In the first of what would become a successful five-film series, Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss is a passable and sporadically entertaining introduction to the 'girl gang' genre and one of the key entries in a series of films known as 'pinky violence'. Anchored by a performance of undeniable presence by Akiko Wada, who plays a no-nonsense biker and who surprisingly didn't appear in any of the sequels, the film gets bogged down by a plodding series of events and set-pieces that are too free-spirited for it's own good, and lingers far too long on various pop performances from flavour-of-the-week bands.
Plot-wise, the film doesn't have much going for it. Ako (Wada) is a drifter who picks up Mei (Meiko Kaji - later to play the eponymous Lady Snowblood (1973)), who is caught up in a beef with a rival girl gang. A fight ensues, and Ako chases away the gang and the various yakuza that have gathered for the entertainment. It becomes apparent that Mei's boyfriend Michio (Koji Wada) is caught up in a plot with the Seiyu Group, a powerful Yakuza organisation, to throw a boxing match. Naturally, things don't go quite to plan and Michio is hunted by the Seiyu Group, but not if Ako has anything to say about it.
Visually, the film is often splendid, using ultra-chic locations, split-screens and obscure camera angles that give it a trippy aesthetic. It's colourful yet undeniably grim, encapsulating the rebellious hippy spirit that undoubtedly made it's way over from America in the late 1960's. Reversing the usual gender roles, the Stray Cat girls are a rather repulsive lot, even though they plays our heroes, and Ako especially berates men for being weak if they refuse to stand up and fight, even when one is beaten to a pulp during a boxing match. It's certainly interesting thematically, but as a piece of entertainment, it's often extremely dull, stretching out it's wafer-thin plot when it should be giving us girls kicking ass.
French director Maurice Pialat mixes his usual approach of dialogue-heavy improvisation and his own slightly twisted sense of 'realism' with the police procedural genre. Anchoring Police is the formidable Gerard Depardieu playing Inspector Mangin, a chunky pitbull of a man who mixes charm, playfulness and violence together as he plays his way through the crime-fighting game with equal amounts of efficiency and carelessness. Pialat's camera, loose and restless, seems fascinated by him, and Depardieu's performance devours the film, overshadowing the director's themes of loneliness and criminality in France.
The first two-thirds of Police are it's best, as Mangin is caught up investigating a bunch of Tunisian drug-dealing criminals, and has his eye caught by the doe-eyed and beautiful Noria (Sophie Marceau), the girlfriend of one of the chief suspects. It's in these early scenes that Mangin is off the leash, slamming suspects heads into tables as a manner of interrogation, and, outside of work, joking with his friend Lambert (Richard Anconina), the criminal lawyer for most of the scumbags that Mangin puts away. Lambert is good at what he does, and most of his clients get off, yet he and Mangin laugh and joke about the system. It's all just a game to Mangin, something for him to do in order to satisfy his many appetites, as the line between the police and criminals is blurred.
Then Police settles down somewhat, as Noria turns from frightened innocent to fully-fledged femme fatale. She gets herself involved in a stolen wad of cash, and suddenly no-one is safe. Mangin is slowly revealed to be a lonely widower, and the film loses it's momentum. The fast dialogue and the murky world of pushers, pimps and prostitutes fades in favour of long takes in empty rooms, and Mangin suddenly isn't as interesting as he was. Sometimes it's better to prolong the mystery, to keep a character's motivations skewed. But Police is still a great ride, featuring one of Depardieu's best ever performances.
Documentaries rarely get to the true heart of their subject, at least, none more than Crumb, Terry Zwigoff's passion piece on the work and soul of one Robert Crumb, comic-book innovator, serial piggy-back rider and loather of practically everything modern. The notoriously reclusive Crumb, who self-proclaims that he doesn't like to interact with people he isn't completely comfortable with, would normally be a near-impossible target for any self-respecting documentary film-maker to get even an interview out of. But life-long friend Terry Zwigoff, who reportedly threatened to kill himself if Crumb wouldn't allow him to film him, achieves an immaculately intimate portrayal of what drives the man, and how this strange and often extremely dark-humoured man came to be.
