Like 2004's excellent, melancholy Friday Night Lights (and the TV series that followed), Peter Berg injects Lone Survivor with the same sense of camaraderie, as a band of brothers go to near-impossible lengths to carry out the task at hand. But where Lights took place on the football pitch, Lone Survivor is set amongst the unforgivable terrain of the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. Based on sniper Martin Luttrell's book (here he is played by Mark Wahlberg), the events that took place in June 2005 was one of the most gruelling acts of warfare ever recorded.
After receiving orders to execute Ahmad Shah, a Taliban leader responsible for deaths of over a dozen marines, a Navy SEAL's unit headed by Erik Kristensen (Eric Bana) plan for a quick operation. Luttrell, team leader Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), sniper 'Ax' Axelson (Ben Foster) and communications specialist Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) are picked for the job, and are dropped onto a steep and jagged Afghan hillside. They locate their target, but after experiencing some communication problems, come across a Taliban sheep-herder and two children. After deciding to obey the rules of engagement and let them go, they are soon pursued by a small army, who rain bullets and rockets down upon them.
Starting with the same twangly-guitar music that steeped Friday Night Lights so beautifully and richly in atmosphere, the film begins with heavy in shots of sunsets, our heroes staring at photographs of their loved ones. and cracking wise over dinner. It doesn't do much to help us distinguish one from the other (apart from the fact they are all recognisable faces), but it does establish a sense of foreboding doom. The opening scene depicts a bullet-ridden and near-dead Luttrell before skipping back in time, so the outcome of a film called 'Lone Survivor' leaves little ambiguity. And when the bullets start to fly, Peter Berg shows us one of the most brutal and realistic depictions of war even put on film.
The four are shot, blown up, and in the most wince-inducing scenes, thrown down a hillside of sharp rocks and thick trees, where we get to experience every impact and every bone broken. It's an endless array of loud violence, and when you finally think it's over as Luttrell is aided by Afghan villagers, they still more to come. It's in the later scenes when the film becomes less a serious study of warfare and bravery, and becomes more of a Hollywood movie. There's a lot added in these scenes that didn't happen in real life, and it feels like an unnecessary attempt to appease an audience used to more traditional action-movie climaxes. But for the most part, this is thrilling, and quite moving, stuff.
Eager to cash in on the faux-sequel success of Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) - which was dubbed Zombi 2 in an attempt to dupe audiences into believing it was the sequel to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), Italian director Luigi Cozzi released Alien Contamination on the back of the success of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). The similarities between Contamination (as it was named in the UK and on the infamous 'video nasty' list) and Flesh Eaters are quite striking - they shared the same production building, they both star Ian McCulloch, and they are both pretty bad.
When a large and apparently empty ship pulls into New York Harbor, obnoxious NYPD lieutenant Tony Aris (Marino Mase) steps in to investigate. Soon enough, a dead, mangled body falls out of a cupboard, and the rest of the crew are discovered in a cramped space, all dead. The ship is transporting a large quantity of strange eggs that, when heated, explode, releasing a deadly fluid which causes anyone it splashes on to explode. The military call in Colonel Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), who links the eggs to a recent mission to Mars, where astronaut Hubbard (McCulloch) returned claiming to have seen a nest of alien eggs only to have his claims dismissed by fellow astronaut Hamilton (Siegfried Rauch).
The main problem with Contamination - and there are a lot of them - is that the film is so carelessly put together in an attempt to blend various successful genre tropes of the time, that it neglects to offer any kind of explanation or logic to the alien's plan. The eggs burst, killing anyone near, but don't hatch and therefore increasing the alien population on Earth. In fact, there's only one 'cyclops monster' who overlooks the eggs. Add to the mix an increasingly sagging middle section in which very little happens apart from dull exposition, the film becomes confusing and nonsensical. The exploding bodies offer a little light humour as the actor's bloated mechanism is clearly visible, but this just adds to the air of tragedy, as it tries to desperately cash-in on the success of Alien.
There is a line from Alexander Payne's 2004 masterpiece Sideways, in which Paul Giamatti's lonely and depressed Miles describes his lack of purpose in the world as feeling like "a smudge of excrement on a tissue, surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage," that has always stuck with me. It's a beautiful, poetic line he attributes to the work of Charles Bukowski, although I don't think it was, which perfectly encapsulates his feelings of emptiness. During my viewing of Black Knight, it occurred to me that this line also sums up the cinematic career of Martin Lawrence, black stereotype extraordinaire.
