BLITZ- Review

Ali Plumb wrote a blog entry last week on Empire Online, praising Jason Statham. The point that really stuck with me, from that entry, was that "he is his own genre". People know what to expect from a Jason Statham movie, and unless that movie is Gnomeo & Juliet, they're certainly going to get it. Blitz is what happens when the satisfaction of those expectations collides with an adaptation of a Ken Bruen novel.

Statham plays DS Brant, a bullish copper who treats South East London like his very own china shop. His station is currently under scrutiny from the press as a result of Brant's very public displays of police brutality towards criminals. While trying to lay low, a murderer calling himself Blitz begins a killing spree, picking off police officers methodically. Teamed with a strait-laced inspector, Brant seeks to bring Blitz to justice, through fair means or foul.

If regular readers of my reviews are wondering why the name of novelist Ken Bruen sounds so familiar. He's the guy who wrote the novel London Boulevard was based upon, and also serves as executive producer on Blitz. Nathan Parker, who wrote Moon, follows William Monahan in writing a rubbish script that happens to come from one of Bruen's novels, and that's a coincidence I shan't ignore. While I haven't read any of Bruen's work, these two recent films based on his books both have the most threadbare stories, reinforced only by the misplaced talents of the cast and crew.

Here's a Thing, that's happened in superhero movies of late. Back in the days when it was Adam West or even George Clooney playing Batman, it was all very frothy stuff. But now, we have Christian Bale as the Dark Knight. Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man, Edward Norton was the Hulk, Andrew Garfield is going to be Spider-Man- all properly great actors who up the philosophical quotient of these comic book adventures and open them up as more acceptable guilty pleasures to more snobby audiences. And with the arrival of Blitz, I can't help but wonder if London Boulevard marked the start of a similar trend in low-rent British crime movies.

Not that this is unfamiliar territory for Aidan Gillen, whose character is pretty much represented as a poor man's Batman villain, alias and methodology and all. Gillen acquits himself best, having always quite easily crossed between roles in films like this and 12 Rounds, and lauded television like Queer as Folk and The Wire. His character may be written as a cod-Heath Ledger’s Joker, but his performance is much more. Given the calibre of the rest of the cast, their performances are lesser.

Paddy Considine manfully manages the marginalised role of a homosexual policeman who apparently comes to see Brant's way as the correct way- think “the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way” again. Ridiculously named "Porter Nash", it's a waste of a fine actor in a role that effectively stops developing once the film's buddy cop movie strand aborts, to make way for more gritty and violent stuff. The particular talents of the always watchable Statham are put to good use, even if it’s in a pretty unlikeable role.

The idea of the archaic cop who gets the right results isn’t exactly untested, having been refined to a high art form by Phillip Glenister’s portrayal of DCI Gene Hunt, but it’s really old hat in films by now. Plus, everyone we meet from the force seems affably corrupt in one way or another in this film, so what is there for Brant to rebel against? As a result, Brant is such a cartoon grunt that it would be out of character for him to have anything more than grudging acceptance of Nash's sexuality and ideological differences, at a point where the film intends to appear all equal opportunities for about ten seconds. Instead, it backfires, coming across with a condescending and surprised inflection that gay men are apparently just as capable as all other men. The very idea!

So this isn't the more enjoyable vehicle for Statham that I wanted to see when I finished watching The Mechanic. The visceral nature of the violence demands that we take it entirely seriously, which makes all the one-liners and trademark Statham moments quite jarring. The plot hares off all over the place, just like London Boulevard, with many abortive plotlines that pad out the running time to where it feels long at a mere 97 minutes. It feels like a too-faithful adaptation of a book in its construction, which I can't confirm because I never, ever want to read any of Bruen's stuff.

While the idea of a Dirty Harry-style series of British cop movies with Jason Statham in the lead role is quite appealing, Blitz ain’t the start of anything. In fact, it barely ends, limping to an unsatisfying conclusion after what feels like an age. The film is also one of those British crime movies that's too much of a British crime movie, as we know them. The tropes are tired, and only the frequently unfulfilled promise of the actors involved is new. It’s violent, it’s dumb and, if you like it, it's the guiltiest of pleasures- but like the other recent Ken Bruen outing, it's far too ugly a film to really enjoy.