Born in 1943 and growing up closely with his brother Charles and Maxon (he also has two sisters who declined to be interviewed), the brother's developed an early fascination with comic-books, mainly thanks to Charles' obsession with the medium. Living with a tyrannical father who often beat them, the three boys grew up extremely damaged and socially inept. Charles was good-looking but, as he describes, there was "just something wrong about me,", but Robert would use these experiences as amusing pieces in his sketches. As he got older, Robert wrote for Zap! Comics, and was one of the front-runners in the underground comic-book scene, where he developed the Keep on Truckin' serial, as well as his most famous characters Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat.
Given what seems like unprecedented access to Crumb, Zwigoff doesn't bombard the film with archive footage or talking head interviews (though there is a bit of the latter), he instead allows the story to be told by Crumb interacting with his family and friends, who all seem to regard the man with a lot of love, regardless as to how damaging he has been to their lives. We meet his two brothers - Charles still lives at home with his mother in a room piled high with literature, discussing his inability to get an erection due to the vast amounts of medication he has been given, and Maxon, having recently discovered his own artistic potential, is compelled to sit publicly on a bed of nails and pass linen through his body to cleanse his intestines. This isn't your typical all-American family.
Which makes it interesting is that the idea of a husband happily greeting his wife and kids after a hard day's work to sit down to a wholesome dinner in middle-class suburbia, became one of the focal points of Crumb's work. It is something that obviously appals and amuses him, this idea of 1950's all-American perfection where consumerism took centre-stage and capitalism reared it's ugly head. He frequently refers back to a simpler time, where America lay relatively untouched, when people's problems were real and poured their souls into the blues songs he so obsessively loves and collects. His piece A Brief History of America, where a peaceful and green bit of land slowly gets taken apart and replaced by all manners of ugly wires, pylon's and advertising boards, shown here in the film, is especially powerful.
Zwigoff isn't afraid to show the dark and ugly side of Crumb either. Shown sketching random passers-by on the street, he formidably judges and satirises them without uttering a word to them. This is a man whose opinion of humanity is nigh-on misanthropy, voicing his disgust at the brands and slogans people feel compelled to wear. His work also went places that most people would leave untouched, such as Nigger Hearts, where a perfect, all-white family sit down to a dinner of African-American organs, or the sketch in which a man and his friend rape a woman with no head (later revealed to have been simply pushed down within her). He's certainly a troubled man, but all great geniuses are, or at least should be, and Crumb the film lays it out on the table. Undoubtedly one of the greatest documentaries ever made.
For anyone who spent a lot of their childhood banging lumps of plastic together, creating outlandish plots and dialogue for them to act out, and pretending that all that lurked beyond the edges of the bed is a sea of molten lava, then you'll get The Lego Movie. It's hyperactive, fit-inducingly-colourful, and very, very funny, but it's the message behind the movie that makes it so wonderful. It tells a silly prophetic story about a simple construction worker thought to be 'the Special' - a plot deliberately made to sound like it's the product of an imaginative child - but his world of instructions manuals, mass consumerism, moronic pop songs and diabolical sitcoms is our world: the adult world. The Lego Movie makes you want to find your inner child again, and go back to those days where you could transport yourself to another world in your bedroom by using your own brain.
Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a naive and simple everyman, routinely watching popular sitcom "Where Are My Pants?", singing along to "Everything is Awesome!", and using an instruction manual for every aspect of his life. Left behind on a construction site one night, he comes across the mysterious Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), who seems to be searching for something. After accidentally spooking her, he investigates himself, and comes across the 'Piece of Resistance', a glowing object that gives him visions and knocks him unconscious when he touches it. When he awakens, he's being interrogated by Bad Cop (Liam Neeson), and finds the Piece has attached itself to his back. Believing him to be 'the Special' from a prophecy, Wyldstyle rescues Emmet and takes him to the Gandalf-alike Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), who teaches Emmet the way to becoming a master builder.
What could have been a mindless 90-minute advertisement for a global product, The Lego Movie dodges the bullet by actually attacking mass-consumerism, placing the importance on creativity and individuality. The big bad buy is Lord Business (Will Ferrell), a helmet-wearing, caped corporate devil who wishes to control everyone by gluing them in place with 'the Krakle' (a mispronunciation of Krazy Glue), oppressing the freedom to travel between Lego worlds (including The Old West, Middle-Zealand and Cloud Cuckoo Land). This is also a stab at collectors, those strange types who like to keep their toys in boxes and display them, rather than getting them out and using them for what they were designed for. Toys may have become ornaments, ways to make easy money on eBay.
