cooper's character in the new sci-fi thriller Limitless. Chuck in the fact that he's a struggling writer who quickly gets stressed out when more stuff comes into his life, and it could have been made for me.

Eddie is our hero's name, and it's purely by chance that he's fixed up with an experimental drug called NZT, by his scummy ex-brother-in-law. NZT is a transparent tablet, about the size of an aspirin, but its consumption stimulates the receptors of the human brain and boosts the body's access to its potential. Eddie begins quaffing pills right away, little realising the price of his newfound intelligence.

For a while, Limitless was reminding me of Fight Club, in places replicating that film's dark humour, mode of storytelling, and overwhelming righteous anger at The Way Things Are. Certainly, it is to Bradley Cooper what Fight Club was to Brad Pitt, giving Cooper a chance to really work his acting chops and open him up to a second appraisal after the frat comedies and romcoms he's made his name in. And while we're talking about Cooper, I was very impressed at how he convinced me as a loser just as much as he convinced as the successful and handsome bloke he really is, later on in the film. But it took a while longer for me to twig exactly what the film reminded me of as a whole, and that's Unbreakable.

NZT effectively makes Eddie into a man of superhuman intelligence, not only able to recall everything he has ever learned and apply it to his current life but also capable of learning new things at an exponential rate. If they'd wanted to take it that way, the filmmakers could have made this a superhero origin story. But while Bruce Willis' character in Unbreakable was a suburban Superman, his invulnerability seemingly natural, Eddie's powers are fuelled by narcotics, but more pertinently, using hypothetical science that messes with nature, in the view of fuddy-duddy conservative Hollywood.

So it's a Faustian tale, and thusly, the pitfalls of addiction are thoroughly examined. As you might expect of a pill sourced from a random acquaintance with a history of being an unreliable drug dealing bastard, it has chemical faults that manifest themselves in the course of Eddie's addiction, but that's not all. The title is Limitless, but Eddie's intellectual omnipotence isn't immune to other people. While you can anticipate the greed of others or, as the film puts it, the human tendency to overreach, you can't always stop external forces from messing up your life.

Director Neil Burger pulls off a great bit of visual storytelling in representing Eddie's addiction. In the beginning of the story, the visuals are bleached, drab and milky. When Eddie first swallows that clear pill and lets it take effect, the world brightens up, illuminated by sunshine and broadened by a wide-angle lens that allows him to see everything in front of him. In a period where he goes cold turkey, it's drab and milky again, but still clear. And once he's fixed up again, that sunshine starts to look awful bright. Blinding, even. The effects don't change, but the context does, and it's very clever stuff.

But unfortunately, the limits of the film aren't just within the story- they're outside of it too, in the script and in the production. With a great head of momentum building between Eddie's successes and his addiction to the drug, the film ultimately doesn't have enough in it to give us a strong conclusion. It does that thing that annoyed me in The Adjustment Bureau, of jumping forward in time, but these scenes feels after the fact in the wake of the climactic scenes preceding it. As is human nature then, the film overreaches.

This is where the comedown begins. You gradually begin to realise that the film isn't as clever as it thinks, or indeed, as clever as you thought up until that point. The high of the earlier part of the film begins to dissipate, and coming down allows you to realise, as you plummet towards the credits and then walk out of the cinema, that you can't account for certain plotholes. Is that subplot really not going to come back? Is that really it for that character? Wait, what was that all about? And one of the early highlights of the movie, when Eddie outright asks the audience what they would do in his situation, given the risk, is negated by the way the film closes the book on any persistent ambiguities about the pros and cons of NZT.

Another recent Faust-inspired movie, Philip Ridley's Heartless, had more heart than the title would suggest. Similarly, Limitless is a good film, but one with more inhibitions than either its title or its pacey swagger would suggest. I was enthralled enough by the premise and Bradley Cooper's performance to give it a rock-solid recommendation, and I stand by that. However, its inconsistencies and its closed-minded conclusion mean that ironically, it's a film for which you might need to leave your brain at the door, if only to avoid the subsequent comedown.

Limitless is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Limitless, why not share your comments below? And yes, I know Robert DeNiro was in this too. When he gives an interesting performance, I'll have something to say.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

A For Anaemic- THE A-TEAM Review

As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.