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

ATTACK THE BLOCK- Review

Nestled into a cushy niche in the hectic release schedule of summer 2011, Attack the Block arrives in cinemas and immediately announces itself as the film to beat, between now and September. I've made no secret of the fact that I've really been looking forward to this feature debut from Joe Cornish, of Adam and Joe fame, and happily it measures up to expectations.

The bones of the story are essentially like the basis for a Battle: Brixton movie, as an alien spore containing a vicious man-eating beast plummets into the midst of a South London council estate, interrupting a mugging. The muggers, five teenagers who live on the block, are attacked by the beast, but are able to overpower and kill it. As the kids celebrate their trophy, they don't realise that more spores are on the way- much bigger spores.

The immediate problem that some will have with Attack the Block is that we're expected to sympathise with chavs. There's more to them than that, but the characters are still chavs. Nevertheless, there's a case to be made that both the film's detractors and Cornish's script are guilty of simplifying the character types. To those who are too easily reminded of Eden Lake, and of course the yobs they've encountered in real life, the parallel is set up very early on through a middle aged woman calling the kids "fucking monsters". And then the real monsters turn up.

That concept of "inner city vs. outer space" is innovative and interesting enough that the hero yobs never irked me when they weren't supposed to. On the other hand, we do first meet them as they mug the supposed audience identification figure, a nurse called Sam, played by Jodie Whittaker. This is so harsh an introduction that the film spends a lot of time trying to reconcile the muggers and the victim when they're forced to unite, and these are the only times in which the film rings slightly false.

That's really the full extent of the potentially problematic stuff in Attack the Block, which is as bold and accomplished a debut as Richard Ayoade's Submarine, with all the ambition and technical aptitude of Duncan Jones' Moon. Cornish blends easily with that new wave of British filmmakers dedicated to ambitious and commercial projects that don't forsake storytelling, or that British sense of humour. His brilliant work re-enacting popular blockbusters using only toys in his bedroom on The Adam and Joe Show has somehow translated into a live-action visual sense that outdoes most of the film's relevant contenders in the very first shot.

However, virtually nobody else out there is making British films as ambitious as Cornish has. And under the Spielbergian touches, such as that sumptuous establishing shot that opens the film, there's the entirely valid current of social commentary. John Boyega, Simon Howard, Leeon Jones, Alex Esmail and Franz Drameh may not play hoodies you can hug, but they're all rounded and distinctive characters, equally capable of being despicable, as in the beginning of their journey, and heroic. It's only a shame that the portrayal of yobs on screen will conflict so wildly with the cinema behaviour of the audience it will attract.

It comes in at a lean, mean 88 minutes, and it's all muscle. Nothing's gratuitous, as we zip from the streets to the 19th floor of the block at the break-neck pace of a modern Doctor Who episode, while keeping the stakes high and the characters in mortal peril. The 15 certificate isn't merely for strong language and drug references- the violence of these gloriously designed creatures is faithfully represented, blood and guts and all. The film gets away with not probing the aliens too deeply on the strength of that eccentric character design and the sheer brilliance of the action choreography. 

Attack the Block is a curiously difficult film to define. It's not a ribald comedy, but it is funny. It's not a sci-fi film, but it does have aliens in it. It's not an outright horror, but it consistently jolts you out of your seat. Dismissing issues of genre, it's simpler to say that it's a stupefying success from a director who wastes no time proving that he's enormously talented and refreshingly optimistic. Cornish is also a good enough writer to ensure that the characters are accessible to anyone who's willing to take a chance on some unconventional movie heroes, in a film that's as cinematic as British cinema gets. Your move, Super 8.

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

13 ASSASSINS- Review

It was announced last week that the director of The Tournament, Scott Mann, who hails from my hometown, has signed up to direct a modern remake of Seven Samurai. Yeah, that Seven Samurai. It's not to say it won't turn out perfectly fine, but it's difficult to discount that we've already had The Magnificent Seven and even A Bug's Life, as well as a period piece set in Japan that owes a debt to Kurosawa's original, 13 Assassins.

Young Lord Naritsugu enjoys a position of privilege above practically everyone else, because he is the younger brother of the Shogun, and so his life is sacred. Unfortunately, he's also a sadistic monster who murders and destroys at will. As the age of the samurai is on the way out, an old samurai named Shinzaemon is hired to assassinate Naritsugu. He discreetly recruits 12 more assassins to his suicide mission and prepare for a confrontation.