It could be argued that such satire has no place in a kids movie. But these are the same kids who now have their own iPhones, bombarded with in-game advertisements and growing up in a world of reality TV, with programmes consistently celebrating wealth, stupidity and branding. Wyldstyle, concerned that Emmet may have never had an original thought in his entire life, asks him what his favourite restaurant is. "Any chain restaurant!" he gleefully replies. This is the man who is supposed to save the world, the greatest master builder to have ever lived, only to be a master builder, you need to have an imagination to create something amazing out of nothing. The best that Emmet has come up at this point is a two-level couch. It maybe useless, illogical and absolutely pointless, but it's something.
But The Lego Movie isn't all metaphors, it's also beautifully animated (it occasionally replicates stop-motion, as if the movie is actually made of Lego bricks, although it is entirely CGI), exceptionally witty, and features an outstanding vocal cast, who make up an entourage of Lego characters based on other mediums. We have Batman (Will Arnett) as Wyldstyle's arrogant yet loveable boyfriend, and the likes of Han Solo, C-3PO, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Gandalf, Dumbledore, Michelangelo the Renaissance artist and Michelangelo the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. It's an absolute joy, as if looking into a child's toy box to find a bunch of random and unconnected figures from years of collecting. And that sums up the film - like looking into the past and realising that that same person, who could lose hours putting on silly voices and concocting ridiculous stories, is still in there somewhere.
Not content with toying with our pre-quirky/ironic film-making preconceptions of how a movie should play out with the mind-blowing Being John Malkovich (1999), or going all-out self-reflexive with a blocked writer in Adaptation (2002), former music video director and Jackass co-creator Spike Jonze spins the traditional movie romance on it's head with Her. Set in a very believable near-future, it's the story of a lonely man who falls in love with a computer voice. It is the stuff of sci-fi and clever-clever satire. Or so you would think. Her, even with the absence of a physical female lead, may just be one of the most honest and heart-warming romances in recent memory.
Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) writes love letters to husbands, wives, sons, daughters and any others loved ones that require his services. He spends his life in front of a computer verbally dictating his achingly romantic letters for BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, a service for people who want to vocalise their love but have no way to express it. Theodore is the best at his job, yet in the real world, he finds himself pining for his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara), and chatting with strangers late at night on sex lines. He goes on a disastrous date with a beautiful woman (Olivia Wilde), but seems unable to connect with anyone in the real world.
When he hears about an innovation in technology, called OS, which activates an artificial voice that can organise your life, answer your questions, or simply be your best friend, Theodore gets Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), who quickly evolves to develop an adorable personality of her own. Soon enough, Theodore finds himself falling for her, and she for him, as they connect solely through an earpiece in Theodore's ear. It's a fad that quickly catches on, and people are soon falling for OS's throughout the country.
It sounds like the stuff of Orwellian satire, but there's no post-apocalyptic landscapes, no government agents watching through holes in the wall, and certainly no flying machines. The future of Her is nigh on utopian; the streets are spotless, the people happy, and no signs of class divide or social disorder of any kind. The film could easily have become another analysis of the dangers of technology and how we would rather send a text message than look someone in the face. The whole thing sounds gimmicky, a horror film about the rise of the iEverything, but this is as human a love story can be, even if the other half is the husky, wonderful voice of Scarlett Johansson. Her shows the joys of technology as much as the darker side.
It's Johansson's vocal performance that really allows the film to work, meaning that it's not just about a weird guy who gets off by talking to a computer. She does the incredible trick of making her a three dimensional character. It seems natural that a lonely guy like Theodore would fall for her, and Phoenix, sporting an unflattering moustache, capitalises on his staggering beast-in-a-cage performance in The Master (2012) - a film he should have beaten Day-Lewis to the Best Actor Oscar for - with another knockout performance. He's incredibly subtle, capturing more in a mumbled line than any Oscar-baiting monologue could. He's a heart-breakingly lonely soul, and when things inevitably get a bit difficult for the human/cyber couple, you really ache for him.
