THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU- Review

In the echelons of inaccurate pull-quotes, there shall be a special place for the Total Film assessment of the snappily titled sci-fi romance, The Adjustment Bureau, which appears on the poster and in many of the TV spots. Total Film called it "Bourne Meets Inception", when it's not really like either of those things, but hey, we're in a week where everything is "Bourne Meets" something or other.

So, what The Adjustment Bureau is really like is the Phillip K. Dick story from which it was inspired. David is a Congressman who looks set for a meteoric rise in the world of politics. He has a chance encounter with a dancer called Elise, and he's instantly smitten. However, when he meets her again a short while later, a powerful force interferes. A bureau of men in hats and suits posit that David and Elise were never meant to meet again, and they try their utmost to rectify the course of the plan that is rapidly unravelling as this couple fall deeper and deeper in love.

If we have to compare The Adjustment Bureau to something other than what it actually is, which is a romantic thriller with an otherworldly and theological concept, the comparison that most immediately struck me while watching it was with A Matter of Life and Death. Particularly in its later movements, the similarities are obvious when you're looking at a film about a couple trying to prove that they're destined to be together, even in the face of a higher force that is trying to divide them.  

A Matter of Life and Death is one of my favourite films of all time, so this film would inevitably suffer from that comparison, but it also means that I enjoyed it quite a lot. The masterstroke as far as this one is concerned is either in the casting or in what the lead actors managed to construct when they were thrown together. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are on fire in this film, whenever they appear together, with a scorching and yet very charming chemistry that really gets you on side.

However, throughout their extended Meet-Cute scenes, the sci-fi elements are established via these men in hats and suits being rather sinister in what they believe is doing right by David and Elise. In the lower rankings of the titular bureau, you get Anthony Mackie, who's ultimately quite friendly and pragmatic, but further up, you get the more rigid and authoritarian John Slattery. Go higher, and you get Terence "General Zod" Stamp, which gives a sense of the ingrained values of this powerful organisation.

They are the opposing force in what is basically a debate about determinism, and the role of free will. If there's a problem with the film, it is that the rules are too vaguely established. We are intended to follow that the Adjustment Bureau give human beings less individual choice in their own destinies because actual free will is a failed experiment that threw up the Dark Ages, two world wars and the Cuban missile crisis. That doesn't explain how their level of control allows for the current atrocities committed all over the world after those events.

These men work in mysterious ways, which is as much as I'm prepared to say without just spitting it out and telling you what we're meant to figure out ourselves while watching the film. In that framework, I can kind of forgive the film some of its vagaries, not least because it's just a very engaging watch. On the downside, I was less enamored of the abrupt time-skips that were brought in throughout the film, because nothing disrupts the momentum more than a sudden "Three years later". The film doesn't exactly outstay its welcome, but there are surely better and more inventive ways to illustrate a vast leap in the narrative.

The Adjustment Bureau was put back to this month from its original release date last summer, and despite having highly anticipated it for a long time, I can now appreciate the wisdom of that decision. In a relatively quiet month at the cinema, it has room to breathe, rather than being shot out of a cannon as counter-programming to Piranha or The Expendables. It's very easy to like, and slightly harder to dismiss some of its flaws, but crucially, it pitches a compelling romance between Damon and Blunt while working through a passage between romantic thriller and sci-fi parable.

The Adjustment Bureau is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen The Adjustment Bureau, why not share your comments below?

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

GNOMEO & JULIET- Review

As high concepts go, a retelling of a Shakespearean tragedy with garden ornaments is going to take the gold for this week's new releases. Still, with the next big 3D pop star pet project coming next week, I'd estimate that Elton John has done far better for his involvement in Gnomeo & Juliet than that fucking Bieber monster thing will do with his premature biopic.

The story, for the uninitiated, involves the romance of two starstruck lovers- in this case, the intrepid blue-hatted Gnomeo and the curious red-hatted Juliet, who live in adjoining gardens owned by a Mrs. Capulet and a Mr. Montague respectively. The two neighbours quarrel, and so the gnomes and ornaments in each garden follow suit, feuding over who has the best garden and indulging in the occasional high-speed lawnmower race. As a narrator gnome establishes in the opening scene, "this is a story that has been told before, many times, and we're going to tell it again, but different."

All of my problems with Dreamworks Animation lie within their inconsistency. The pop culture references could be a lot more bearable if focused on a recurring theme, as with the medieval branding in Shrek 2. Their soundtracks, usually sourced from wildly eclectic but still recognisable songs, might sell CDs but doesn't suit the tone of the movie. This is why Dreamworks' only truly good films since the first Shrek are How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda. In Gnomeo & Juliet, we have a no-brand animated film that keeps consistency in both its musical choices and its irreverent referencing, while carrying right on with being absolutely crackers.