The version of 13 Assassins now playing in UK cinemas is 126 minutes long, and it's comprised of one part historical politics and one part balls-to-the-wall, headsploding, sword-slicing mayhem. Seasoned director Takashi Miike has constructed what some are calling his masterpiece, and not without good reason. The plot, with all of its historical implications and faith to the political entanglements of feudal Japan, is deceptively simple. The first hour serves to develop the characters, and all else is a sustained battle sequence that is just awe-inspiring.

Although I maintain that the film owes a very clear debt to the formula of Seven Samurai, it's also a film that throws in a flaming stampede of cows to prefix its centrepiece action sequence. Just to repeat that- the cows are on fire. Samurai films may be nothing new, and this may repeat elements of previous outings, but it has cows on fire. Its surprisingly funny and always innovative moments of spectacle are what set it apart.

It's unfortunate that the titular assassins are less distinctive from one another. Seven Samurai has almost half as many protagonists and it's a much longer film, so it's far more difficult to fully characterise every single one of Shinzaemon's mates. Naturally, the eccentric loon, as played by Toshirô Mifune in Kurosawa's film and by Yûsuke Iseya in this one, stands out. The rest are less lucky, and it's easy to lose sight of who's dead and who's alive in the final melee. On the plus side, Kôji Yakusho makes Shinzaemon a well-rounded character, particularly in his stand-offs with the baddies.

Almost as if to compensate for the vagaries of all those protagonists, Shinzaemon has a conflicted friendship-cum-rivalry with Hanbei, a former samurai who works as an adviser to Naritsugu that's really quite transfixing. These two men strategise against one another with utterly opposed objectives, and it's their story that really comes to the fore. Gorô Inagaki must also be applauded for his deliciously villainous turn as Naritsugu, a villain you really can't wait to see getting his comeuppance. It only makes that extended climax sweeter.

Although you have more to go on from their motivation than you do from the characters of most of our titular 13 Assassins, Miike has made a triumphant tribute to the samurai epic. It is ludicrously enjoyable, inventively choreographed and just an all-around satisfying movie experience. More importantly, it's a film with all the trappings of a modern classic. For a director as prolific as Miike, that's something very special indeed.

13 Assassins is now playing in select cinemas nationwide. It will also be released on DVD and blu-ray on September 5th.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

HANNA- Review

Hanna may be seen as an unusual outing for director Joe Wright, who has in recent years given us Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and The Soloist. But nevertheless it's an action-packed antithesis to several recent rubbish films that purportedly had themes of female empowerment and independence, like Sucker Punch and Red Riding Hood.

It’s a modern fairytale that sees a young girl rescued from a wicked witch by her kind father. The modern part is that they hide in the North Pole. And the witch is ruthless CIA Agent Marissa Viegler. And the kind father, Erik, has been training Hanna’s body and mind to be the ultimate killing machine, to wreak revenge upon "the witch". When she's unleashed upon the world, and Marissa and her cronies begin to hunt her, she begins to adapt to life outside of her spartan existence to discover culture and companionship.

First and foremost, Hanna is a character-driven drama, which suits Wright's palette a little better than, say, The Expendables would have. But it's also a character-driven drama that happens to have an awful lot of kick-ass action sequences. In a way that is entirely unexpected, Wright announces himself as an action director to be reckoned with, fully capable of developing strong and empathic characters and shooting fight scenes that aren't shot two inches away with a shakycam, a la Bourne.

As we understand the story, Hanna views the world, and her revenge mission, through the prism of the stories of the Brothers Grimm, one of the few indulgences that her father seems to have allowed her as he constantly sneak-attacks the girl to prepare her for the future. The fairytale elements of the story are not always subtle, but they can always be appreciated. Unlike the grand histrionics of Red Riding Hood, it actually does bring an implicit coolness to the modern fairytale approach, with a script that’s strong regardless of how blatant the Grimm references may be.

Hanna also supersedes Sucker Punch by empowering a character who just happens to be female, without sexualising or objectifying her to remind us that she's only a silly woman or anything like that. Saoirse Ronan is an actress I really enjoy watching, and she’s on stunning form here. By turns, she's Hit Girl from Kick-Ass and Daryl Hannah in Splash adjusting to the complexities of the world around her without even having to don burlesque outfits or retreat into some imaginary bordello. Even Hanna’s partial sexual awakening as she encounters her first true friend is remarkably tasteful and heartwarming.