Her doesn't go down the route of Theodore craving human contact - the film is more complex than that. Samantha, with her infinite capacity to evolve, struggles to understand her own existence. It doesn't get bogged down with existential waffle, so we get to witness Samantha's child-like confusion and instinct to see and learn everything. Along with work friend Paul (Chris Pratt) and his recently separated best friend Amy (Amy Adams) (who both have love stories of their own), Theodore learns what it's like to love, and all the soul-breaking pain that comes with it. Her is wonderful and sad: a love story that even the most heart-hearted singletons living in this touch-screen world would find hard not to relate to.
18 year-old Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart), is a Valley girl working in the local movie theatre when the rest of the world are out partying, waiting for the arrival of a passing comet. Reggie has a party of her own with goofy projectionist Larry (Breaking Bad's Michael Bowen) and ends up missing the event entirely. After Larry is attacked by a zombie-like creature and dragged away, Reggie emerges into the world the next morning to find everyone vanished. All that remains are piles of clothes and red dust. She travels home to pick up her adorable sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney), and heads to a local radio station in search for fellow survivors, only to find lovable idiot Hector (Robert Beltran).
What is clearly aiming for pastiche of 1950's apocalyptic sci-fi movies, is actually an uneasy mix of many things. With the early introduction of the 'zombies', who can talk and use weapons, we are in horror territory. But this seems quickly forgotten once Hector goes to search for his mother and the girls head out for some very 80's retail therapy, even dancing around to Cyndi Lauper. Then it feels like we are in a John Hughes movie, with light humour and a cheesy soundtrack replacing the end-of-the-world atmosphere. It then switches again when the survivors are tracked down by a group of researchers who may or may not be up to any good. We are then in kiddie-friendly sci-fi mode, with men in white suits and big buttons that make science-y sounds.
Night of the Comet really isn't that bad, it just suffers from a disarming lack of follow-through that withhold's the film's potential, and shifts between genres too gleefully. The result is a film that's isn't funny enough to be labelled an out-and-out comedy, too bloodless to be called a horror, and takes too long to get to the shady scientist types that it would be misleading to name it science fiction. The performances are all decent, especially Star Trek: Voyager's Beltran and Chopping Mall's (1986) Maroney, who both would have benefited the film by having more screen-time. Geoffrey Lewis also shows up near the end as the big-bad head of the shady researchers, but it's too little, too late, and Night of the Comet is tame and messy when it should be spunky and fun.
Certainly lacking in wise-cracking rubber monsters and outlandishly-dressed brain-dead punks, Combat Shock - a serious, if extremely low-budget drama/psychological horror by writer/director/producer Buddy Giovinazzo - proves that Troma Entertainment occasionally took their movies seriously. The shell-shocked Vietnam veteran story had been done many times before, and certainly a lot better, but never quite as unsettling. Far from a masterpiece, and riddled with terrible production values, Combat Shock nevertheless is a glowing statement as to just what scraping-the-piggy-bank film-making can sometimes offer.
After an event during the Vietnam War that left a village dismembered and massacred, Frankie Dunlan (Rick Giovinazzo - brother to Buddy), struggles to adapt to civilian life. Living in poverty, unable to find work, and saddled with a whining wife (Veronica Stork) and a deformed baby, he is about the have the worst day of his life. Owing money to a group of drug-dealing punks, led by Paco (Mitch Maglio), Frankie wanders the battered streets of his native New York, coming into contact with various low-lives and looking for any way to make a buck. Seemingly without hope, and terrified to go back to his starving family empty-handed, he resorts to an act of violence.
You could imagine running a finger along the negative of Combat Shock and immediately needing to wash your hands afterwards. The movie seems awash with grime, and the streets Frankie wanders down have an almost apocalyptic quality. This is utterly depressing stuff, nearly entirely devoid of laughs, where the types of people Frankie befriends are gun-wielding junkies or child prostitutes. It's sometimes laughably pessimistic, a journey into utter depravity, and combined with some extremely amateurish production values and an occasionally plodding narrative, can be a bit of a slog to get through at times.