In terms of the soundtrack, executive producer Elton John's back-catalogue accompanies much of the action, and yet doesn't stretch the film to the Herculean efforts of synchronising music as seen in Mamma Mia! and the like. And the visual references are largely Shakespearean, culminating in a fourth wall-crawling setpiece where the relative merits of a tragic ending are discussed in advance of this adaptation's ending. In the case of the references, it's the first indicator that the film is something more than I could have reasonably expected.

It's no masterpiece, and it's certainly not above borrowing certain story beats from other, more popular animated films. Most flagrantly, an apparently emotional sequence midway through the film has diminished impact when you remember a very similar and more memorable sequence from Toy Story 2. Also from Toy Story, we get the idea that these characters are inanimate objects that come to life.

That makes them very breakable, and this imbues the entire film with a bizarre sense of jeopardy that's lacking in certain other animated family films. You may assume that this won't end in the same way as the source material, but a niggling doubt may manifest itself as the film goes on. It's presumably this eccentricity, uniquely British, that attracted the starry cast of British talent. While James McAvoy and Emily Blunt are competent but fairly interchangeable with other bright young stars, there's some nice work from Michael Caine, Matt Lucas and Ashley Jensen. Oh, and Jason Statham playing a gnome is everything I ever hoped it would be.

Gnomeo & Juliet wound up being a lot more fun than I had expected- a cheerful little curiosity with more invention and imagination than you'd know from just glancing at it. I'm sure it will be overshadowed by Tangled and (God forbid) Yogi Bear during the half-term scramble by parents looking to keep their young'uns entertained, but it's worth a watch. It's camp and colourful, which makes it better suited to 2D than to the dimmed and darkened 3D, which just gets more boring with every successive release. It's not always predictable, and for the most part, it kept a smile on my face too.

Gnomeo & Juliet is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen Gnomeo & Juliet, why not share your comments below?

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

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS- Review

It's as bad as it looks. And worse.

Huh.

Sometimes I just...

Right, let's start with story, shall we? Theoretically, the story of Gulliver's Travels, created by Jonathan Swift to subtly satirise government and politics so as to avoid being executed for his views, is a travelogue by Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver is shipwrecked in a country where the inhabitants are 1/12 of his height, and variously travels to several other weird and wonderful places as the narrative progresses and Swift's critiques of the established order are embellished.

In Gulliver's Travels, a film from the makers of Shrek and Monsters vs. Aliens, the tale is modernised to centre around Jack Black as the now more implausibly named Lemuel Gulliver, an dislikeable bumbag who is never going to get out of the rut of employment he's nestled into at the New York Tribune. After resorting to shameless measures with the travel editor to bag a writing assignment in the Bermuda Triangle, Gulliver winds up shipwrecked in Lilliput. And that's where any manner of faithfulness to the text ends.

I'm only putting the gloves on for the advertising. To go into a rant about how it's stupidly over-exposed in trailers and adverts, like The A-Team before it, belies how apt the advertising actually was. It was crude, it looked terrible, and I for one wanted nothing more than for it to fuck off and die every time it assaulted my eyes and brain. That's pretty much how Gulliver's Travels, the movie, turns out. Some honest fellow in 20th Century Fox's marketing department deserves a quicker death than his cohorts in this enterprise. 

Gulliver's Travels is bad. And I mean, really bad. That salient point is the only way I can quickly get across my thoughts and feelings on this utter train-wreck of a motion picture. It is without wit, without irony, without innovation and without thought or feeling for anyone silly enough to pay cash money to see it. More notably however, it's without laughs. The kids in the screening I caught will testify to that. I'm not making this up- many of them laughed at the trailers before the film, for coming attractions like Gnomeo and Juliet and Yogi Bear, and at the Ice Age short that played before the main feature. For the entire duration of the main attraction, the whole cinema was deathly silent. You'll have more fun reading about Jonathan Swift's descent into madness on Wikipedia is than watching this film.

But what's wrong with it specifically? Well, simply put, it's Gulliver's Travels a la Dreamworks. I have been harsh on Dreamworks in the past, but I am speaking literally here- one of the screenwriters worked on the first two Shrek films and the director is Rob Letterman, who made a decent job of last year's Monsters vs. Aliens. But think of everything that comes with a bad Dreamworks film. Inane pop culture references, repurposed but no less blatant product placement, unfunny jokes that aim no higher than the shins of the lowest common denominator, and most annoyingly in this case, Jack Black.