Does it really need the preamble? Have we not been bombarded, blasted and bloody well bludgeoned with The A-Team for the last couple of months? Before every film you see in the cinema, an advert from Orange that features the film heavily, specifically that opening narration from the series! They even played the ad before the screening of the film itself! Presuming you know about these characters one way or the other, it only remains to say that Hannibal, Faceman, Murdock and B.A. are out to acquit themselves for a crime they didn't commit. Explosions ensue.

What are the odds that I'd be saying a film based on The A-Team doesn't do enough? As with the other 80s throwback I reviewed this week, The Karate Kid, the source material isn't exactly to be heralded as high art. It's a fairly fun show that somehow still ended up being pretty much universally loved by repeating the same basic story each week with likable characters. I'm no purist, but if I catch an episode while channel-hopping, I'll give it a look.

It was fun, it was frothy and crucially to its formula, it was cheap. Minimal budget, maximum returns- the show was insanely popular in its heyday. All you should really need to know about The A-Team in 2010 is that it cost $100 million to make. When that much money is in play, especially from a studio like 20th Century Fox- whose executives are well-renowned for hatchet jobs on the likes of Die Hard 4 and Alien vs. Predator- there has to be some compromise. The cheesy, family-friendly stunts of the original become transparent and samey to appeal to a less than lucid 12A audience. There's death, swearing, sexual references and all those things that have led Mr. T to disavow the remake.

So it's an expensive operation that removes all the charm from the original concept, but one that's eased immeasurably by its miscast players. Liam Neeson isn't bad as team leader Hannibal, but he never particularly relaxes, seeming to deliver his lines through gritted teeth all the way through. Quinton "Rampage" Jackson steps into the Mr. T shaped hole, and mumbles his way through with all the confidence and natural grace of a UFC fighter who was quoted calling acting "kinda gay" during his promotion efforts on this one.

The worst offender is a smug and now entirely annoying Bradley Cooper as Face. Somewhere in his mind, Face clicked with "Dreamworks Face" for him, because that's almost his default expression in this film! That fucking Dreamworks Face! Seriously, Mr. Cooper?! Much more watchable is Sharlto Copley, but it's sad to see him follow up his Wikus van der Merwe from District 9 with this- a film in which he's fifth-billed, behind Jessica Biel, even though he's playing a member of the title's four-man team. He plays it wacky, but he provides welcome laughs in an otherwise anaemic remake.

It would be both churlish and forgetful to complain that the eventual villain of the piece is underpowered, because the bad guys of the week in the series were always underpowered compared to the larger-than-life protagonists. At the same time, the film gains nothing for evoking Green Zone-esque mercenaries and upgrading the context to the war in Iraq. Even having the team still working for the military makes this one long origin piece, almost as unforgivable as the languorous back-story of Ridley Scott's Robin Hood from a few months back.

You might like the camaraderie between the protagonists, because it does liven up a pretty bog-standard action film, but I found it to be full of itself, backslapping and condescending. It's like the film is constantly trying to persuade you that it's fun so you'll excuse its faults, rather than actually showing you a good time. Any sense of fun just feels intensely artificial. It definitely doesn't help that we've seen almost every good action setpiece in all the adverts and trailers. What remains is one admittedly brilliant gag sequence in a mental hospital and a bunch of CG-infused stupidity. It's the film that's suffered the most for its advertising campaign in recent memory- sure, that extensive clusterfuck will get people to see it, but will they be satisfied?

Remember The Losers, from earlier this year? Well that film out-A-Teamed The A-Team. This reboot has squandered its potential by sticking with the playbook for big-budget action films and taking itself seriously enough that its faults are just magnified. It's not just the absence of series hallmarks, like BA's van (for the most part) and that theme tune, but it's the utter lack of anything to latch onto and really enjoy. Lots of people will call this "fun", but I doubt many will stretch to call it "good".

That A in the title couldn't honestly be said to stand for "Awful", but there are any number of other words I would fit in there. Like Average, or Atypical, or Awkward, or, as I said earlier, Anaemic. Hardcore fans of the series will be disappointed and there's really very little to recommend to new audiences either, except maybe Sharlto Copley's Murdock. Shame he had to hang around with a bunch of other more unlikable gits, really. 

The A-Team is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If and when you see The A-Team, if there's no-one else to talk to, and if you know how, maybe you can leave... a comment. (gunfire and... cue theme tune.)