Yet for all it's sloppy editing and wide-eyed, over-the-top thesping, it is at times extremely effective. The baby, horribly disfigured due to Frankie's exposure to Agent Orange, looks cheap, but the way it moves and sounds, combined with the dump that surrounds it, is just as disturbing as Eraserhead (1977). There is also a horrible moment when a junkie, unable to find a needle for his fix, opens his damaged arm with a coat hanger and pours heroin into his black, bleeding vein. Some will find it's relentless depravity too much to take, but there's a gritty honesty here, going deep into the dark heart of a post-Vietnam America, where traumatised Vets were hung out to dry by a country that had forgotten them.
For the first time in the seemingly endless Friday the 13th franchise, A New Beginning betrays the promise of the previous instalment of being the 'final chapter', and has a (spoiler!) non-Vorhees imposter donning the mask, doing the deranged one's good work for him. This has led to this, the fifth entry, being donned the black sheep of the series, and isn't too well-remembered by it's hardcore fans. Being only a casual viewer of a series I believe to be, up to this point, the same movie made over and over again, I have no real problem with this. It's the execution that's the problem, and the laziness of director Danny Steinmann in failing to come up with any inventive scenes of butchery, making A New Beginning easily the most forgettable so far.
Tommy Jarvis (John Shepherd, and played by a returning Corey Feldman in one early flashback scene) is tormented by the events of the previous film, and has been released from a mental institution to seek peace of mind at Pinewood Halfway House. It is owned by Dr. Letter (Richard Young), and is home to various troubled and disturbed teens. After the brutal murder of Joey (Dominick Brascia) by Vic (The Return of the Living Dead's Mark Venturini), one of the home's more unstable residents, a series of brutal and unprovoked attacks ignite at the halfway house and the surrounding areas.
Chock to the brim with murders, A New Beginning should be the most easily watchable of the series. But lacking a true artist such as Tom Savini, and employing a hack like Steinmann (who only made 4 features in his entire career, including hard-core porn), the film is repetitive and plain dull. Shepherd, it's lead, lacks charisma, so we are stuck with an annoying kid (Different Strokes' Shavar Ross), who although has the energy to carry the screen-time he has, lacks the likeability of Corey Feldman and his character. The Scooby-Doo-esque mystery should add another element, but by the time the revelation comes, we've forgotten who the hell it is, and after 90 minutes of endless hacking and mutilation, I couldn't have cared less.
It's rather difficult to spot a George Clooney-directed movie. He's riffed on the Coen Brothers, Billy Wilder and Alan J. Pakula, without ever settling on a style of his own. Of course, there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from masters of their craft, but there's something undeniably empty about Clooney's output (the excellent Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) excluded). His latest, a light-hearted, men-on-a-mission World War II romp, is quite possibly his worst yet. It wants to be a war movie of old - a breezy, patriotic adventure best enjoyed on a rainy Sunday afternoon, but ends up being awkward, saddled with an awful script penned by Clooney himself and frequent collaborator Grant Heslov.
After successfully convincing the U.S. President to assist in maintaining the cultural heritages of the countries ravaged the war, Frank Stokes (Clooney) is given the go-ahead to round up a crack team and enter Europe to save the art looted by the Nazis. Stokes and his friend James Granger (Matt Damon) quickly gather the team - which consists of Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville), Walter Garfield (John Goodman), Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin) and Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban). Granger heads to occupied France and hooks up with spy Claire Simon (Cate Blanchett), who believes the team are out to steal the art for themselves, while the rest of the group split up with various objectives.
Artistic licence has obviously been taken here, and there is no problem with that for the sake of both entertainment, and bringing the valiant efforts of those involved in the real Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program, to people's attention. The undeniable greed of the Nazis (they hoped to open the Fuhrer Museum to home their loot) and the merciless destruction of any work produced by Jews, shouldn't be hard to convey to an audience. Yet, somehow Clooney struggles to make us care. Perhaps it's the cheery casualness of it all, or the fact that the film is nothing more than a few scenes lacking context where the cast mess around without letting us in on the joke.
This is Clooney as Steven Soderbergh, clearly channelling his experiences on Ocean's Eleven (2001), but lacking the ability to control an ensemble or pen a script that helps establish each character. On paper, the cast is of the highest quality, but in the film, they are all basically the same person. Everyone is 'the funny guy', yet no-one is funny. Without any feeling of a consistent threat throughout the film, it's hard to care, so Clooney lumps in an 'I think I've stepped on a mine' scene near the climax which cries of desperation. If this had been made 50 years ago with, say, Henry Fonda, this would probably be a classic. But this is 2014, and The Monuments Men is one of the biggest disappointments of recent years.