As a rule, I generally like Jack Black, no matter how much of a pounding he took in my estimation after A Clockwork Orange style consumption of that Orange advert for this film before each and every one of the 40 films I've seen in the cinema since August. The trouble is, his repetitive schtick can get sort of irksome, especially when you cast him as a character as flagrantly abominable as this film's rendition of Gulliver. People say he plays himself, but I can't quite believe the image of Jack Black in films is anything close to the man himself. Because otherwise no one would be able to stand working with him.

Towering over the cast of Liliputians as he does, there's a fair argument to be made that Black is acting in a different film to them, added in afterwards through the magic of green screens. Supporting players like Billy Connolly and Jason Segel and Emily Blunt and Catherine Tate and... well, most of the little people are better than films like this. Only James Corden seems on the same wavelength as Black, with the consequence that you actually root for Chris O'Dowd as the film's villain as he calls out Gulliver's every action for the bullshit that it really is.

It's even more of a wasted opportunity when you consider that there are no prominent grown-up adaptations of Swift's novel, which contains more invention and intelligence than anyone bothered with on this version. Nothing about it shows an understanding of the potential of the source material. Too often, themes of corruption and war are glossed over by the need for apparently box-ticking sequences involving Jack Black playing Guitar Hero with little people, or pretending that Star Wars is the story of his life (and even that idea has been done elsewhere), or fighting a Transformer, or having a fucking song and dance number.

And so its lack of irony actually becomes something quite interesting. Look at that supporting cast again- they're all English, except for Jason Segel who makes a good stab at an English accent. Along with his rambunctious nature and ego issues, Black's Gulliver brings with him the worst parts of American culture. To get political for a moment in a vain effort to reclaim the original text's perspective, is it possible that with David Cameron installed in government with the aid of News International, Murdoch subsidiary 20th Century Fox sees Britain as an island of little people who gratefully take what we're spoon-fed via cultural imperialism? As a commentary on hegemony, it could be quite fascinating. However, it's supposed to be Night At The Museum, and it's actually a big pile of shite.

If this version of Gulliver's Travels hadn't been made, someone would have made it up as a joke. Indeed, I know many people who were initially confused by the Orange adverts for this film, believing it to be a joke trailer in the vein of the company's previous campaigns about Danny Glover's Dial Hard or Sean Astin's Lord of the Ringtones. The trouble is, it does exist, and it's hard to find anything funny about this film's existence. Gulliver's Travels is rotten- plain and simple. It is assembly line fodder of the most outright stupid kind, and nothing brings me more cheer at the end of 2010 than to see this film failing to make bank. Keep up the good work by staying at home, away from its awfulness, and 2011 will look a lot brighter.

Gulliver's Travels is now showing in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen Gulliver's Travels, why not share your comments below? If you're wondering where this places on my bottom 10 list, rest assured it's on there- come back soon to find out what the other 9 are...

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

Wide of the Mark

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.

I'm back from Edinburgh and will be putting together my Toy Story 3 video diary and the like later in the week- if you really can't wait, my review went up on Den of Geek this morning. For today though, we have the two other films I saw over the weekend, Wild Target and MacGruber, in exchange for the EIFF picks I missed, The People vs. George Lucas and Jackboots on Whitehall.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If The Blues Brothers or Wayne's World are the gold standard in full-length films dredged from popular sketches on Saturday Night Live, then MacGruber isn't really in the same league. Coming from a parody of a show most people will only know of because Marge's sisters like it on The Simpsons, the titular MacGruber looks more like a Michael Bay cos-player than Richard Dean Anderson's resourceful secret agent.

The one joke in the sketches is expanded to parody many 80s action movie cliches as MacGruber chases down Dieter van Cunth, a dastardly businessman who killed his betrothed and has now stolen a nuclear missile.

In broadening out the scope to accommodate the latent homo-eroticism, the over-the-top villains and overwrought romantic scenes of 80s action movies, it's hard to forget that we've been here before, when it was called Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux. And more recently, we've seen a tongue-in-cheek magnification of those tropes to the nth degree in the Crank films. MacGruber is neither as funny as Hot Shots! nor as fun as Crank.

I wanted it to be funnier than this, that's why I saw it in Edinburgh over the weekend, knowing it wouldn't be playing in cinemas near me. Instead, it's just a little too matter-of-fact to find really enjoyable. Writer-director Jorma Taccone and star Will Forte don't seem to realise that MacGruber is actually so after the fact that we need something more. The 80s are too far gone to be funny to the teenage target audience and not far gone enough to be immediately funny to anyone else, as with the 60s and 70s in the Austin Powers films.