Eric Bana shows off his seldom aired action chops and Cate Blanchett makes for a despicable witch. As Ronan, Bana and Blanchett orbit around one another on their respective missions, the film’s 111 minutes flies by. Its pace is abetted even further by the work of Tom Hollander, who is equally camp and sinister as the tracksuited German henchman, Isaacs. His whistling of his character's leit-motif is both creepy and jaunty at the same time, and he injects some fun into the drama.

There’s also a soundtrack from The Chemical Brothers that stands out as one of the best scores since Daft Punk’s efforts on Tron: Legacy. Like that score, this one has been much discussed in the initial hype around Hanna, to the point where even I had bought the album and listened to it all the way through before seeing the film. Perhaps that's why I noticed how Wright wisely holds back that score until Hanna blazes into civilisation. In early scenes, she professes an interest in music that is meticulously paid off throughout the rest of the film as she discovers the rest of the world that has been kept from her.

Hanna isn’t without minor flaws, but it’s astonishingly well-executed, considering the recent raft of lesser films with similar themes. Hanna's simple interest in music and culture might go over the heads of some popcorn-munchers, but it's a deeply arresting and intelligent action drama in which the character is placed paramount, above the fisticuffs or the spectacle. It's surprising enough that the film got out with a 12A, considering some of the strong violence on show, but it's more surprising as a reinvention of Joe Wright the period drama director, into Joe Wright the action director.

Hanna is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

SUCKER PUNCH- Review

I like Zack Snyder. I don't think he makes guilty pleasure films, except for maybe 300- I think he makes visually exciting and generally very well-made adaptations. Dawn of the Dead, Watchmen, Legend of the Guardians and yes, 300 too, are all fine adaptations from what you could call difficult source material, in terms of their baggage if not in terms of their suitability for the screen.

While Snyder might be amongst the best in the business for adaptations, his new film Sucker Punch is all his, and so his visionary side takes a lemming-like leap into the depths of narrative incoherence. Baby Doll is a 20 year old girl who is left with her younger sister and her abusive stepfather when her mother passes away. When the stepfather attempts to rape the sister, Baby Doll snaps and he commits her to an insane asylum, on the fast track for a lobotomy. She then retreats inside her own mind in order to go on an epic quest to secure her own freedom.

Not everyone hates Sucker Punch. That's gonna surprise certain film fans, who should by now be familiar with the vitriol that has greeted this film since its release in the States a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, the audience with whom it's most successful is made up of males aged 13-25, an audience who are not exactly poorly served by the cinema of delights such as Transformers. Worse still, Zack Snyder has been telling anyone who'll listen that this is a story of female empowerment.

Female empowerment is a thorny subject. Last week, I read a blog post by filmmaker and Nostalgia Chick Lindsay Ellis, who speculated that even women now find it difficult to write their own gender because female characters are judged more stringently than male characters. Ellis contrasts Robert Langdon, a vacuous mush of a character created by Dan Brown, with Bella Swan, a vacuous mush of a female character created by Stephanie Meyer. The gender distinction is there in popular criticism, and as I'm not a woman, it makes it all the more difficult to talk about why I don't think Sucker Punch works from a position whereby certain women won't get angry and certain men won't call me some kind of Democrat.

Here's the very simple maths of why it lost me. Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung are our leads, and they're all very attractive young women. I don't phrase it like that from the position of someone trying to be diplomatic about gender equality, but from the position of someone who was utterly disinterested in the film. The reason? Their characters are all objectified by Snyder's lens, and it's as objects that they're on a par with Charles Foster Kane's sledge, or the One Ring, or any other narrative object that would be as difficult to root for if we were expected to empathise.

And so as these sexy young ladies plough through a cavalcade of admittedly gorgeous action sequences, involving undead Nazis, robots, samurai, dragons and fighter planes, it's deceptively boring. It's like a picture of a beautiful woman- a representation of what is good looking about that person, but without any personality. More than that, it is extraordinarily contrived, taking on a fetch quest mechanic that really would have made it more suitable for a video game endeavour by Snyder rather than a movie.

The imagined reality angle has led some to compare the film to Inception as both a negative or a positive comparison, depending on if they disliked the film or if they're 13 years old. To me, I was reminded of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, if only because this is a succession of video game setpieces, but sans any hint of humanity. It is lifeless in a way that Edgar Wright's film was not, and the distinction between them should be greater than it will probably end up. This one's really more like Repo! The Genetic Opera, an overrated film with a much greater cult following than Sucker Punch will ever accrue.