Social injustice and the failure of the justice system has long been a favourite topic for documentary film-makers. It's been done to death, sometimes raising enough attention for the case that it leads directly or indirectly to releasing the incarcerated (The Thin Blue Line (1988), the Paradise Lost trilogy (1996-2011)), or exposes enough holes in the story to make you doubt the effectiveness of police interrogation and/or the legal system as a whole (Brother's Keeper (1992), Capturing the Friedmans (2003)). It's estimated that 10,000 innocent people go to jail every year, so naturally, this kind of thing keeps rearing it's ugly head, and it makes for riveting and gob-smacking viewing.
The 'Central Park Five' are Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, youths aged between 13-15 in 1989, who found themselves in the wrong place, in the wrong city, at the wrong time. Trisha Meili, a young jogger running through Central Park, New York, was viciously beaten, raped, and left for dead by Matias Reyes, a notorious rapist who confessed to the crime years later. The five boys were in a group of 30 or so others, some causing havoc and attacking people, when the police descended on them. Through long and intense interrogations, the five made false confessions to witnessing the crime, incriminating one another with the promise of being allowed to go home.
The first hour of The Central Park Five is its finest. Ken Burns, directing here with his daughter Sarah and her husband David McMahon, is a historian at heart, digging out terrific archive footage of a city consumed by crime and racial tension, in the midst of the AIDS outbreak and the savage crack wars. The young boys, all black or Latino, were nothing but scapegoats for the NYPD, who were looking for a quick and tidy conviction. The brutal witch-hunt they suffered following their arrest, and the lazy role of the press - labelling the boys actions before the assault as 'wildings' and failing to do any real investigating of their own - is representative of the social and racial divide. This was a time when the city averaged six homicides a day.
There is also a wealth of footage showing the boys' 'confessions', which are fascinating to see unravel. There is a special moment when Korey Wise is shown a picture of the victim's bruised and battered head, and the sound that leaves his mouth leaves you in doubt of his incapability of committing such an act. The second half of the film left me frustrated. There are no big, satisfying moments of anyone getting their just deserts, and the Five, now released from prison and cleared of guilt, shows a startling lack of bitterness to the ordeal they experienced. There's certainly a lack of anger to the film, both by those involved and the directors, and it leaves things a little cold. But perhaps that's the point, that reality really is that harsh, and closure is hard to come by.
For all those concerned that Denis Villeneuve, director of art-house pieces Polytechnique (2009) and the Oscar-nominated Incendies (2010), has sold out on his trip to the U.S., then rest assured, Prisoners is a suitably grim, adult and metaphor-laden drama which just happens to be anchored by two Hollywood A-or-there-about-listers. Beginning with an almost unbearably tense opening hour or so, Prisoners soon dissolves into a formulaic thriller, abandoning the near-unbearable tension of the opening hour and packing the film with foot-chases and repetitive torture-porn, finding itself too caught up in tying all the many loose ends together for it all to make sense.
Whilst attending a Thanksgiving dinner, the daughters of Keller (Hugh Jackman) and Grace Dover (Mario Bello), and their neighbours Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy Birch (Viola Davis), go missing. The only clue is a mysterious RV parked outside moments before the abduction, which is quickly found by Detecive Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) in a car park with an apparently stricken Alex Jones (Paul Dano) inside. After Alex is quickly released due to a lack of evidence, Keller is furious and unconvinced, abducting him and taking him to an abandoned former home in order to instigate his own method of interrogation.
Boasting Oscar-nominated cinematography by long-time Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins, this is one of the finest looking mainstream thrillers in years. Drenched in grey, the miserable colour palette drapes the film in a feeling of foreboding dread. It brings to mind the beautiful and superior thriller Zodiac (2007), only without the period setting. It drags - and it does drag - on for 2 and a half hours, and the film is so lacking in humour that any realism the film was striving for suffers. It also stars Hugh Jackman, possibly the most effortlessly likeable actor working today, and watching him bang on the wall shouting "where is my daughter!?" - a line that should have been retired after Taken (2008) - is silly and unconvincing. The film takes itself so seriously that it almost becomes a parody of itself.