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

My Bloody Quarantine

I've still got legs! And with my limbs intact, I really can't ignore the fact that I have to review Valentine's Day, giving even more thought to two hours of my life that would have been more pleasurably spent slamming my head in a car door while the massive cast took it in turns to cut the all the webs between my fingers and toes with scissors. Cringing? That's nothing to actually watching the film.

The sole reason this gets a post of its own is because it is literally tainted. I have also seen From Paris with Love, which... SPOILER ALERT... was pants, but not so pants as to deserve the fate of being "the one I reviewed alongside Valentine's Day." Yes folks, this is the blog's first ever conscious quarantine of a film review.

***WARNING***
THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS EXTREME PREJUDICE TOWARDS AWFUL SHIT.
IF YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY AWFUL SHIT, PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Sigh. OK, here goes. If I were to take a run at what this film's about, I could sum it up by saying it follows a number of tumultuous relationships and unlikable people on one Valentine's Day in LA. More operatively, very famous actors playing unlikable people. The traditional, but largely unconscious format of these reviews usually sets aside a paragraph to talk about the cast and their performances, so I'll take a run at that now. Deep breath...

Ashton Kutcher is irksome and twee, Jennifer Garner is a downright stupid character played by a usually enjoyable actress, Patrick Dempsey succeeds only for being a smarmy fuck finally cast in the thankless role of "Smarmy Fuck #2", Queen Latifah is still pointing out that she's a larger lady for anyone who hasn't noticed, Jamie Foxx continues to bend over and take an arse-fucking to his career in the name of a paycheck, Jessica Biel's character spends the whole film voicing problems with commercialised love that really should've been considered by the writers, Anne Hathaway is winsome but underused, Topher Grace builds in annoyance on the foundation of the less than sterling performance he gave in Spider-Man 3, Taylors Swift and Lautner are just abominable, Hector Elizondo is bewildered and Shirley Maclaine sort of deceives him and then dresses up as a Quality Street at the end, and finally, Jessica Alba, Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts are all pointless addendums to a horrifying running time.

Yes, this film runs for 125 minutes and covers no more ground than a dead baby turtle. Cringing again? A dead baby turtle would hardly be more abhorrent than this film. In the same way as (500) Days of Summer was a terrific romantic comedy but not a great date movie, I literally cannot imagine a worse date movie that this. No other film in recent memory tries so tepidly to quantify love with dialogue that sounds like it comes from the trailer narration of a Jennifer Aniston film rather than anything else. The odd thing is that this film came out on the weekend of February 14th, and another Garry Marshall-directed film was re-released for the day, Pretty Woman. Valentine's Day has, unbelievably, become a huge hit in the States, but it's almost like they were hedging their bets by counter-programming against their own awful piece of celluloid crap.

Some will call me bitter- that's the stock excuse against people who call Valentine's Day the crass and commercialised greeting-card-company funding drive that it actually is. No, sorry, this is just a bad film. The mooted sequel, New Year's Eve may be doubly terrible, but it won't be certainly won't be better than this. If Valentine's Day is about love, then it's not about watching Valentine's Day, and given how that's the one day of the year when you're presumably supposed to watch this awful shit in years to come, they've failed on every single level. Even by the measure of people who like it, and I presume those who contributed to the Memorable Quotes page on IMDB do, there is not a single funny line in the thing. It's a film about a bunch of attractive actors tricking you into an auditorium to steal your money and worse, what feels like a year of your life. It is just abysmal- it's not the worst film I've ever seen, but it's down there.

To end on a sensitive note- February 14th isn't just one day of the year where you should be romantic with your loved one. You should show your appreciation all year round, signify your feelings with every loving caress. And most importantly, the time not to watch Valentine's Day with them is all year round. Avoid this film like genital warts.

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Righto, everyone to the radiation showers if you read through all of that, and then back here later in the week for the review of From Paris With Love, which will likely be paired off with either Precious or The Crazies, and then there'll be a look at Disney's Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland by Disney at the weekend. If you've seen Valentine's Day, please do get in touch with the comments below. We have to stick together here- we didn't die, so we can presumably survive anything. Be strong, everyone. Jesus loves you.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch it. Really, I know I did, but don't go and see it. Don't!