In all fairness to Snyder, his film was hobbled slightly by poor test screenings, which led to studio interference with the final cut. Although an even longer musical version of this film doesn't sound too appealing to me, I can at least appreciate that this ain't entirely what Snyder wanted to do. For another thing, movies have more financial taboos about their ratings system than video games, and Sucker Punch is further crippled in its grislier aspects by the 12A certificate. There are about five or six attempted rapes in the film, and in order to avoid a higher rating, that's an act which only becomes as threatening or as damaging as walking towards someone slowly with a creepy grin.

There's only so much damage that could have been done to Sucker Punch by the studio, because I struggle to pinpoint the salvageable stuff in this indefensible folly. The cinematic visuals can only make for a plot as absorbing as a music video, when combined with shonky dialogue and plot twists and dreadful sexual politics that are nigh on unforgivable in a film trumpeted as a piece of female empowerment. It's a piece of something, alright. It's a catastrophic misstep that, whether intentionally or not, values upskirt shots far above character development, and it's an embarrassment to all concerned.

Sucker Punch is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

SOURCE CODE- Review

Duncan Jones properly makes a name for himself with Source Code- and goodness knows it's not easy to make a name for yourself when your birth name is Zowie Bowie. After his astonishingly good debut Moon in 2009, he takes on a bigger budget to direct Jake Gyllenhaal as an Air Force helicopter pilot who's drafted into a top secret government science project.

Captain Colter Stevens wakes up on board a commuter train, in a body that is not his own. Everyone else sees him as the man he appears to have inhabited, a teacher called Sean Fentress, including Sean's colleague Christina. Eight minutes later, the train explodes, bombed by an unknown attacker. In a cramped capsule at a government facility, Colter is repeatedly put through those eight minutes by a technology called source code, with the goal of discovering the bomber's identity before he strikes again in the real world.

Following The Adjustment Bureau and Limitless in recent weeks, Source Code presents itself as another more intelligent sci-fi, driven by characters and generally very well executed. Duncan Jones is once again directing from a script that is not his, but he still indelibly makes it his own film. It shares some of the same themes as Moon, and some selected shots of Jake Gyllenhaal in isolation that echo those in the earlier film.

Of the script however, it has to be said that the wrong director could have easily gone off the rails with it. Imagining Tony Scott directing this script is a concept that... well, it's actually remarkably like Deja Vu, a Scott film in which frequent collaborator Denzel Washington plays a cop tasked with travelling back in time to prevent a terrorist attack. The easy distinction to make here is that Source Code does not uphold the idea that the past can be changed, instead opting for a multiversal approach.

Each time Colter attempts his mission, it creates a new reality, and there's always the sense that those realities go on even after Colter reawakens in his capsule. It's a fascinating conceit, and one that leads to the maximum amount of emotional turmoil for the pilot as he falls in love with Michelle Monaghan's Christina. Monaghan is a vastly underappreciated actress, and she makes the most out of what is essentially an underwritten character, getting the audience on-side from the offset.

Gyllenhaal is less distinctive but no less accomplished in the lead role. Jones' leading man from Moon, Sam Rockwell could arguably have pulled it off better, but it's certainly not bad casting. It pains me to say that the single instance of bad casting, which almost pulled down the whole movie for me, involves the usually reliable Jeffrey Wright. He channels Shatner as Professor Rutledge, hamming it up in a performance that really belongs in another movie. By contrast, Vera Farmiga, with whom he shares most of his scenes, is the very picture of restraint and consideration.

The best thing to say in the film's favour is that it never seems repetitive, even for a moment. This is a plot that is predicated upon a character repeating the last eight minutes of a man's life ad infinitum, doing things a little differently each time, and it always feels fresh. The premise reminded me a little of Quantum Leap, and to that effect, Jones cast Scott Bakula in a short cameo. That's just one example of the intertextual nous at Jones' disposal, which complements and enhances his visionary approach.

It's a nimble watch at 93 minutes, and as far as its denouement, it seems to occupy the same headspace as Back to the Future. Neither that film nor Source Code particularly bothered to ground the mechanics of their central apparatus in actually established scientific knowledge, and both films circumnavigate their plotholes by being accessible and hugely entertaining. Duncan Jones continues to be an exciting filmmaker, and long may he continue to exhibit his beating heart as much as his brain, in clever and touching sci-fi features like this one.

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