ON STRANGER TIDES- Pirates 4 Review

There's a strong argument, mostly being made by myself, that Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides is the sequel we always should have had to the 2003 swashbuckler that started it all. I don't mean that it's the best sequel possible, but that it's following the formula of the Indiana Jones films by bringing back one or two characters from previous instalments and telling a new adventure, rather than going for cod-epic storytelling.

It's not completely without ties to the impenetrable mush of At World's End, as it picks up with Captain Jack Sparrow having seemingly given up on his search for the Fountain of Youth, on which we left him sailing into the sunset. As he arrives in England, it's revealed that an impostor is posing as Jack, with plans to recruit a crew and mount a search for the Fountain themselves. Jack is soon drawn into a race for eternal life, between a Spanish Armada, his old foe Captain Barbossa and the legendary Captain Blackbeard.

It's after watching this latest instalment that I realise I have a strange affinity with the series. The first one is unabashedly enjoyable, but there tends to be more debate on the quality of the two sequels, and with good reason. Heard of "Six Characters in Search of an Author"? The first three Pirates of the Caribbean films serve as "Three Films in Search of a Trilogy", with the convoluted ties to the first film and over-plotted action outright ruining the series for some point.

As for my own affinity, I don't dislike the series as certain other reviewers do. I recognise that At World's End is a load of bullshit, concerned with such contrived devices as "the ninth Piece of Eight" or whatever the hell that film was about, and that Dead Man's Chest didn't so much end as trail the third instalment. But on their own merits, I found things to enjoy in each of those movies. And so I suspect that while the consensus will be against On Stranger Tides, I found more to enjoy here than in the previous sequels.

That said, it still doesn't hold itself very well. It's a good half an hour shorter than the previous instalment, but that still makes it 137 minutes, when there's a much more enjoyable 100 minute film sitting within, waiting for an editor to piece it together. The action takes about 45 minutes to get going, and when it does, there's no real drive or thrust to the plot. My earlier comparison to Indy earlier on works here, as the hunt for the Fountain of Youth resembles the plot of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at times, but while that film has one group of characters to root for, screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio plump for a sprawling cast. Again.

Another of the problems carried over from its immediate predecessors in the series is the lack of a villain. Geoffrey Rush is the best thing in this one, but his Captain Barbossa, so brilliant an antagonist on the first outing, has long since become more of an anti-hero. In this one, he's even a privateer for the English, albeit with ulterior motives. I suppose the de facto antagonist here is Blackbeard, played by an underused Ian McShane. As usual then, it resorts to having the characters argue a lot and double-cross one another.

Rob Marshall replaces Gore Verbinski in the director's chair, but it's Elliot and Rossio who need to be ushered out, because they just never seem to get to the point. For instance, there's a scene in which a character is forced to jump off a cliff, to an uncertain fate. Before that character eventually jumps, we have a refusal, some argument, emotional blackmail, a ridiculously redundant Russian Roulette set-up and a bit of hoodoo, before the character just jumps anyway. And don't get me started on Keith Richards.

They also seem to have no sense of timing, as writers. If you pay attention to the dialogue, you realise that the plot takes place over a fortnight. After a great opening sequence set in London, the progression of time is thus- one scene in daylight, and then an extended setpiece at night. Most of this movie takes place in the dark, which not only makes the sunny Caribbean settings pointless, but also probably makes for great viewing in super-dim 3D. I stuck with 2D, personally, though I concede I was sort of impressed by the 3D in the trailers for the film.

I enjoyed On Stranger Tides enough that I really want to say good things about it, so I shall. Johnny Depp shows no signs of getting bored in the lead role, and if you're not bored of him playing it either, he's still a lot of fun to watch as Captain Jack. Some of the action is a little repetitive, four films in, but there are two really good setpieces at the beginning and at the midpoint. I think I'd personally have opened the film on the latter, which is an excellently constructed scene that establishes the film's take on mermaids. Then again, I'd also have got it done in 100 minutes.

Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides marks a partial return to the entertaining form of The Curse of the Black Pearl, but as with latter instalments, it is still slightly discordant. To refer to Pirandello again, it's like Six Subplots in Search of a Movie, because there's not much to the McGuffin that's supposed to actually unite the strands. I found it enjoyable, but it did string out my enjoyment across the laborious running time. For some, it will be a step too far, if your enjoyment has been strung out since the first film, but it's still a step in the right direction. Let's have a change in the writing department next time though.

Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Pirates of the Caribbean- On Stranger Tides, why not share your comments below?

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

RIO- Review

Can we change the name of Orange's "Gold Spot", in which a 20th Century Fox film gets some rampant phone-related plugging for about six months at a time before every single film in the multiplex? Thus far, we've had The A-Team and Gulliver's Travels there, so I was lobbying for the "Brown Spot". However, as annoying as the ads for Rio have been before every single film, it turns out they just indicate how shit Orange are at making cinema ads nowadays. Where did Mr. Dresden go anyhoo?

The film itself follows Blu, a rare blue macaw who lives in Minnesota with his owner Linda. It turns out he's so rare that he's actually the last male of his species, and he must go to sweltering Rio de Janeiro to mate with Jewel, the last female blue macaw. Unfortunately, the two birds barely even get on with one another, much less wanting to actually get it on, even to save their species.

