Review #1,306: 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri' (2017)

Along an overgrown, disused highway somewhere outside Ebbing, Missouri, three formerly dilapidated billboards still bearing the torn remains of whatever advertisement was previously displayed there over a decade ago, have suddenly sprang back into life. Only the messages delivered aren't in the name of some big-name brand or local company, but they are the deliberately confrontational words of grieving, thoroughly pissed-off mother Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand). The first billboard reads 'Raped While Dying', followed by 'And Still No Arrests', and finally 'How Come, Chief Willoughby?' The opening scenes of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which see Mildred negotiate a deal with businessman Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones) and quickly install the provocative messages, set up a David-versus-Goliath story, in which a justice-seeking woman sets out to shame and spring into action the police department she feels has failed her following the brutal rape and murder of her daughter.

Yet, this being a film written and directed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, the kind of story suggested in the trailer is only the tip of a far more engaging and complex iceberg, and one that isn't afraid to take you to some incredibly dark places and urge you to accept the redemption of a truly repulsive character. The police department, led by family man and all-round likeable pillar of the community Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), take the billboards as a declaration of war, but Willoughby, being a sensible officer of the law, pays a visit to Mildred for some one-on-one time in the hope of resolving the matter peacefully. They chat almost like old friends, or former lovers who have stayed on good terms, but Mildred is unmovable in her quest. Even the revelation that Willoughby has terminal cancer and is close to death isn't enough for Mildred to think twice about her actions, and it turns out that she was already privy to this information before renting the boards. "They won't be as effective after you croak," she admits, almost like it's her way of apologising.

The role of Mildred was written specifically with McDormand in mind, and the result is her best performance since 1996's Fargo and will surely bring her second Oscar win come March. The first time we lay eyes on her she is marching into town like a gunslinger seeking revenge, dressed in blue overalls and sporting a tightly-wound bandanna. Despite the pleas of her teenage son Robbie (Lucas Hedges), who is bullied in school because of his mother's antics and performance on the local news station, as well as threats from the drunken, racist Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), Mildred is unwavering in her strides for justice. Even her deplorable, wife-beating ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes) voices his disapproval, but it all falls of deaf ears. Yet despite her questionable methods and finger-pointing at a police department who seem to have genuinely run into a dead end with the case, you stay with her until the end. I can't think of any other actress working today who could pull of a feat with such conviction, especially when dealing with a character who spends most of the movie keeping her real emotions close to her chest, or channelling them into rage.

McDonagh views small-town America as tightly-knit and full of big characters, a place where everybody knows everybody and gossip spreads like wildfire. In many ways, Three Billboards shares much in common with Calvary, the under-appreciated effort by the director's brother John Michael from 2014, and is structured almost like an ensemble piece. By bringing in a wealth of colourful supporting characters, played by the likes of Peter Dinklage, Abbie Cornish, Kerry Condon and Clarke Peters, as well as those already mentioned, McDonagh can explore themes of anger, bitterness, loss and loneliness on a far grander scale. While the wonderfully obscenity-laden script will keep you both laughing and wincing throughout the running-time, the film is at its most compelling when showing genuine compassion for the characters inhabiting the story. It refuses to judge anybody too harshly, even peeling back the layers of the most loathsome character in the story, the permanently hungover Dixon, who is played by a career-best Sam Rockwell. Three Billboards somehow manages to be both enormous fun and utterly heart-wrenching, and coming off the back of the underwhelming Seven Psychopaths, this is a huge stride in the right direction for the enormously talented McDonagh.


Directed by: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Lucas Hedges, Abbie Cornish, Caleb Landry Jones, Peter Dinklage, John Hawkes, Clarke Peters
Country: UK/USA

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie

Review #1,301: 'Geostorm' (2017)

It's been happening to major releases for decades, but nowadays near enough every big-budget blockbuster comes with its very own straight-to-DVD knock-off. Recently, cult label The Asylum have released the likes of Ghosthunters to coincide with 2016's Ghostbusters, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to sponge off the success of Guy Ritchie's equally terrible King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and even Operation Dunkirk to dupe ill-informed shoppers into thinking it was Christopher Nolan's awards-grabber Dunkirk. When I first saw the trailer for Geostorm, I was convinced that The Asylum had stretched their purse-strings a tad, and that Gerard Butler had finally done the decent thing and stepped away from the big screen. It turns out that Geostorm is actually meant to be a proper movie, and that The Asylum's cash-in was in fact called Geo-Disaster.