His belief-beggaringly successful TV career made graduated into movies in the late 1990's, and cinema was forced to endure his mixture of prat-falling and tough-guy gun-totin', to which he was convincing at neither. But perhaps I'm being unfair to Lawrence as, after all, Black Knight was written, financed, cast, produced and directed by a whole host of people. all of whom should hang their heads in shame. It is a generic time-travel, culture-clash story in which theme-park layabout Jamal (Lawrence) is transported back to Medieval England, where he faces a corrupt king (Kevin Conway) and his douchebag enforcer (Vincent Regan).
Never mind the complete disregard for anything resembling historical accuracy, offensively stereotypical black characters, the dirt-cheap production design, and the baffling sight of Tom Wilkinson (who, to quote my step-dad, must have been short of a few bob), it's the comedy void that we are thrown head first into that makes Black Knight a truly torturous experience. Clearly the writers think that a shout of "holler!" or the sight of a bunch of white people trying to dance is an acceptable substitute for comedy. An unforgivable experience.
After Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class (2011) injected a bit of life back into the X-Men franchise, any further instalments faced the headache of what to do with a bunch of fantastic actors playing the same characters decades apart. Inspired by the 1981 Uncanny X-Men comic of the same name, Days of Future Past switches between a nightmarish, dystopian future overrun by giant sentinels, and the boogie nights of the 1970's. We get the best of both worlds, and thankfully, in his seventh appearance over the course of 14 years as his most recognisable character, Hugh Jackman's Wolverine inhabits them both.
After narrowly escaping a sentinel attack in the near-future, a band of mutants including the returning Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Kitty Pride (Ellen Page) meet up with Wolverine, Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magento (Ian McKellen), Storm (Halle Berry) et al to hatch a plan before the next inevitable attack. Kitty transfers the mind of Wolverine back to 1973, where a young Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is soon to assassinate Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), setting off a chain of events that could result in the apocalypse. The only problem is, the young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is depressed and mansion-bound, still struggling to deal with his powers and the loss of the use of his legs. They also need to help of Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who is imprisoned in a plastic cell for allegedly assassinating John F. Kennedy.
For all it's time-travelling gobbledegook, Days of Future Past doesn't spend too much time trying to explain the mechanics behind it. Like Rian Johnson's mind-bending Looper (2012), it recognises the folly in attempting to spell it out for you. When you look at it under a microscope, time-travel makes little sense in movies as it is, so it's best to accept what you're seeing and move on. McAvoy's Xavier even dismisses Wolverine's ramblings as 'future-shite'. This frees up more time in an already packed movie to concentrate on the damaged Xavier, brought to life by another fantastic performance from McAvoy. If First Class was Magneto's origins, this is Professor X's, showing a scared, conflicted and broken man and how he became the father to mutants he is when embodied by Patrick Stewart.
Of all the many mutants on show, some are not given as much time as their name would suggest. Storm, Anna Paquin's Rogue, and most notably, Ian McKellen's Magneto are somewhat left out to dry, while Nicholas Hoult's Beast, Kitty Pride, and a first appearance for Evan Peters' Quicksilver, are more prominent, and thrive in their larger roles. Trask, a rather fascinating villain thanks to the performance of Dinklage, is left undeveloped. We glimpse into his mind and ambitions, but there's little clarity given to his motivation. But with a film this packed with characters, it would take four hours or more to explore them all, and some inspired set-pieces pepper the film at the points where you start to think the plot will make your head explode. The (possibly) plot-hole laden climax aside, it seems like the franchise is as good as it was at the end of X2 (2003), seemingly serving to delete all the poor decisions made in returning director Bryan Singer's absence. Now, the wait for X-Men: Apocalypse.
For those (surely) few concerned at the film title's hint that this may spell the end of the giant, indistinguishable CGI aliens, then rest assured, the perplexing box-office takings and the recent announcement of a fifth instalment means that there's no end in sight for Michael Bay's soulless, money-churning franchise. For those tired of the sickly, shaky-cam photography, annoying, goofy humour, tactless pandering to it's undemanding audience, and endless scenes of computer effects bashing against one another, this spells disaster. Though Age of Extinction marks a slightly more focused improvement over it's two predecessors, Bay is showing no signs of wanting to create a decent movie.