This is a plot that was apparently central in last year's Alpha and Omega, but more prominently, Pixar were developing an almost identical film in Newt, which got cancelled last year. So Orange has been trailering the film for what feels like years, and it's also usurped whatever the genius minds at Pixar were getting up to. That was more than enough to lower my expectations to subterranean levels, so it's pleasing that Rio actually turned out to be quite entertaining.

Contrary to the poorly dubbed Gold Spot ads, there's some good voice acting to be had, which is always a good start for a CG animation. Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway effectively do Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in their vocal roles as Blu and Jewel. Eisenberg reprises his pre-Social Network nervy schtick rather than his cold and superior Mark Zuckerburg, but it's Hathaway who manages better with the musical numbers.

Yep, musical numbers. Happily, they're not like Dreamworks musical numbers, that just deploy whatever song is cleared for the soundtrack, but actually a fair few original numbers mixed in amongst the obligatory covers. The highlight is the great villain song, performed by Jemaine Clement's rather brilliantly voiced villain, a psychotic cockatoo called Nigel. As a fan of good villain songs, it worked for me as both a parody and an iteration of the old trope.

The story itself is not revolutionary, falling somewhere between the Buzz subplot in Toy Story and the relocation gubbins in Madagascar, but then what can you expect from a story that was independently thunk up by three different animation companies? I can tell you though it's sweetly executed though, with amusing characters and enjoyable visuals.

The cartoonish vistas of Blue Sky's Ice Age movies give way to slightly more realistic-looking forestry here, but there's still room for big colourful backdrops and nicely designed characters. That said, two lazily characterised supporting characters, voiced by Jamie Foxx and will.i.am, really grated on me, and there's a weird bit in the middle where we briefly get an army of Capuchin monkeys for reasons that don't particularly serve the plot. It's like the film lost all self-confidence for about 20 minutes and said "Hey, monkeys are funny, right?"

Let's always remember that studios compile trailers and marketing, not the filmmakers, and there are often films that are a lot better than their trailers would suggest. Rio is one of those films where all the stuff that looks bad about the trailer is, at the very least, more bearable when seen in context. It's no masterpiece, but it's colourful, it's vibrant, and it's simple, accessible animation, just in time for the Easter holidays.

Rio is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Cinema of Attraction

One of the pitfalls of reviewing movies is that even someone like Michael Bay or Allan Loeb can turn around and appear to dismiss any and all criticism of their awful shit by simply asking the reviewer if they've done any better. So Roger Ebert went and made Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and more recently, Mark Cousins gave us the documentary The First Movie.

Those guys are proper film critics, and I am decidedly not. If anything, I want to be a screenwriter myself one day, and hopefully avoid doing any of the rubbish things I've criticised in the time I've been reviewing films on this here blog. But it's still with some trepidation that I give you my first short film as a director, The Cinema of Attraction, which you can see after the jump.

While I admit the concept is a large one, The Cinema of Attraction is a short film I took from the idea to the finished product in just over a week, and on a budget of no more than £4.35. It's the story of James and Donna, whose relationship we follow over several days. Their relationship is constantly being reassessed and redefined by the development of cinema, meeting in a silent film with intertitles and the whole shebang, and continuing to develop through talkies, technicolour and the arrival of the multiplex cinema.

As you'd expect from a Mad Prophet production, there's a bit of a rant at its heart, but I'd like to think that it does have a heart. It's also got a fuckton of allegorical cinema stuff and occasionally quite overt references to classic romantic films, but it would be pretentious of me to talk about what they are and why you should like it. I'm not so arsey as to review my own film, but I'm not above promoting it to you, the good people who read this blog.

The Cinema of Attraction arose as another project for Writers' Block North East, that veritable hive of creative talent in Middlesbrough, and I managed to recruit two very good actors, Bonnie Hibbs and Tim Marshall, to star as Donna and James. They elevate the whole thing, of course, but there's not a lot more to talk about- it's better to just let you enjoy the film yourselves.

Next up, I'll be seeing if it wins the competition at Writers' Block in its truncated and admittedly slightly less interesting form, and submitting the full version for various short film screening events in the area. And after that, it'd be nice to make more films, frankly. Hope you enjoyed this one.

DRIVE ANGRY- Review

Last Friday, we figured out that there is no type of bad movie that I hate more than a bad comedy movie. And today, we rediscover the fact that there is nothing in cinema that disappoints me more than when Nicolas Cage just doesn't put the effort in. And in a trashy grindhouse flick like Drive Angry, when everyone else is doing their best, that's just sad.

Cage dons another of his famous wonky hairpieces to play Milton, a dearly departed soul who has broken out of Hell itself on a mission. Cult leader Jonah King and his followers murdered Milton's daughter, and plan to sacrifice her orphaned baby to Satan. So Milton arrives back in the mortal realm, recruits pissed-off waitress Piper and blazes a trail of destruction as he goes after King, for his granddaughter and for his revenge.

The plot is the kind of thing that usually makes for a better trailer than a whole feature film, as was the case with the recent Machete. And it's the kind of thing that really requires a crazy bastard like Nicolas Cage to actually invest in projecting something for the audience to enjoy. There's a case to be made that he's effortlessly cool. I don't know about you, but I found his turn in Drive Angry to be merely effortless.