With its horrendous special effects, ham-fisted action and completely nonsensical premise, I refuse to believe that I'm the only one who couldn't fathom that this was an actual blockbuster attempt. Geostorm may just be one of the stupidest movies ever made, and the real horror is that the final product is actually the result of 15 million dollar re-shoots after audiences reacted badly to test screenings way back in 2015. If this is a result of expensive re-shoots and a two-year hiatus, then I'm almost curious to see what state it was in beforehand. I can only imagine that the original version wasn't quite as hilarious, although Butler was always attached to play Jake Lawson, the brain-child of a giant climate-controlling satellite dubbed 'Dutch Boy', so it must have been at the very least amusing. Dutch Boy monitors and influences the planet's weather after mankind has ravaged the Earth and turned it into a melting-pot of devastating storms and extreme temperatures.

He may be highly intelligent, but as he's played by Butler, he's also punchy and obnoxious, and has his toy taken away from him by a Senate cub-committee after he refuses to cooperate. Jake's brother Max (Jim Sturgess) is placed in charge instead, but Jake's skills and experience in the field may be called upon again when Dutch Boy starts carrying out seemingly random attacks and threatening to cause a 'geostorm' - a super-storm of which none will survive. Abbie Cornish is also in the movie for some reason, even though she's way above this sort of schlock. Soon after starting to navigate through the unnecessarily complicated plot you will realise that very little of Geostorm makes sense, and you can probably work out who the bad guy is by reading the cast list. However, for all its utter stupidity and boring set-pieces where millions are indifferently massacred by bad CGI, I can never say that Dean Devlin's Geostorm was boring. It made me laugh more than once (albeit unintentionally), and although I say this through gritted teeth, it's moderately entertaining, if brainless fluff.


Directed by: Dean Devlin
Starring: Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Andy Garcia, Ed Harris
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #922: 'Seven Psychopaths' (2012)

Even though I wasn't blown away by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's directorial debut, In Bruges (2008), the film contained enough memorable one-liners and great performances to have me anticipating his next feature. In the four years that elapsed between In Bruges and his follow-up Seven Psychopaths, Martin's brother John Michael wrote and directed the offensively hilarious The Guard (2011), and in 2014 gave us Calvary, one of the truly great films of that year. Martin's limelight has been stolen somewhat, and Seven Psychopaths is a slight let-down. It's a movie about movies, or rather a movie within a movie, or even a movie without a movie - either way, it's a bit of a mess.

Script-writer Marty (Colin Farrell) has writer's block. He knows what his next movie is going to be called - Seven Psychopaths - but the title is all he has. Struggling with alcoholism, he tries to keep his girlfriend Kaya (Abbie Cornish) happy while his unhinged best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) tries to worm his way into a writing credit. Looking to avoid creating yet another movie glamorising violence, he wants his psychopaths to retain some humanity and have the message of his movie be about peace and love. Billy suggests he takes inspiration from the 'Jack of Diamonds' killer, who only kills high-ranking mobsters and is currently on a killing spree in Los Angeles, and they take an ad out in the local paper asking for real-life psychopaths to come and tell their story.

Billy also kidnaps dogs from rich folk for a living along with his partner-in-crime Hans (Christopher Walken), but they have just stolen a Shih Tzu from the wrong man - gangster and madman Charlie (Woody Harrelson) - a man we first meet trying to fix his gun so he can shoot the young girl who had the dog in her care in the face. Marty has the vaguest of ideas about his other psychopaths - one being a Vietnamese war veteran (Long Nguyen) dressed as a priest looking to avenge his family's murder during the war, and another a quaker (Harry Dean Stanton) who stalks his daughter's killer for decades - but no way of connecting them and one story possibly accidentally stolen. With Charlie on their tail, Marty, Billy and Hans flee to the desert to contemplate their fate and finish the script once and for all.