The cast actually does a pretty solid job and they're more than capable of raising chuckles with what scant wit there actually is on show. It's a puerile and immature film, but credit where it's due to Ryan Phillipe for being fairly funny as the straight man and rookie to MacGruber's raving idiocy, and to Kristen Wiig who really ought to be more broadly known by now than she actually is.

Val Kilmer seems a little stilted as Cunth, but that's possibly him being uncomfortable playing a character who's essentially a dirtier version of a Richard Curtis joke (read his name aloud).

People were laughing sporadically in the screening of Macgruber that I caught, but it's only really hilarious if you find Top Gun hilarious. Oh wait. If you find Point Break hilarious. Oh wait. Look, it's as funny as both those films, but the charm with those was that they weren't meant to be funny. A spoof as broad as this one requires a different kind of viewing approach, and it's just not consistently funny enough.

Not that you were planning to anyway, but if you don't live somewhere that's showing this, don't go to Edinburgh to see it either.

Macgruber is now playing in selected cinemas nationwide.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

On this side of the pond, we have Wild Target, a farce about hitmen that features an all-star cast. Emily Blunt plays Rose, an unscrupulous young woman who scams the wrong man when she sells a forged Rembrandt painting for £1 million. Her mark is understandably annoyed, and hires hitman Victor Maynard to kill her. Meticulous but isolated, Victor warms to Rose and instead becomes her protector against the goons that are sent after her in his absence.

It should be said, I love the cast of this thing, because it's a caveat to all that follows. Emily Blunt, Bill Nighy, Rupert Grint, Gregor Fisher and Martin Freeman are all actors I could watch all day, so it's great to see them altogether here. Grint, Fisher and Freeman each display their respective talents for comedy- three generations of comic talent working together, with Grint probably stealing the show. Most of the comedy with Nighy's Victor is that he's a skilled hitman who acts the same way as Nighy always acts- reserved and slightly awkward but with a razor wit- and that much at least is pretty funny.

The trouble is, the rest of the film just isn't that funny. Jonathan Lynn directed the likes of The Whole Nine Yards, The Fighting Temptations and Sgt. Bilko, so that should give you an idea of the calibre working behind the camera. He seems to have moved precisely nowhere since his last British farce, Nuns on the Run, because that's what Wild Target is most reminiscent of.

One Lucinda Coxon wrote the script, and watching the final film, the problem seems apparent. She knows what she wants the film to be, and where she wants it to end, but doesn't seem entirely possessed by the idea of getting there sensibly. Too many throwaway plot and character developments are broached in the second act and then forgotten about, and the desired ending just comes off as absurd. And not in the way it's intended.

Thus Emily Blunt really struggles with a character who's pretty unlikeable. The thing is, it's Emily Blunt- there's not an awful lot she can do to make me outright dislike her in a film, especially with some of the better scenes for her character here. For the most part though, Rose's motivations and actions are nonsensical, and the farce comedy isn't broad enough.

The final result of Wild Target evokes those crappy one-off two-hour comedy dramas ITV used to do, albeit with a much more talented and well-known cast. Where once you'd get James Dreyfuss playing wacky twins, now you have Bill Nighy as a hitman and Rupert Grint as his apprentice. Ironically, this cast is so good, and I enjoy watching them so much, that this actually gets a pass from me. I'm not going to champion it as something to support while in cinemas, but it's worth catching on DVD or on telly somewhere down the line.

Wild Target is now playing in cinemas natiowide.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen MacGruber and/or Wild Target, why not comment on the films or on my reviews below? And if you think my reviews of only halfway-decent comedies are hard to read, imagine how hard they are to write.

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

The Studio Silver Bullet

Having looked forward to Joe Johnston's remake of the classic Universal horror The Wolfman for a long while, and got in to see it while the iron's hot, I thought I'd drop in to give you my 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.

--------------------------------------------------------------

The Wolfman is about more or less what you would expect. This new version follows an actor, Lawrence Talbot, as he returns to his family mansion following the death of his brother Ben. Mysterious circumstances surround the death, fuelled by the hearsay of an unearthly beast in the woods. When Lawrence comes face to face with the beast, he's attacked and ends up being cursed with the same condition- he becomes a werewolf. Between full moons, he's beset by the pious villagers, investigated by the imperious Inspector Abberline, and manages his complicated relationships with both his father Sir John and his brother's widow Gwen. All the while he struggles with his monstrous condition as he tries to find out the truth behind his brother's death.