Luckily, there's a guy on hand who is effortlessly cool, and frankly, he's everything you want Cage to be in this movie. He's William Fichtner, and he plays Satan's right hand man, the Accountant, who's sent after Milton after he breaks free from damnation. Fichtner is a long-serving fixture from various action movies over the years, and he's more than able to give it all he's got in a larger role like this one, elevating the film in times when it seems like Cage didn't really want to be there. He makes this movie

Likewise, I enjoyed Billy Burke's histrionics as Jonah King- if you're wondering where you might know Burke from after seeing him in the trailers, he's Bella's dad off of Twilight. He breaks out of that more well-known character very well as the over-the-top villain of the piece here. It would also be remiss of me to overlook Amber Heard, who's doing a great job with the least of roles. Piper is another of those strong females who you wish could break the fourth wall and kick the cameraman's arse, as any strong female would in reality, if a guy followed her around leching over her good parts with a camera.

We've been into this murky territory before with me bitching about the alleged appeal of Megan Fox in the Transformers movies, and it follows here that Piper is into cars in a big way. My contention here is that Heard is not only much more attractive, but doing a much better performance, giving it her all in a way that most objectified bimbos in action films can't muster. She's the biggest thing on the poster for Drive Angry, obscuring a bored Cage, so it's a shame that the filmmakers were happier to use her looks to market the film than to use her name. Hopefully, she'll get some fame out of this and get some better roles, but I don't think that's how Hollywood works.

Wow, that's more than I would ever have expected to write about the actors in a film called Drive Angry, but what else am I going to talk about? The 3D? In this instance, I suspect the cinema messed up the projection, because despite all of the marketing trumpeting the fact that the film was "Shot In 3D", it looked like the worst of conversions. Lots of ghosting, which got very annoying, and as I haven't heard these complaints anywhere else, I imagine it's the cinema's fault. It demonstrates that multiplexes are making a killing by charging a premium for shoddy 3D, but should it entirely reflect upon the film itself?

Director Patrick Lussier had one of the first Real-D 3D films out of the gate in 2009, with My Bloody Valentine, so he's developed a box of tricks that he uses to full effect here, continuously chucking things at the audience as he did in his previous film. It's a small shame that he dips into Shoot 'Em Up's toolbox too by ripping off that film's raucous sexfight. More pertinently however, he goes back to the same well as Rodriguez and Tarantino have done with their own grindhouse throwbacks, and doesn't end up with a bucket of shitwater. It does have a mild odour to it though- I'd recommend you boil it before drinking it down.

It's a requirement of viewing that you know what you're getting into with Drive Angry, not only in terms of the goofy and old-fashioned plot and the prehistoric attitude to women, but also so that you're not too disappointed when you see Nicolas Cage sleepwalking through it. Amber Heard struggles against the casual misogyny to prove herself as a likeable action heroine, and William Fichtner just owns the entire film whenever he steps on screen. There's already talk of a sequel to this film, but what we really need to see is a spin-off for his character. This one was enjoyable enough, but more of the same would try my patience.

Drive Angry is now showing in 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

YOGI BEAR- The Schrödinger's Bear Experiment

This is going to be a short one. Largely because there's very little to say about this film that hasn't already been said in my proper review for Den of Geek, but also because even before I wrote that other review, there's very little to say about this film that would surprise anyone.

Yogi Bear is shit. If that's all you need to know about the film, then come back tomorrow when I'll be talking about the Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston romcom vehicle Just Go With It. But if you'll have a little more patience, maybe we can talk cod quantum mechanics and get some interesting scientific discourse out of the turmoil.

Here's a video you might have already seen. Courtesy of YouTube user estefez, it's an unofficial alternate ending to Yogi Bear that plays out something like the death of Jesse James in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. With nothing short of ridiculous optimism, I wondered if I could expect that ending into the actual film, in a Schrödinger's Cat style experiment.

So as long as I couldn't see the ending, it could be the death scene AND something much less interesting simultaneously. Up until the ending though, we all see the film as a closed box, looking a bit like this...

It's a talking bear pictured above, which is for some silly reason, the least of Yogi Bear's plot, which is more concerned with environmental messages and hackneyed "They're going to kill trees unless we stop Them!" gubbins. Given the carbon emissions that probably came from the production of this debacle, the closest it comes to being green is in recycling plots and gags that we've seen before in other films; other rubbish films, for that matter.

Its reluctance to bring in hip pop culture references to modernise the character is as close to charm the film ever gets, in between Dan Aykroyd's anybody-could-do-this impression of the title character and the predictable joyless mush that is the script. Justin Timberlake, Anna Faris and Stephen Daly might be trying harder than the rest of the cast, but there's only so much you can do with a script that looks for all the world like it was written with Crayolas.

It's not merely a case of over-analysing a film intended for children, because my issue with the film, and I think most children would agree, is that children are smarter than this film. These are children who flocked to see Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon in the last 12 months. You can't give kids Smarties and then go back to giving them radishes at snack time, just as you can't go from showing them proper family films to expecting them to just sit there and endure Yogi Bear.

Still, if it's that unpleasant, perhaps the fundamental misunderstanding that was my Schrödinger's Bear experiment could pay off. The 3D puts you right there in the film, right? Maybe if I expected that ending enough, it could transpire?

Alas, however much you expect this...

... you're still gonna end up with this.

The bottom line is, watching the title character tool around for any sustained period will make you wish for that ending instead of expecting it, and that's potentially where the theory falls down. My experiment was a failure, but then so is this film. Give it a miss, eh?

Yogi Bear is now showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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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.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

SANCTUM- Review

As discussed on this blog and on my weekly radio show, true stories invariably fill up UK multiplexes in January and February, usually because of the distributing run-over from the dying days of the previous year- i.e. The King's Speech, Black Swan and The Fighter, which were all released Stateside in 2010.

