THE FIGHTER- Review

Here's a puzzler. When Christian Bale is the centre of attention all of the time, and Mark Wahlberg is overshadowed by his skinny and charismatic self, despite having more heart than Bale or anyone else around in this story, am I talking about the 2011 awards season or The Fighter?

For those unfamiliar, The Fighter is the true story of boxer "Irish" Micky Ward as he came back from obscurity and humiliation to take on the Welterweight Champion of the World. As we find Micky, he's being managed terribly by his domineering family, and trained by his egotistical crackhead brother, Dickie. His brother is the hometown hero, in whose footsteps Micky has always been intended to follow, but as he finds one final chance to realise his potential, it may well mean severing ties with his family.

This Mark Wahlberg thing is a sticking point with me, just because he's so good in this. I laughed along with everyone else at The Happening and Max Payne, and the Saturday Night Live skit in which he's shown to talk to animals remains one of my favourite things. Hell, I even laughed during the Golden Globes TV coverage the other week, which cut back to Wahlberg drinking when someone who wasn't him won an award for acting in The Fighter while he didn't get a mention. That was before I saw the film, and now I'm completely on his side.

Yes, Christian Bale is an absolute force of nature as Dickie, channelling the way that Kevin Smith describes the drug-addicted Jason Mewes as well as throwing his weight around dramatically just the same. And yes, Amy Adams proves her mettle by breaking type in one of the sexiest roles of the year. And yes, Melissa Leo deserves everything that's coming her way for her overbearing matriarchal turn as Micky's manager. But where's the appreciation for Mark Wahlberg?

It's so strange that he's been overlooked, because all the elements for awards success are there. He's undergone a physical transformation, training for the last four years to achieve the physique he has for just this one film and somehow being overshadowed by Bale going really skinny again. He's playing a real person, just like Best Actor favourites like Colin Firth or Jesse Eisenberg or James Franco. And yet somehow, he's the one who's being overlooked. Shame on all of you.

I realise I'm talking a lot about the general audience and industry response to the film, which largely doesn't matter much in this context, and not saying enough about The Fighter, which is a phenomenally good film. It's inspiring and engaging and just all around excellent in all the places where most modern sports movies usually fall short. The seminal boxing movie is probably Rocky, and there are six of those to choose from. And even putting those aside, there's Raging Bull and Million Dollar Baby. It's a crowded field, but The Fighter takes it to the crowd and riles up an audience like no other sports movie I can remember seeing in a cinema.

As I quite thoroughly explained above, it's an acting showcase more than a film about the true story, which makes it all the more annoying that it trips at the final hurdle and does that really fucking annoying thing that movies based on true stories do. It shows the real people during the end credits. I actually appreciated the way that Sugar Ray Leonard and Mickey O'Keefe were cast as themselves, because it wasn't too obvious and it didn't take me out of the film, but Hollywood, let's get this straight. In recent months, I have entirely bought into performances by James Franco and Sam Rockwell, only to be shown the people they portrayed so well at the end of the film. The same follows here with Wahlberg and Bale. I don't want to see the real Micky and Dicky, or else I'd have waited for a documentary to tell this story instead.

Speaking of realism though, I feel like I should bring up a discussion I had in the pub about the film, the night after I saw it. We both really enjoyed it, and I praised the acting, the direction and how real the boxing looked. The other guy said that it actually looked choreographed and fake, so I stuck to my guns and asked why. Then he knocked me out by quite rightly pointing out that I don't actually watch or like boxing. Only then did I wake up to the fact that I'd been so hooked into the real story and the world it inhabits that I'd been convinced I knew it better than I did. So the guy in the pub wins some points there. Hey, this review is far enough from the rails already, so personal anecdotes are fine, and relevant, especially when they illustrate the spellbinding and magnetic effect of the film!

The trend of showing the real people in the credits really annoys me, but it's definitely not enough to prevent me from recommending The Fighter to all and sundry. It's truly engrossing and it's never po-faced- in the manner of director David O. Russell's previous film Three Kings, it's a lot of fun to watch. It's a rousing watch and the calibre of the performances are next to none. While The King's Speech may hoover up certain major awards, The Fighter should clean up in certain acting categories. The only shame is that Mark Wahlberg isn't getting more recognition for his stellar work in the film.

The Fighter is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Fighter, why not share your comments below?

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

And That's Funny, Right?!- THE OTHER GUYS Review

Did you lose your job during the recession? Has your credit rating plummeted? Then you know there has to be comedy in that, right? Right?! This is the pandering central conceit of The Other Guys, from the creative team behind Anchorman. After a blistering action-packed opening starring Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, we're introduced to the titular other guys, played by Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg.

Pen-pusher Allen Gamble and disgraced detective Terry Hoitz get their big chance to go up in the world when they stumble upon evidence of a Ponzi scheme orchestrated by a devious CEO. Working around the fact that they're utterly incompetent and have to have their balls busted every other day by their long-suffering boss, they go on a journey of... oh, look, it's just a buddy cop comedy, right?

Let me remind you of a film that limped in and out of UK cinemas earlier this year. It was called Cop Out, and people seemed to hate it. As a big Kevin Smith fan, it disappointed me- I found it to be lacking in his usual earnestness and humour, muddled in the plot department and all in all, it felt way too self-indulgent. I'm baffled by all the great reviews The Other Guys is getting, because the difference between Smith's film and Adam McKay's film is six of one and half a dozen of the other.

If anything, the plot in this is even more muddled than Cop Out. While that one at least had some motivation for our protagonists, this is merely a series of comedy sketches strung together by some vague political implications. It's like the filmmakers are breaking the fourth wall and saying "Will Ferrell is a geeky cop! And that's funny, right?!" Sadly, the answer is mostly no! I like Ferrell, but so much of his ad-libbing here utterly missed the mark for me.