This production has been dogged (pun intended) by studio interference since its inception, and it shows in the final product. Originally scheduled for 2007 without a director or cast, it was pushed back to April 2009 when Joe Johnston came aboard. And then it was pushed back again, to November. And then again, so now it's finally hitting cinemas, after numerous rewrites, reshoots and other such hindrances. The result is sadly perfunctory and confused rather than fulfilling its potential. Universal have been in this territory before with 2004's Van Helsing, a clusterfuck of a film that singularly failed to replicate the fun spirit of their more successful remake of The Mummy. While there are considerably less monsters in this one, the story just seems to coast along with an awful lot going on but nothing actually happening.


While Van Helsing was a largely audience-friendly 12A, The Wolfman has been equipped with dismembered limbs and bloody fountains to appeal to a more hardened horror audience, and it's utterly misjudged. I suspect this is down to the studio interference, seeing as how Joe Johnston's previous works have included family classics like Rocketeer and Jumanji. Those are both fun and exciting romps, and the 15 certificate precludes this film's efforts to be a fun and exciting romp. But it's still trying for that, and so horror fans will be turned off as much as the family audience. This leads to a big discrepancy in tone, mixing anxious jump-scares with occasionally computer-generated blood. Yes, our old friend, computer-generated blood. This is the kind of cheap solution that belongs in Ninja Assassin or Blood: The Last Vampire- not in your big horror blockbuster. The excellent prosthetic work attests to the fact that they wouldn't have bothered with digitally adding gore if they had intended to- they could have had practical effects during filming instead.

As a result of the aforementioned mismatch of tone, there are occasional flashes of brilliance that sink without trace amongst the more predictable and humdrum horror schlock. There's a breathtaking sequence around midway through where Lawrence wolfs up and runs riot through Victorian London, hurdling chimney-pots and derailing trams as the hapless police try to end his rampage. It's brilliantly shot and very well judged, making the wolf compelling and watchable in the exact same way that New Moon didn't, This was the point where I really thought the film was going to pick up in quality. Instead, it settled back down into the same vanilla narrative conventions, proving that films made by committee rather than by the artist never really work. For instance, nobody at the studio thought it was dumb to sacrifice the supporting characters' common sense in return for numerous scenes of them chasing Lawrence while wolfed-up instead of running away from him and waiting til he changes back into a human.

The cast are hit and miss for the most part too, but I blame the script for that, with around a third of the whole thing's running time preoccupied by nightmares, hallucinations and flashbacks as opposed to actual plot. The excellent Benicio del Toro could probably have made for a much more interesting werewolf with half a realistic line, but instead it feels like he's flat and expository. When main characters are expository, there's a problem. Anthony Hopkins makes a decent appearance as Sir John, but it's blatantly obvious where his character is going, and there's a thankless love interest role for the usually brilliant Emily Blunt, whose portrayal is winsome but not particularly memorable. The real standout performance is Hugo Weaving's, making one of his first on-screen appearances since he finished with both Agent Smith and Elrond in 2005. Having spent the interim period voicing penguins, giant robots and masked revolutionaries, it's just terrific to see him as Abberline. I was actually rooting for him rather than Lawrence, about whom the script never really makes you care.

Werewolves currently just stand behind vampires and ghosts as the supernatural gribbly of choice for Hollywood, and The Wolfman isn't likely to bolster their popularity to the levels of Edward Cullen and his ilk. Its final release date just before Valentine's Day seems to position it as an alternative date movie for the weekend, and on that level it might succeed. It has the occasional thrills and scares and a truly brilliant action sequence in the middle, but not really enough story or substance to make it enjoyable overall. Universal should've kept their oar out and this might have been released over a year ago and disappointed me a lot less than it eventually did. While it sounds like I'm being down on the film, it's actually not bad- just not as good as it really ought to be with the premise and the talent involved. I'd be very willing to see a director's cut, provided it brought in some more coherence and gave us something of the romping horror adventure I expected.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Odds are The Wolfman will be the best choice if you're looking for a film to see with your significant other this Valentine's Day, as the alternatives are the simply-named romcom Valentine's Day, the latest Harry Potter knock-off Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and the considerably more family-friendly Ponyo. Still, if you do go and see The Wolfman, why not share your thoughts in a comment below?

The next post will likely cover The Princess and the Frog and A Prophet. I did say that last time, but hey, I was really looking forward to The Wolfman. Those other two will be up next, with some of this week's new releases, mentioned above, following on.

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