January and February in the States then, tend to be a dumping ground for less attractive cinematic propositions, which, typically, get a simultaneous release in the UK. See The Green Hornet or The Mechanic, for instance. However, what you have in the James Cameron produced thriller-stroke-drama Sanctum, is a crossover between both- a horrific journey through an uncharted cave system, in which a motley crew of adventurers are trapped when it begins to flood.

Here was me thinking that the whole point of nu-3D was to add depth to an image. That's what the industry hobnobs say, with complete disregard for all that black-and-white old-timey stuff that Orson Welles was doing all the way back when Citizen Kane was made. But now this one comes around, and as the premise would suggest, the setting is meant to be claustrophobic. That is the main source of tension- this is after all, a thriller. Therefore, the 3D doesn't work, in precisely the same way as Buried wouldn't have worked if it were in 3D.

Namely, we're supposed to believe that our heroes can't fit through this tiny squeeze between hulking masses of rock, all while underwater and running out of air. But if 3D puts you there, in the film, then there's obviously enough room for you, and for a whole room full of cinemagoers. It's facetious to judge a film on 3D's terms, but I think it illustrates a point that needed to be made, post-Avatar. Just because James Cameron is a better filmmaker than almost everyone else using 3D, it doesn't mean he can make 3D any better than it actually is.

On the film's own terms, Sanctum plays out in a pretty generic fashion. The screenplay had two writers, Andrew Wight and John Garvin. Wight actually had the near-death experience that formed the "true story" this film is based on, and Garvin is also credited as an actor and a "dive coordinator". I can't tell you who it was, but either one or both of them conflated this thing to the most derivative story imaginable. Broad archetypes go into the cave, and the deeper they go, the more staid and over-familiar they become.

Richard Roxburgh breaks type, in a way, by playing the gruff cave-diving veteran Frank, but there's a weird thing about the way his character plays into things. Although James Cameron ostensibly just produced this thing, the script is full of tics like characters explaining things over and over again. How that manifests itself is usually via everyone ignoring Frank's advice. And whenever that happens, the death toll goes up. It's like a super big-budget and decidedly more soggy version of one of those grisly public information films that went out in Britain during the 1970s.

So I suppose if you're paying enough attention, you'll at least figure out what not to do when you go into the world's deepest uncharted cave system to explore, and end up getting stranded in a hole that's slowly filling up with water. That would be some comfort if I ever had the inclination to go diving. And yet I still have much more common sense than many of the supposedly experienced adventurers who resolutely ignore Frank- it's particularly annoying with Ioan Grufford's billionaire wussy and Alice Parkinson, his girlfriend. Don't forget though, we're told it's a true story before the film even starts, so at least one of these people is getting out of there.

Whatever appeal Sanctum is meant to have, it's been so vaguely represented in the trailers that if you're actually looking forward to seeing it on the basis of those trailers, I imagine you'll enjoy it. In all honesty, James Cameron himself has done more to promote the film by joining Twitter recently, and I've been enjoying his feed much more than I enjoyed this film. With low expectations, I was neither disappointed nor surprised, but it did at least keep me awake and engaged in what was going on, no matter how predictable. There are moments of screaming claustrophobic tension, but these are far too sparse for the premise.

Ultimately, the 3D is an albatross around the film's neck, keeping the film submerged in gloom, when it could have soared to terrifying heights.

Sanctum is now showing in 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

TANGLED- Review

I make no secret of the fact that I heartily enjoyed last year's very traditional Disney outing The Princess and the Frog. I think it's great that John Lasseter is steering the company back towards its roots after Dreamworks and Shrek took up residence in the fairytale movie market. Adding more to the weight of my own anticipation for their new feature Tangled, it's Disney's 50th animated movie, and apparently the second most expensive movie ever made, somehow.

Anyhoo, this $260 million animation (no, really) is essentially the story of Rapunzel, as seen through the lens of the charismatic fugitive Flynn Rider. Flynn is wanted, dead or alive, and he hides out in Rapunzel's tower in order to escape the law. He doesn't count on the long-haired teen being so determined to get out of the tower for a while, and solve the mystery of the floating lanterns that fill the sky every year on her birthday.

Again, I really liked The Princess and the Frog, so this one is going to suffer slightly by comparison. As ever, this is my own opinion on the film, and so you could argue that it's for a much younger audience, my inclusion in which I've long since outgrown. I just don't think that Tangled measures up, especially after the promising reinvigoration seen in Disney's 49th feature. That film has a timeless quality that made it reminiscent of Disney's best. Aside from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, how many other films made in 1937 would your kids sit through just as happily as if it had been made today?

What Tangled goes for is more in the vein of the modern spin on fairytales, which Dreamworks has conflated to the millionth degree in their Shrek canon. For starters, it's trying to get boys as excited to see it as girls, hence the slightly ambiguous title. This attention to including its audience is probably more to do with the fact that it cost $260 million than any real desire to entertain young boys who are otherwise distracted by their XBoxes. If Cinderella had cost that much, they might have called it The Magic Pumpkin. A $260 million Sleeping Beauty might be The Dragon Witch. A hyper-expensive Bambi might have been Deers Get Shot, Ha Ha Ha Ha. And so on.