Essentially a re-boot due to a complete cast overhaul (minus the robots), this fourth instalment offers little in terms of refreshment. Our human hero is now Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), replacing Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky, but sharing all the personality traits. Yeager is a genius mechanic, turning junk into something useful, though nothing financially successful, as his hot-pants-donning jailbait daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) repeatedly points out. He is essentially the same nerdy, fast-talking every-man as Sam, only he has arms like tree trunks. His discovery of a beaten-down old trunk in a crumbling movie theatre (perhaps a nod to Bay's hand in the disappearance of the local independent cinema) kicks off a series of events which soon attract the attention of corporate-type CIA agent Attinger (Kelsey Grammer).
Of course, the truck is Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), and it turns out that the government are hunting down transformers - even the good guys who helped in the previous film's battle in Chicago. A shady company, headed by Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci - the only actor appearing to have a pulse), is also involved, using 'science' to extract data from the head of Megatron and extracting a new, codeable metal - laughably dubbed 'Transformium'. Anything can be created from the substance, and is being used to develop the company's very own transformers, including Galvatron, who fans of the comic will know to be an absolute beast. When he is unleashed, it becomes apparent that Galvatron has plans of his own. Also in the mix is ancient transformer bounty hunter Lockdown (Mary Ryan), who intends on taking Optimus back to the 'creator'.
It's a hell of a lot of plot, and at 165 minutes, this will test the endurance of even the most hard-core fan of the new movie franchise. Bay clearly hasn't learned anything from the critics. Age of Extinction is the same convoluted splurge as the film's that came before. This time at least, thanks to the vocal talents of John Goodman and Ken Watanabe, the robots can at least be identified amidst the carnage. Without Megan Fox or Rosie Huntington-Whitely to letch over, Bay has employed another useless female character in Peltz, who runs away from explosions in short-shorts and high heels, and has an equally dull boyfriend in Shane (Jack Reynor - whose Irish accent somehow sounds fake even though his IMDb page lists him as having lived in Ireland most of his life). They've been sleeping together for ages so, y'know, the whole sex with a minor thing is cool.
Many critics have dubbed this as the worst yet, but I disagree. Although I detest the use of CGI as a narrative tool, the special effects here are some of the greatest work ever put on film. There's also no outright racist characters, such as the Twins from Revenge of the Fallen (2009), and the whole experience is far less cringe-worthy than it's predecessor's in terms of attempted comedy. But with the film failing to inject any development or evolution into the series, the point of these movies points to just one thing - money. Bay is filling his pockets without a shred of artistic integrity, and as long as audiences keep offering their money for sheer mediocrity, these movies will keep popping up every couple of years.
Released in 1969 under the guise of a low-budget exploitation film, The Honeymoon Killers is in fact one of the best American real-life crime movies ever made. It tells the story of Martha (Shirley Stoler), a lonely, overweight nurse who is entered into a 'lonely hearts' club by her friend Bunny (Everybody Loves Raymond'sDoris Roberts). She receives a response from Latin lothario Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco), who is a con-man who preys on lonely women, shaking them down for their money. When he reveals this to Martha, she is undeterred, and insists on joining him on his quests by posing as his sister. Ray promises that he won't sleep with any of them, but Martha's overbearing jealousy soon leads to murder.
Based on the notorious case of the 'lonely hearts killers', first (and only) time director Leonard Kastle adopts a documentary-style approach, opting to use mostly hand-held photography, naturalistic lighting, and minimalistic editing. If sometimes the small budget becomes obvious, this only heightens the sense of realism running throughout the film, assisted by two astonishing performances from it's leads. Stoler is immense, evoking sympathy at first but then revealing her true motives are rooted in jealousy and bitterness as she becomes unpredictable and frightening. Bianco, who is still enjoying a prolific career, performs with a flawless Latino accent, demonstrating the charm and seduction that helped Fernandez dupe so many of his unfortunate victims in real-life
But the film is not without artistic merits as well. Lacking blood and devoid of any kind of shock tactics, the murders are cold and brutal. A hammer blow to the head has as much impact as Leatherface's notorious entrance in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), as the victim struggles and twitches while the killers struggle for finish her off. Another has the camera focus just on the panicking eyes of a sedated victim, as Martha and Ray argue off-camera about to do with her. A gun then appears at the corner of the screen and it's all over. It's shockingly blunt for it's era, but only serves to make The Honeymoon Killers one of the most invigorating and uncomfortable experiences I've had in recent memory.