Gyllenhaal as Loki, however, is outstanding, and is a character I wish the film focused more on. With neck tattoos, a strange, buttoned-up (with no tie) appearance, slick-back hair, and blinking tic, it hints at a more interesting character than the film fully allows to develop. The film is more interested in not-so-subtle War on Terror parallels and comments on post-9/11 vigilantism, that sadly struggles to keep a hold of it's ever-widening plot and multiple plot strands, over-reaching itself constantly with scenes of stoic uber-seriousness. But it's splendidly filmed, and beautifully performed by Gyllenhaal, Dano and Melissa Leo (playing Alex's mother), which could have done with some heavier editing and less self-importance.
It was only a matter of time before most people's favourite X-Man, Logan a.k.a. Wolverine, got his own stand-alone movie. After Brett Ratner's atrocious X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) almost killed the franchise in it's tracks, 2009 was the perfect time for not so much a re-boot, but a fresh take, employing the Oscar-winning director of 2005's wonderful Tsotsi, Gavin Hood, to tackle the indestructible mutant's origin story. The result is an ugly mess of meaningless CGI, repetitive fights, corny dialogue and an over-abundance of dull supporting mutants.
After taking an extended holiday following the events of William Stryker's (Danny Huston) violent Team X mission in Africa, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is happily living as a shirtless lumberjack in Canada with his beautiful girlfriend Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). His estranged brother, Victor a.k.a. Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber), seems to be picking off members of Team X, so Wolverine is approached by Stryker to help with the problem. At first he declines, but when he finds Kayla's bloodied body in the forest bearing the marks of Victor, he joins Stryker who implants the alien metal adamantium into his body.
Origin stories are always difficult, and only Iron Man (2008) seems to have dodged the problem of making the creation of the superhero more interesting than what they can do with their newly-found powers. Origins takes the approach of practically ignoring it completely. We have a brief scene at the start with Logan and Victor as kids, and then a montage of the brothers fighting in the American Civil War, World War II and Vietnam. Within minutes, we have skipped well over 100 years of Wolverine's life (it appears he was born around 1840). It's main focus is the rivalry between Logan and Victor, and Schreiber snarls his way through some dodgy lines and somehow manages to come through unscathed.
Truth is, Origins has more in common with the previous X-Men films than any other superhero kick-start film, filling scenes with forgettable mutants such as Agent Zero (Daniel Henney), Fred Dukes a.k.a. The Blob (Kevin Durand), John Wraith (Will.i.am) and Chris Bradley a.k.a. Bolt (Dominic Monaghan). I would have happily paid extra to see more of Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), who was no doubt added to appease fans but is criminally ignored once he shows his face, and Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), whose story arc left me dumbfounded at the missed opportunity. Because of this, Wolverine is almost left out to dry. Normally, Jackman's charisma shines through, but here he just scowls.
All in all, this is no better or worse than those recent comic-book hero disasters Ghost Rider (2007) and Jonah Hex (2010). The first two X-Men films, directed by Bryan Singer, were really quite good, but the franchise (at this point) had become nothing more than a wad of money thrown at the screen in the hope that the crash-bang-wallop action scenes would keep the audience distracted enough to not realise what they are watching is a large pile of crap. Schreiber at least keeps things lively, and Hood is wise enough to keep things well below the two hour mark. But that is scant praise indeed, and the best thing about the film is that the sight of Wolverine chopping wood brings to mind Monty Python's Lumberjack Song.
Plot-wise, the film doesn't have much going for it. Ako (Wada) is a drifter who picks up Mei (Meiko Kaji - later to play the eponymous Lady Snowblood (1973)), who is caught up in a beef with a rival girl gang. A fight ensues, and Ako chases away the gang and the various yakuza that have gathered for the entertainment. It becomes apparent that Mei's boyfriend Michio (Koji Wada) is caught up in a plot with the Seiyu Group, a powerful Yakuza organisation, to throw a boxing match. Naturally, things don't go quite to plan and Michio is hunted by the Seiyu Group, but not if Ako has anything to say about it.