In the actual film, there are occasionally points where the all-inclusive approach actually does work. From a studio whose most profitable franchise features pirates, figures renowned for their raping, pillaging and stealing, it's not surprising that they have a roguish criminal like Flynn as a leading man, but slightly more surprising that he's so unlikeable. Audiences are more likely to be entertained by Maximus, a palace steed with more detective skills than any of the humans. This Inspector Horse figure is the best reason to see Tangled, and injects most of the film's humour whenever he appears. Similarly, I enjoyed the caricatured ruffians in the film, voiced by the likes of Ron Perlman, Richard Kiel and Brad Garrett.

I'd also give kudos for the villain, even if she doesn't get a badass Disney villain song in the tradition of her predecessors. Mother Gothel is a character with proper motivations, and when you get the villain right in a Disney fairytale, half the battle is already won. My disappointment at the lack of a good old villainous sing-song extends to the rest of Alan Menken's soundtrack too. Aside from the rather brilliant "I Have A Dream", which simultaneously subverts and conforms with the traditional Disney "here are my objectives" song, it's all very generic and poppy. It could come from any 90s Disney film, and with one particular song, I'm not convinced it wasn't from another film. It's a real comedown after Randy Newman's jazz-themed work on The Princess and the Frog.

From the perspective of a Disney fan who had every reason to really enjoy this one after last year's effort, I was slightly disappointed by Tangled. I can't help but think it might have charmed me more if it were a hand-drawn 2D feature rather than a polished CG piece that's closer to Dreamworks' output than anything else. The CG stuff looks nice and there are some very artful shots in here, but it somehow has less character than hand-drawn animation. That said, the family audience is under-served by January's releases, and this is never less than fun and cheerful. I'm sure those much touted younger audiences will lap it up, and all of my persnickety quibbles aside, I didn't dislike it either.

Tangled is now showing in 3D at cinemas nationwide, and at selected cinemas in 2D.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE GREEN HORNET- Review

There are a number of things that may seem alien to one another when mentioned in the same sentence, and the marriage of two such elements can often provoke dread and preconceptions. Now that Jack Black's Gulliver's Travels has been and gone, we find a matrimony between Seth Rogen, Michel Gondry and The Green Hornet rolling into cinemas.

The story hasn't much changed- it's an easy one to update, hence coming to fruition after a lengthy development period as something entirely different to the original idea of a Green Hornet movie. The bare bones are the same though- Britt Reid is the heir to a journalism empire who's given a new sense of responsibility after his father dies. He then bonds with the elder Reid's mechanic, Kato, who's also an expert martial artist and a damn fine coffee-maker. The two of them launch a hare-brained scheme to be superheroes who pose as supervillains to get close to the criminals of Los Angeles, and thus the Green Hornet is born.

The post-modern superhero movie has been given a good innings in recent years. Iron Man arguably began the recent trend by giving us a protagonist who is a former arms manufacturer on the path to redemption rather than some altruistic bloke who wants to do good. In a more high profile way, Kick-Ass burst onto the scene last year, telling the tale of an average schlub dressing up in a green outfit to beat people up. It might not surprise anyone to hear that The Green Hornet owes something to each of those films, or that it's not on the same level as either.

Those alien things I mentioned at the beginning? Here, they're particularly noticeable because they all seem to be working independently of each other. For Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script, this is very broadly a comedy, with some action stuff chucked in for good measure. And his part in the production, as with his acting in the actual film, is the loudest. It's so loud as to drown out any sense of directorial flair that might come from a visionary director like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry.

As many have said before me, there's nothing to mark this out as a Michel Gondry film. It smacks of studio interference, not least because it's largely being presented in 3D, and its release date was pushed back in order to accommodate its post-conversion. By post-conversion standards, it's technically accomplished, but it's also worthless. 3D can at least have a point and purpose in films that experiment with the technology, like Avatar or Jackass 3D. I can even forgive the constant 3D releases of every CG-animated movie going, even if it usually is to squeeze more pennies out of filmgoing families.

What's more appalling to me is a film like this- a mid-range 3D film. What is the point of a Seth Rogen comedy film being in 3D? Yes, there's action too, but none of that was shot for 3D, because the decision to add stereoscopy was taken after the film had been shot. Not to go on about it, but so much of what is wrong with the film can be exemplified by the fact that it's in 3D. It exhibits a lack of artistic conviction, and goes some way to explaining why it's a film in which every decision seems to have been taken because that's the way they do it in this kind of film.

Not to be overwhelmingly negative, I have to admit there are a few positives. Jay Chou makes a great deadpan Kato, and he's a character you can actually get behind despite how the gulf between his talents and those of his bozo employer are over-exaggerated just by how much time they spend talking about it. Likewise, Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz could have done a great deal more with his villain Chudnofsky if there was much scope for it. The guy just won an Oscar, and although the film has a clear sense of its antagonists, it doesn't have enough sense of anything else to give him some time to shine.

When Waltz is around, you get brilliant moments like Chudnofsky's first scene in the film, complemented by a brilliant cameo from James Franco, which also marks out how surprisingly brutal this really is for a 12A rated film. Later on, someone is impaled through the eyes with broken chair legs. And that said, all of the action looks pretty good. Gondry's one distinguishable touch is the Kato Vision POV that we get whenever Kato is in the middle of a fight, but I'm talking more about the choreography of those fights. A lot of them are calculated to give Chou room to be awesome, a courtesy he doesn't get many other times in the film.

