It feels like decades have passed since British writer/director Edgar Wright pulled away from Marvel's Ant-Man, apparently in fear of the studio's insistence on having the action take place within their Cinematic Universe and jeopardising his singular vision in the process. And it feels even longer since the underwhelming closure to the 'Cornetto Trilogy', 2013's The World's End, graced the big screen. But Wright has clearly been making the most of his spare time, finally completing the script for a movie that has been clattering around his head for over 20 years (he had the idea back in 1994). Drawing inspiration from a line in Simon & Garfunkel's song Baby Driver ("They call me baby driver, and once upon a pair of wheels," and a collection of his favourite petrol-head movies, he has delivered what is by far his most accomplished work to date.
Shortly before the release of Baby Driver, Wright hosted a film festival entitled 'Car Car Land' - a collection of his favourite car chase movies, featuring everything from William Friedkin's The French Connection to Walter Hill's The Driver. It has been quite rightly said that great cinematic action feels like a dance - elegant, brutal, and pieced together with delicate invention and skill. It is fitting that Wright named his festival after one of the finest musicals of recent times, La La Land. He has also taken this theory quite literally with Baby Driver, a movie as much at home with dazzling musical numbers as it is with high-speed pursuits and gun-fire, combining them beautifully without a hint of smugness. Our hero the getaway driver times his entire life to the beat ever-blasting into his ears from his loaded collection of iPods. A menial task such as making a sandwich becomes a toe-tapping dance number.
His name is Baby ("B-A-B-Y, Baby," as he confirms to practically everybody he meets), and his hipster blend of skinny jeans and sunglasses may have been grating without Ansel Elgort. Like Channing Tatum, his physicality and grace prevents you from taking your eyes off him once he starts to move, and cinematographer Bill Pope make sure to capture these moments in all their glory (including one terrific tracking shot at the start). Baby needs his music to block out the tinnitus constantly ringing in his ears, but also to remind him of the music-loving mother he lost in the very accident that caused his affliction. His short life has been spent in the debt of gangster Doc (Kevin Spacey), who employs the youngster's superhuman skills behind the wheel as a getaway driver for his ever-changing roster of low-life bank robbers. Each of them eye Baby with both curiosity and suspicion, when all he wants to do is pay off what he owes and leave town with adorable waitress Debora (Lily James). But one last job is never one last job.
Opening with a bank job that will leave you stunned at both the editing and choreography (no CGI is used), there's an early sense that Wight may have blown his load too early. But this only kicks off two hours in the hands of a craftsman who truly understand the mechanics of cinema. Not just action cinema, but musical and dramatic, and the film offers its fair share of belly laughs too. It's as much of an exaggerated world as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but contains itself in its own little world. The characters are larger-than-life but tangible, incredibly brought to life by the likes of Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Bernthal. There's an almost ever-present soundtrack, with the characters speaking and moving in sync with the rhythm, which lend the film a unique energy. When the music stops and the soundtrack screeches to reflect Baby's tinnitus, we long to be thrown straight back into Wright's fantasy world. The car chases, the love story, the testosterone-fuelled exchanges - there's nothing new here, but Edgar Wright knows this. Baby Driver is so swaggeringly confident and stylishly hypnotic that it becomes a genre film like no other, causing most other action movies to hang their heads in shame.
With Collateral, Michael Mann - a director who was still working at the top of his game back in 2004 - combines his favourite and familiar traits - an ice-cool soundtrack, buckets of visual style, and a conversational showdown as important as the physical one that inevitably follows. It follows one night in the life of Los Angeles cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx), who after accepting a multi-stop fare from the slick-looking Vincent (Tom Cruise), has his life turned upside down. Vincent looks and sounds like a businessman looking to close multiple deals in the course of a few hours, but when a dead body lands on the top of his cab at the first stop, it becomes clear to Max that Vincent is a hired killer.
The two verbally poke and prod each other - Max at Vincent's complete detachment from real-life and the emotional abuse and/or neglect he must have surely suffered to lead him on such a dark path; and Vincent at Max's tendency to procrastinate at every aspect of his life. Max frequently flicks down his sun-visor and stairs at a picture of a desert island, waxing lyrical about his grand plan to set up his own limousine company. At the start of the film, Max drives Justice Department prosecutor Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) and the two share a spark. He should ask her for her number but he doesn't. Luckily she takes the initiative and gives it to him anyway. Vincent may be a remorseless psychopath, but at least he grabs life by the balls.
Such an engaging character study and a film so packed with marvellously shot set-pieces should lead to an equally great climax, but like Heat (1995), Mann's other L.A.-based crime noir, the film ends on a weak note. Vincent just may be the worst hit-man in cinema history. He's physically capable of taking down multiple foes with fists and weaponry, but his decision-making is laughable at times, and in the end he is forced into a rather bland chase after his prey through a subway. But for the most part, Collateral is thrilling and fun; at it's best when its two leads are simply sitting in the cab and conversing, wonderfully performed by Foxx and Cruise.
If Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man trilogy (2002-2007) had never existed, Marc Webb's arguably unnecessary reboot The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) would have been a near-perfect introduction to the cocky web-slinger. Andrew Garfield, one the most intriguing young actors around, and Emma Stone, that old-school sassy and husky-voiced beauty who effortlessly charmed in Easy A (2010), were an almost dream couple, and their romantic scenes sparkled with chemistry. But when Garfield put on his costume and went spinning webs across the city, the film owed everything to Raimi's eye for crazy, energetic camera-work, and failed to thrill enough as a re-imagining in it's own right. Raimi's influence seemed unshakeable.