Luckily, he's played against Mark Wahlberg, a natural comedy actor, as anybody who has seen The Happening will testify. His infuriated yelling for Ferrell to shut up is often a lot funnier than whatever tangent Ferrell is off on. They at least have a decent dynamic going, and I'd happily have watched any number of short sketches with them riffing on one another. The plot in this one just doesn't work, and it drags the film out to 107 minutes. Not a long film, but a film that feels really, really long.

It does have more than a few belly-laughs, an area in which Cop Out was definitely lacking, but come on! This one's surely only getting such a good buzz because of the goodwill towards Ferrell and McKay. This is by far the weakest film they've made together- I enjoyed Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers and so my expectations were high. Were they met? Fuck no!

Individual elements of it are great, but I wanted to see most of those elements more than we saw Will Ferrell. Exempt from that are Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, whose extended cameos are the most perfectly pitched comedic roles the film has to offer. Also, Steve Coogan- either he doesn't ad-lib well or they just gave his character really crappy dialogue. But I'd happily have seen more of Michael Keaton or Eva Mendes, dammit!

The Other Guys is a film that almost felt calculated to alienate me as it went along. I laughed a lot in the first half hour, but that's not enough to give the whole film a pass. It's only sporadically funny and sadly more concerned with throwing in Blues Brothers style car chases than being consistent and coherent. Wait until DVD if you're a fan of Ferrell. If you're not, then don't watch Cop Out either, but to those trumpeting this as the second coming, they're both different shades of the same disappointing colour.

The Other Guys is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Other Guys, why not share your comments below? Incidentally, even though I like Step Brothers, I'm going to slap the next person who yells "It's the fuckin' Catalina wine-mixer" in public. Unless we're actually at the Catalina wine-mixer. Which seems unlikely.

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

THREE KINGS- The Best Iraq War Movie?

Last week's 1980s smorgasbord leaves the multiplex looking a little bare this week, (there's a Cats & Dogs 2 review coming on Friday, for fuck's sake), so I've been delving back in time to watch some slightly older films this week. This happens a lot more than you'd think based on the review output of this blog, and I'm silly to try and prove that by blogging on the topic of a film that only came out in 1999.

Three Kings was on ITV1, that most evil and asinine of terrestrial channels, this past weekend, and having wanted to watch it for a long time, I decided Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, showing at the same time over on BBC One, would probably turn up on iPlayer. It didn't. It's difficult to be angry about missing it though, because Three Kings is one of the best war movies I've seen in a long time.

Perhaps my memory seems short- after all, Inglourious Basterds was only out last year. But what I'm actually talking about is modern war movies. What must be remembered is that America and its allies are still embroiled in war overseas, a fact that has informed all of Hollywood's action output since the September 11th attacks almost a decade ago.

Never mind that the war is against the broad and entirely intangible concept of "terror", and the fact that you might as well declare war on fluff or rainbows, it's had a huge influence. For instance, all of Steven Spielberg's films post-9/11 (bar that Indiana Jones one) have been related in some way to America's reaction. See The Terminal or Munich or War of the Worlds, you'll see what I mean.

What makes Three Kings different? Simply that it was produced before Bush misguidedly opened fire on Iraq, and it documents the war the elder Bush waged in the same arena, some years earlier. The upshot of this is that it's really prepared to show what America was doing wrong in that war, rather than being informed by vague aspersions towards the legitimacy of the second conflict and liberal guilt as in the likes of Green Zone.

Maybe I'm overstating it with my oh-so-political reasoning and my provocative blog heading, but bear with me- I'm going to be writing about Demolition Man on Wednesday, so you know that'll be a lot more fun. And you know what? Three Kings is actually a pretty fun film too. It's just a thrilling miasma of comedy, action and drama, weighing characters with personality against the undertones of political commentary.

It essentially combines heist movie tropes with the fallout of Desert Storm by sending a group of soldiers- a young father, his fratboy buddy, an undervalued chief sergeant and a cynical major due for retirement- off on a quest for gold bullion. The trouble is, it's all bullion that Saddam Hussein stole from Kuwait, and the four end up violating the ceasefire and bringing the Iraqi Republican Guard down on their heads when it all goes wrong.

There are scenes like those in latter Iraq war films, where characters sit about discussing what's wrong with them as human beings and what's wrong with America as a country, but it never seems preachy. With George Clooney's Major Archie Gates, wondering what was achieved in this minor set-to with Iraq seems a matter of course for him, and far less conspicuous than Clooney's latter visits to the same area in Syriana (which is obviously without humour) or The Men Who Stare At Goats (which is entirely humorous).

Elsewhere, the inevitable diatribe about America's arrogance is delivered fittingly by a more unconventional torturer than we normally get in American cinema. Amir, played by Cliff Curtis, is not some hulking mute or pantomime evil character while torturing our protagonist, he's a man who's genuinely been wronged by his own country and by America itself. Antagonists with proper dimensions are sorely missed in most other Iraq movies.

People will cite Sam Mendes' Jarhead as a great Iraq war movie, but I remember being distinctly underwhelmed by that when I first saw it. I should probably revisit it, but I can only remember it doing things that David O. Russell does better in Three Kings, with Mendes only really being reinforced by the "This really happened" mantra.

The one that does stand out as better is obviously The Hurt Locker, but as I said, you can have a lot more fun with Three Kings. The Hurt Locker is a damn fine film, but it's not one I like to see again too often. Three Kings tempers its social and political conscience with a plot that goes beyond the foreign policy implications and just outright entertains its audience.

There are the same stark visuals and washed out colours, but what you're looking at is still enjoyable on many levels. Can America produce another war movie like this, as long as they're tooling around in the Middle East?

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