Rogen, in his leading role, is pretty much miscast. It's especially disappointing because I like the guy's work, and having co-wrote the script, his blatant unsuitability to play Britt Reid suggests something of an ego run rampant. To his detractors, I've said that he never shouts in his other films as much as he does in this one, and it's in this one that he arguably needs the most restraint, especially as the origins of this character are so obviously based on Robert Downey Jr's turn as Tony Stark in Iron Man.

The last film Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg gave us was Pineapple Express, a highly enjoyable fusion of action and comedy that measured each of those quantities equally. By contrast, The Green Hornet isn't really measured in any quantity. There are nice moments throughout, and the action is decent, but the potential of Jay Chou and Christoph Waltz is wasted, and overshadowed by the least likable performance Rogen has ever given. Bearing in mind that most cinemas are playing it in the rubbish 3D version, either seek out a 2D screening or wait for the DVD.

The Green Hornet is now showing in 3D at cinemas nationwide, and at selected cinemas in 2D.
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If you've seen The Green Hornet, why not share your comments below? Why didn't I mention Cameron Diaz? Honestly, because I'd completely forgotten she was in it until the time I wrote this bit of the blog post. Huh.

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.
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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.

TRON: LEGACY- Review

There is actually a sequel to Tron. And it comes almost three decades after the release of the original. We are now in a realm where all things are possible, and there's nothing Grid-like about it. I saw Tron for the first time yesterday evening, right before catching a midnight screening of Tron: Legacy. I may profess myself disappointed by Tron, but believe me, it's got nothing on the sequel as a sheer letdown.

The sequel picks up with Kevin Flynn having taken his company Encom to its peak after the ending of the first film, but then he disappears, leaving his young son Sam behind, all alone. Flash forward two decades and Sam gets a message that suggests his father might still be around, living in the computerised world known as the Grid and working on a breakthrough that could change the course of human history. Sam ventures into the Grid, and finds his father in hiding from his own digital counterpart, Clu, who rules the state with a pixellated iron fist.

At least Tron: Legacy starts how it means to go on, with an on-screen notice about how this 3D presentation features many 2D scenes. It only compounds the dishonesty of the gimmick by playing out this disclaimer only after cinema patrons have forked out extra for the "3D experience", taken their seats and sat through ten to twenty minutes of ads and trailers. The film starts out low, and continues to disappoint, specifically in how it looks in completely the other direction to its predecessor.

Even if Tron isn't that impressive, and looks dated by today's visual standards, prominently on display in this film in particular, there's a prescience about it. Tron was released before the Internet was widely known, but its relation of the inside of a computer to arcade games and social interaction could well be linked to the world wide web. In Tron: Legacy, every single thing is not only understandable in terms of every development in cinema and technology that has happened since, but also identical to them in so many ways.

It even borrows heavily from the first film in the name of in-jokes and references. Lines are repeated, shots are recreated, and it's practically a remake in all things except for the continuing arc of the elder Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges. Bridges plays Flynn very well, although burdened with a suddenly emergent tree-hugger outlook, but even the Dude himself can't manage to salvage Clu from the haze of overhyped de-aging SFX. There's not a single frame where Flynn's ageless doppelganger looks photo-real, even when framed alongside the computer generated vistas of the Grid. For his part though, Bridges does a damn fine job- it's always a pleasure to see him as nature intended.

With regard to other intertextual gubbins, the first half hour plods along with Center City looking an awful lot like Christopher Nolan's Gotham. And we're introduced to Garrett Hedlund's Sam, a protagonist so impossibly vacant that he couldn't be more dull if he were played by Shia LaBeouf. To break the monotony, he dives off buildings and breaks into corporate headquarters- in 2D, mind you- in a number of other scenes reminiscent of The Dark Knight. This also sadly includes how seriously it takes itself, which works less well for lightcycles and electric data frisbees than it does for a masked vigilante fighting mob rule.

Poor Michael Sheen also has very little to work with, and frankly, he's made to look like a twat in his role as Castor, the film's most useless and inexplicable character, who runs a disco for programs on the Grid, for some reason. He enlivens the proceedings in much the same way as Jar Jar Binks enlivened The Phantom Menace, and I'm not exaggerating. Olivia Wilde comes off rather better in her naive warrior woman role as Quorra, making her the most magnetic screen presence by default and a joy to watch whenever she gets to bounce off of Jeff Bridges.

Many negative reviews have said that Tron: Legacy is to Tron as The Matrix Reloaded is to The Matrix. I'm going to go one further, having already invoked Jar Jar. It's funny that Tron came out of a period in Disney's history when they tried to find the next Star Wars, and now years later, this sequel comes close to the drudgery that characterised George Lucas' largely abysmal prequels. It's not as bad as either Episode I or II, but it has all the clunky dialogue, over-reliance on visual effects and general matter-of-fact-ness about it that made those films such a pain.

Tron: Legacy might have decent special effects, but it looks and feels like the moodiest night out you'll ever have, set in a giant orange and blue neon-lit club where nothing really registers as important.  I've been wrong before, but I think Disney may have made a $200 million mistake. It's taking the slot in which Avatar broke the bank in 2009, and it's a similar mish-mash of recent developments that's not even as good as "Dances with Wolves in space". It feels like it goes on for way longer than its two hours, and the script is too incredibly convoluted to forgive or even to follow. Despite occasional and apparently accidental lapses into real entertainment, and great performances from Olivia Wilde and the proper Jeff Bridges, this last hope in a dismal Christmas movie schedule is a massive letdown.

Tron: Legacy is now showing in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Tron: Legacy, why not share your comments below? If you think the Star Wars prequel comparisons are a tad harsh, come back when you've seen the film and your lexicon of words to describe the sun is suitably expanded...