Despite his questionable religious beliefs, cringe-worthy talk show appearances, and all-round general creepiness, one cannot deny the raw star power of Tom Cruise, even a shocking 28 years since his breakthrough in Top Gun (1986). Here, he brings charm to an instantly dislikeable character - a cowardly, smarmy PR major who hasn't seen a second of combat in a world battling invading alien forces. His performance - possibly one of the best in his long career - shows his true range as his character goes through a highly convincing arc from pathetic rookie to fully-fledged action hero. It's easy to forget that Cruise is a highly accomplished actor, and there is no-one better out there to spear-head a blockbuster.
As humanity prepares for a surprise attack on an alien force called Mimics who have devastated many of the large cities on Earth, General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) orders public affairs officer Major William Cage (Cruise) to cover the combat from the front lines during the assault. Objecting that his life will be placed in danger, Cage is arrested, labelled as a deserter, and wakes up handcuffed in the hands of Master Sergeant Farrell (Bill Paxton), a Southern drill instructor with a strange sense of humour. Cage is suited and booted with hi-tech armour and dropped into the battle, which turns out to be a disaster for the humans and they are overrun by the Mimics, who decimate their forces. Cage manages to kill a rare large Mimic, and is killed in return when the Mimic's acid-like blood dissolves his face.
He then wakes up handcuffed, and again meets Master Sergeant Farrell, who appears to have never met him. The day plays out like it did before, and once again Cage is dropped into the battlefield only to be killed again, this time surviving a little longer. It's on the battlefield that he meets famous soldier Rita 'Full Metal Bitch' Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who seems to recognise his ability to anticipate events and tells him to seek her out, before they are both killed again. Cage tracks her down on the base, and Rita informs him that he is stuck in a time-loop, something she experienced after a previous battle with the Mimics but has since lost due to a blood transfusion. The two start to work together, with Cage training to survive a little bit more every time he dies.
Adapted from the Japanese light novel All You Need is Kill (a title the film adopted before it changed to the generic Edge of Tomorrow - something that may have been the cause for it's underwhelming box-office performance), the film clearly takes inspiration from video games. Every time your character dies, it starts again from the beginning of the level or checkpoint, where you can use your experience to gain the skill required to complete the level. While this can be frustrating and monotonous when bashing a game controller, Edge of Tomorrow doesn't linger on the repetitiveness of Cage's day, and instead moves the story along to the point where you don't even know how many times Cage has lived the same day.
Each time, Cage learns to duck here, fire there, take a different route; and director Doug Liman revels in killing off his hero in a variety of ways to an often comedic effect. The first two-thirds of the movie are delightfully entertaining, with the Mimics proving to be inventive creations, resembling giant, tentacled tumbleweeds, and the movie wisely choosing not to get bogged down in time-loop mumbo-jumbo. Emily Blunt, one of the most charismatic and beautiful actresses working at the moment, is excellent, portraying a female lead who, for once, isn't there simply for the male hero to rescue and fall in love with, but is the key to any hopes of success. Which is all the more disappointing when the movie begins to bow to convention during the final third, as Vrataski starts to fall for our vertically-challenged protagonist.
As with most recent blockbusters, Edge of Tomorrow also struggles at the climax. The inventiveness of the Groundhog Day approach (I almost made it through the entire review without mentioning the Bill Murray classic) makes way for a familiar, simplistic climax and a roll-your-eyes bittersweet final scene, It's sad, because this could have been one of the best blockbusters in the past couple of years; a twist on the usual crash-bang-wallop alien invasion flick. It does, however, offer plenty of great action, bolstered by a fine sense of humour, and proves that Tom Cruise can still convincingly anchor a big-budget action movie, even at the ripe old age of 52.
With the emergence of everyday computers during the 1980's, came the natural fear of just what they were capable of. Evilspeak may not contain the most ridiculous use of blending technology with the supernatural ever committed to film, but it does demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of how they actually work. Apparently, you can key in a question or a Latin sentence, and you will receive an answer or interpretation. Of course, with Google now the most omniscient tool since the Almighty himself, computers are now capable of doing just that. In Evilspeak, it is used in an attempt to summon Satan, but how exactly is unclear.
Social outcast Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard) is a young cadet at an American military academy, where his chubby appearance, lack of football (soccer) skills, and general idiotic behaviour make him the subject of bullying. Whilst cleaning the church cellar, he comes across the diary of Father Esteban (Richard Moll), a Spanish Satanist who existed during the Dark Ages and who is glimpsed in the opening scenes sacrificing a woman. Using his trusty computer, Stanley interprets the diary and discovers that it contains a recipe to perform a Black Mass - a black magic ritual he plans on using against his classmates.