This is an odd film from start to finish. The opening scene depicts two gangster (Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt) discussing famous murders of people being shot through the eyeball, before being blown away themselves by the masked Jack of Diamonds killer, It's reminiscent of the Tarantino-inspired wave of self-aware crime flicks of the 1990's, where pop-culture references and quirky humour trumped anything dark and serious. The use of freeze-frames to introduce it's collection of psychopaths also reminded me of the 1990's, when Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996) opened the floodgates for countless inferior imitators in Britain to do the very same. Are these the kinds of movies McDonagh was offered in the wake of a successful debut and is now satirising them? Or did he just run out of ideas and resort to emulating a now-dated era?

I found this the main problem with Seven Psychopaths, and I felt like I could never be sure if McDonagh was being smart, lazy, or both in an ironic clever-clever way. At the half-way point, the film begins to drag and meander as if McDonagh had genuine writer's block (there's a reason the main character is Irish and called Marty) but kept writing in the hope that it would eventually work itself out. But Seven Psychopaths does have moments of inspiration. As Hans, Christopher Walken makes the welcome return to the large roles that seem to have evaded him of late, and delivers a performance of real humanity. The dialogue too, is as quotable and vicious as you would expect from the man who penned In Bruges, with the humour providing a welcome distraction from the barrage of exhaustive violence - and maybe that's the point. But whatever the point, this will more likely leave you scratching your head trying to figure it out.


Directed by: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waits, Olga Kurylenko, Abbie Cornish, Harry Dean Stanton
Country: UK

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #142: 'Sucker Punch' (2011)

Zack Snyder has directed a couple of quite good films (Dawn of the Dead (2004), and Watchmen (2008)), but this debut as the story/screenplay co-writer, shows that he is more of a visual stylist than one for narrative complexity. Snyder's formative years in television commercials has shown through his film career; fast editing; the oh-so-tired and cliched use of speed and slow motion in action sequences. In Sucker Punch however, the narrative/visual structure works on this with self-contained sequences, amounting to a series of commercials. The "adverts" (or even music videos) are fantasies of Baby Doll (Emily Browning). What these dreams are structurally also, are levels in a video game. To get to the next level, she must complete the task.

Baby Doll is being incarcerated into Lennox home for the mentally ill by her "evil" step-father. A lobotomy is ordered. This is where she delves into her imagination, constructing a world where she is imprisoned in a bordello and controlled by men who make them perform for them. Escape is on her mind. When Baby Doll is forced to "dance" for the audience, she goes even further into a dual fantasy where she is given orders by "Games Master", The Wise Man (Scott Glenn). These game-level "bosses" are visual cliches in themselves. Baby Doll and her appointed gang consisting of Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jenna Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung), must battle giant monster-samurai on level one; German zombies in CGI WWI on level two; lord of the rings-like orcs and dragons on level 3......and so on. These fantasies of Baby Doll's are constructed as a device (in the bordello she is simply dancing), which make a simple task such as stealing a lighter off a dumb cook, is turned into a fight for survival from monsters!

This is absurdly expensive, derivative nonsense. It's an awful brickolage of visuals that have been on our screens for the last decade. The game-like structure is utterly ridiculous (yes, this type of structure was used to good effect in 2009's Scott Pilgrim vs The World, but that film played as pastiche), and Sucker just uses this device as a means to project dazzling computer effects. They make no narrative sense. Is her dance visually like the fighting in her fantasies? Even if you did want to hide from the reality itself, why would you construct over-elaborate fighting levels just to get a map? These questions are irrelevant, the main concept behind this movie is the perverse collection of fantasy dolls that make up the gang; all short skirts, underwear and stockings. It's a teenage boys wet dream, the product of a juvenile mind. As a teenager in an adults body, I have to say it was nice. However, the film did not have any excitement to it. The characters were bland facsimiles of genre regulars. The action was so similar to so many of these type today, it was hard to care about it, and became tedious very quickly.

Directed by: Zack Snyder
Starring: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn
Country: USA/Canada

Rating: **

Marc Ivamy