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

Never Mind- MEGAMIND Review

This year, Dreamworks has pumped out three animated films. Of Shrek Forever After, there's really nothing more to say than how samey it was, but the real triumph has been How To Train Your Dragon. The first outright excellent film to come from the company since Shrek, it probably would have won the Best Animated Picture Oscar away from Pixar if it had only come out in the year where they offered Cars 2 instead of the superb Toy Story 3. Somewhere in between Shrek and the dragons, falls Megamind.

The titular blue-bonced supervillain comes from the Superman origin story, jettisoned from an exploding galaxy to Earth by loving parents when he was just a baby. The same applies to his arch-nemesis Metroman, with whom he engages in elaborate battles. He never wins, except for the day that he accidentally does. With Metroman dead, Megamind reevaluates his career in evil and realises that something has to be done to restore the old status quo.

When the origin of your main character is a reference to Superman, you know you're probably in the vicinity of a Dreamworks film. Let's be very clear in stating that the chief difference between the superb How To Train Your Dragon and this more middling effort is that the former was a film made by Dreamworks, and the latter is a Dreamworks film. All of the studio's old tropes are back, and en masse. That same bloody expression with the cocked eyebrow, celebrity voice talents and a faux-Disney "it's what's inside that counts" moral message.

More than that, if you're Dreamworks, it's not the best choice to make a film about the politics of superpowered rivalry, post-Incredibles. Especially when your protagonist is constantly trying to measure up to an enemy who's similar in method and origin and always falls short of beating them. It would seem like a manifestation of the studio's short man syndrome with the almighty Pixar, doing "superheroes" as a theme with more bombast and bravado, but with none of the subtlety or resonance of The Incredibles. It's like making Shark Tale after Finding Nemo. Oh, hang about...

All of this said though, Megamind is far from a waste of time. In the year when Hiccup and Toothless flying through the skies made jaws drop, this one has some incredible action spectacle that really uses the medium to its fullest advantage. There are genuinely creative battles and disasters on show here that would be impossible to realise in live action, even with the greatest special effects available at the moment. You wouldn't want to see them in live-action either, because that's how things like 2012 happen. But in animation, the real highlights of this film are in visual delights such as a huge skyscraper crashing down a street after two characters like an unstoppable locomotive.

I predicted a while back that this film and Despicable Me would turn out as proportionately the exact same story. I was wrong, but the films did level out at around the same level of quality. Both films had fun playing with the technological innovations their hyper-intelligent antiheroes could muster, but both films ended up borrowing a lot from other sources. In the case of Megamind, aside from the Superman allegory that peaks with Will Ferrell doing a killer impression of Marlon Brando as Jor-El, there are a ton of oblique references that go over kids' heads and won't impress adults that much. The post-modern superhero film has actually become hackneyed in itself, over the last year or so, especially when it was clearly done best by Brad Bird, in 2004.

As to the script, it could have used some work. Even without the compulsively spoilerish trailers and clips that have been floating around, the plot is astonishingly predictable. More than that, it's not really that funny. If the film's meant to be a comedy, and it's certainly been marketed as such, it should have made me laugh more. As it was, I found the teaser trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2 to be a funnier watch, before the main feature began. It's more diverting than it is humourous, which is fine if you don't go in expecting a comedy.

On balance, Megamind is more of the same from Dreamworks, and such a mechanical feature that I could probably tell you exactly what the plot of Megamind 2 will be if the numbers add up correctly for Jeffrey Katzenberg to greenlight a sequel. With some promising creative developments at the studio, hopefully this film and next year's trifecta of sequels will be the last of their kind before Dreamworks goes into a period of renaissance. Maybe they'll learn how to animate new facial expressions along the way. But crucially, they just might inject some sense of fun that's sorely been lacking in their last few similar efforts.

Megamind is now showing in 2D and 3D, at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Megamind, why not share your comments below? If you're wondering what next year's trifecta is, it's Kung Fu Panda 2, Madagascar 3 and Puss In Boots. And all Pixar is offering up is Cars 2. Boy, next year is gonna suck. Except Kung Fu Panda, natch.

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

A few thoughts on JACKASS 3D

Warning: this is categorically not a review. Whatever you and your dumb little buddies might have expected I would say about Jackass 3D is probably incorrect, because I thought it was brilliant. At the same time, it's a film that utterly defies criticism, even postive criticism.

The awful joke I was waiting to bust out for six months was related to how my mates haven't seen Jackass Number Two, and I was fretting over how they'd follow the storyline. Boom boom. The order of business is exactly the same, except this time, Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O and co. are pushing the boundaries with their cinematography, and ultimately making the best "Real-D" 3D experience to date.

It's not looking down on the film to say it defies criticism. This one is genuinely creative, and against all expectations, 3D was the making of this series. Let me put this to you- had Jackass 3D merely been a flat-vision Jackass Number Three, would it have been a must-see in the cinemas as much as the actual film is to fans of the series?

As TV-to-movie structuring goes, this is the most literal, simply putting a sequence of goofy, daring and occasionally sick-making stunts in sequence with the more cinematic addition of showboating bookends to the film. It's literally like watching an extra long episode of the series. And at the end of the day, had this not been in 3D, it would be little more than the third Jackass film. And the tone never changes. The guys never learn anything.