Similar in subject matter to Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), Evilspeak fails to engage as De Palma's iconic horror did due to bad writing and a lack of any engaging back-story. Howard is impressive as Stanley, playing the bumbling goon well enough to get him on our side, but for the most part, the film aimlessly and bloodlessly ambles on, occasionally throwing in random supernatural events such as deadly pigs attacking a naked secretary in the shower (naturally). When the climax comes, it is a satisfyingly bizarre collection of blood and guts that cemented it's classification as a 'video nasty', and the effects aren't bad at all. However, this comes too late and Evilspeak never manages to become anything other than an occasionally amusing oddity with an amiable performance from it's lead.
Anyone unfamiliar with the unconventional work of former film-making brat Harmony Korine may mistake some early scenes of Spring Breakers - seemingly his first venture into 'mainstream' directing - for the youth and skin-worshipping work of MTV, or even a pop video. The camera pans across and lingers on an endless array of bikini-clad, big-breasted babes, toned, air-punching jocks, and all kinds of behaviour you wouldn't want to see your adolescent child participating in. But there's something vacant and lifeless in their expressions, and the film captures them with a mundaneness despite the thumping beats and gorgeous cinematography. It would seem Harmony Korine doesn't like the youth of today one bit.
He voiced his distaste (or at least wrote it) with his screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids (1995), as it's various characters spread HIV throughout the youth of New York and generally waste their days smoking pot, drinking alcohol, skating in the park, and committing petty crime, all with a disturbing lack of responsibility. Spring Breakers is less realistic and less confrontational, but taps into a youth culture more people can recognise and even relate to. The film often feels like a banal Facebook status brought to life for 90 minutes. And this can often be as tedious as it sounds. Our young and gorgeous heroes spout bull-shit teenage poetry and do hand-stands in corridors and car parks, and these scenes often repeat themselves to nauseous effect.
The film follows four college girls - Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine - Harmony's wife) - on their spring break. They're short of cash, so they rob a diner armed with water pistols and a hammer, and set off to St. Petersburg, Florida to indulge in sun, sex and alcohol. All is going well until they are busted and thrown in jail for taking cocaine while partying with some older, less-friendly types. Unable to pay their bail, the girls find themselves facing spending their spring break behind bars, and missing out on the life-changing event they have been so looking forward to. Things look up, however, when a rapper named Alien (James Franco) bails them out.
He seems to be in everything these days, popping up in soap operas, TV shows and movies alike as well as finding time to dabble in poetry, short stories and directing. It would be easy to be sick of the sight of James Franco, but his appearance in Spring Breakers takes the film out of the realms of the dreary into something all the more invigorating. It may even take you a while to recognise him, with his cornrows, gold teeth, tattoo's and gangster swagger. He makes Alien, for all his cartoonish behaviour, scarily believable. He brags to the awe-struck girls, "look at my shit!", while he shows them his collection of guns, tanning oil, shorts, and piles of money. Two of the girls lap it up - the other two are wise enough to bail - and are more than willing to participate in his gang activities.
Sadly, Franco's best efforts aren't enough to rescue Spring Breakers from humdrum. While the film intermittently comes to life, scenes drag and linger while monotonous narration plays over the soundtrack and the camera ogles breasts and crotches. There's certainly a message here, and Korine's viewpoint is crystal clear, but perhaps it's too clever for it's own good, becoming just as dreary as the world it is satirising. It will be certainly interesting to see where Korine goes from here, and hopefully his shift into more conventional film-making doesn't mean the peculiar quirks and off-the-wall tone that made Gummo (1997) so utterly brilliant is gone forever.
After receiving orders to execute Ahmad Shah, a Taliban leader responsible for deaths of over a dozen marines, a Navy SEAL's unit headed by Erik Kristensen (Eric Bana) plan for a quick operation. Luttrell, team leader Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), sniper 'Ax' Axelson (Ben Foster) and communications specialist Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) are picked for the job, and are dropped onto a steep and jagged Afghan hillside. They locate their target, but after experiencing some communication problems, come across a Taliban sheep-herder and two children. After deciding to obey the rules of engagement and let them go, they are soon pursued by a small army, who rain bullets and rockets down upon them.