With 3D, you get the team clearly striving to innovate. They make use of the same slow-motion cameras deployed so memorably in Zombieland last year to give ultra-painful replays of impact, usually in somebody's face. One of the running gags that was continually funny was "The Rocky", whereby a fight shot from the Sylvester Stallone movies is replicated by chucking water on someone and punching them in the face, filming the prank in slow motion and setting it to "Gonna Fly Now."

There's a determination to avoid the same old stuff that really helps to make this the most entertaining cinema experience I've had all year, and that means I can't put it all down to the stereoscopy. The Jackass crew are at an impasse between the silent comedy maestros of classic Hollywood and the dystopic "Ass- The Movie" crap peddlers in Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and the film is only funnier for the fact that these guys are older now. It's not to say they're any wiser, but they do get more scared than they used to. In a subversion of that moral from Monsters Inc.,the braying hyena-like laughter that accompanies most stunts is less entertaining than seeing one of these guys genuinely frightened.

It's not surprising that the most enjoyable and essential 3D experience ever comes in a film with no storyline whatsoever. 3D is, at best, a theme park attraction, and Jackass benefits more from this demonstration of the technology than the technology does itself. It's like taking the carnival sideshow to a place at Alton Towers- everything is writ large, and it's funnier than ever before. It's demented and low-brow and all of that, but if you're able to stomach it, it's the most fun you'll ever have wearing silly glasses.

Jackass 3D is now showing in 3D (duh) at cinemas nationwide.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, a professional, and until next time, make sure you and your dumb little buddies don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Game Over- SAW 3D Review

Yeah, it's Saw VII. I might charitably call it Saw VII 3D, but it's certainly not Saw 3D. Hey, after the week I've had over on Den of Geek, doing Saw week, I think I'm allowed to call it whatever I want. Assuming of course that this film is as inaccessible as any deeply story-driven gory soap opera that you enter at the seventh instance, you might want to catch up with my brief summations of the first six films in this blog post from last year, if you don't have time to read through my lengthier Den of Geek critiques.

Righto then, Saw VII. Jigsaw's long-suffering ex Jill Tuck is immediately seen forsaking all badassery she mustered at the end of the last film by running away like a wuss when she sees demented bumbler Hoffman survive the reverse bear trap she put him in. Aiming to broker a deal for her release to his vengeance, Hoffman wreaks citywide mayhem with the traps and games, encompassing the already under-resourced police as well as a self-help guru who claims to have survived one of the Jigsaw tests.

One thing sticks out in how Saw VII fails to offer up a single shock in its entire running time. In the midst of so much grisly routine and misanthropic treatment of characters, one mistake could have redeemed the whole film had it been averted. Twisted Pictures should never have announced the return of Cary Elwes as Dr. Lawrence Gordon. Elwes almost serves as the franchise's Mount Doom with his bookend appearances- with him, Saw was made, and only with him can it be unmade. If they'd only kept that as a surprise, the film would have been worth its salt.

Instead it's just obscenely functional for a film so hyped as the final end of a franchise that fans have followed fo the last six years. So much of its essence has been lost in that time that even Saw VI seems like a return to form in comparison to the ornery incomprehensibility of some of the instalments in the middle. However, while that film improved for its partial reintegration of the late John Kramer, there's a near-criminal lack of him in this final instalment.

Tobin Bell is the gnarled heart and twisted soul of the entire series. It goes rapidly downhill once we're watching Costas Mandylor woodenly trudge along in his shoes, and Hoffman only becomes more unbearable at the very end. I also feel sorry for Betsy Russell, who rounds out her patient and competent run on the series with a scream queen turn, running down corridors and hiding behind cabinets.

But naturally, Saw films are not about the acting, or at least they haven't been since the days of the mighty Elwes and original co-creator Leigh Whannell. They're more about stock characters being put through unimaginable- sometimes baddies and sometimes goodys, but never relatable. With the character of Bobby Dagen, who becomes a hit on the talkshow circuit and bestsellers list at Jigsaw's expense, we make steps back towards the idea of redemptive torture being the object, but it's quickly subsumed by the same succession of unimaginative sideshows we've seen in the fourth film, or the fifth film, or any other film except the first two, really.

Of the 3D, there's really little to say, except that it might bolster the box-office enough to justify continuing the franchise, even beyond its apparent conclusion. There are still dangling threads that could be resumed, looking at how tenuous some of the series' latter instalments have gotten. It may turn out to be the finale as much as The Evil of the Daleks turned out to be "the final end" for the Daleks back in 1967. If anything is popular enough, it'll get picked up again. For me though, this is the end. Game over, as it were. I will not see another new Saw film, because I'm pretty much done with them.

In the same way as a dumb blockbuster will eventually seem quiet if it's loud enough for long enough, nothing in Saw VII fazed me, even with all of its sick-making gore. It's a disaffecting and demoralising film that reverts back to its worst excesses after the forward step made by its immediate predecessor, trying to skirt by on being a little more comprehensible. Cary Elwes is the most classy presence and his return could only have been more welcome if it hadn't been announced in advance.

Otherwise, we're looking at a finale so removed from the original point that it's more geared towards wrapping up its dense mythology. It achieves that well enough, but it's difficult to imagine Saw VII being anyone's favourite addition to the series.

Saw VII is now showing in 3D at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Saw VII, why not share your comments below? If you do want to read those lengthy Den of Geek critiques, find the links below...

Revisiting Saw and Saw II
Revisiting Saw III and Saw IV
Revisiting Saw V and Saw VI

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