Yet the film was a success, and two years later we have a sequel. The story moves on and Peter Parker (Garfield) has grown too, though he is still caught up in a reluctant relationship with Gwen Stacy (Stone), having been warned by her dying father at the end of the last movie to leave her out of his superhero business. After apprehending a criminal named Aleksei Sytsevich (Paul Giamatti) who was trying to run away with some plutonium vials, he saves nervous young Oscorp worker Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), who becomes infatuated with Spider-Man, believing them to have a special friendship. Parker's old friend and Oscorp inheritor Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) is also back in town, and learns that his dying father's illness is hereditary.
With the first having shared so much with the original trilogy, it's surprising that Webb and the writers have made the same mistakes as the one that killed Raimi's baby in it's tracks. Thankfully, there's no emo Peter Parker dance scene, but there is an over-abundance of villains. Okay, Giamatti's Rhino barely registers (thankfully), but Jamie Foxx's Electro and DeHaan's emerging Green Goblin battle for screen time, and DeHaan is far too exciting an actor to feel like he's being squeezed in. Having watched Marvel's Avengers dominate the box-office, Sony are clearly starting to set-up something bigger, but they do so at the expense of the film at hand.
In fact, there's an over-abundance of everything. With a hefty running time of 140 minutes, the amount going on in the film should justify it's length. But Parker spends most of his time being angry at his parents for being dead, similar to the angst done better last time around, and his plucky conversations with on-off girlfriend Gwen soon loose their charm and quickly become annoying. The action scenes, although they look beautiful in hi-definition as Electro causes havoc, suffer from seen-it-all-before syndrome, and some of the dialogue spouted by Giamatti especially, caused me to worry that Joel Schumacher had perched his arse back on the director's chair. It's sporadically fun but mainly just a bore, but I fully expect a third instalment to turn up in two year's time.
You would be forgiven if, during a screening of Quentin Tarantino's latest Django Unchained, you believed that one of the many directors the film plays homage to, is John Ford. After all, Ford all but made the American western genre his own, from early silents such as The Iron Horse (1924), to well-established classics like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Searchers (1956), he brought critical adoration to a genre that was then seen as nothing more than popcorn cinema. But Tarantino hates John Ford, to quote - "to say the least, I hate him [...] It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else's humanity." So, in Django, do we have a post-modern, anti-Ford American West, where a freed black slave is the hero, and the White Man the devil? Well, kinda. But this is Tarantino, and from what was clear from his previous film Inglourious Basterds (2009), he doesn't do things the regular way.
In 1850's Texas, shackled slave Django (Jamie Foxx) is released by dentist and bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who bargains Django's freedom for information about the Brittle brothers, Schultz's latest bounty. Schultz is opportunistic in his outlook, but makes it clear to Django that he despises slavery. Django informs Schultz that he must find his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who he was separated from by his previous plantation owner. Moved by his story, Schultz agrees to help Django as well as take him on as an associated bounty hunter, after Django displays a natural ability for gunfighting and killing. Their search leads them to the plantation of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a slaver who deals in 'Mandingo' slaves, along with his own freed slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).
Very much like Inglourious Basterds, the most intriguing thing I found with Django is its sheer unpredictability. The later work of Tarantino have elected to follow very much they're own path, ignoring narrative convention or story-telling tradition in favour of certain scenes or ideas that the director wants there, or focusing on a certain character when they really have no purpose being there. For example, August Diehl's Major Hellstrom appears from nowhere in possibly the finest scene from Inglorious Basterds. He has no other scenes, but his character is instantly intriguing, whereas such a scene and character wouldn't have been given neither the depth or the screen-time if done by somebody else. It is a basic cover-gets-blown scene, seen in a thousand other films, but in Basterds it becomes a masterwork of tension, and features some of Tarantino's best ever dialogue. You could call it indulgent, but Tarantino sees the opportunity to squeeze as much as he can from every possible moment.
Django follows the same idea, but whereas this approach complimented Basterds' chapter-based structure and plethora of supporting characters and extended cameos, Django has neither the wealth of central characters, nor the sheer scope to be a complete success, or to justify it's massive 165-minute running-time. The narrative hook of Django finding his wife is given very little screen-time or focus that by the time this becomes important, its very difficult to really care. The more intriguing relationship that comes out of the film is in fact the one between Django and Schultz - polar opposites in terms of societal position and background - yet both in a situation that calls for them needing each other. The main bulk of the first two-thirds follows the two in the tradition of a buddy-movie, only they get along, and Tarantino manages to eject some fine comic moments into these scenes, as well some actually quite touching ones.
Although he doesn't possess the sociopathic charisma as his Hans Landa from Basterds did, the character of Schultz is another triumph for Tarantino and Waltz both, the latter being recognised again by the Academy and receiving a Best Supporting Actor nod. Like Landa, Schultz is a social intellectual, a man able to use his wits and charm to lure his victims into a false sense of security before either blowing the top of their head off, or outwitting a town's marshal. But it is Waltz - and DiCaprio's maniacal plantation owner - that comes out of this most memorable, not the film's protagonist, Django. Foxx is perfectly fine in the role, as angry and posturing as you would want ("you gonna let me pick my own wardrobe?"), but sadly just as un-memorable. Tarantino seems so wrapped up in Schultz and the film's extreme violence that Django gets left out in the rain, lacking the iconic costume or the stand-out scene that, say, Uma Thurman's The Bride in Kill Bill (2003-2004) had.
Spike Lee has said he will be boycotting the film, claiming the slave trade is not a subject for exploiting or trivialising, and opposes the excessive use of the 'n' word (something he complained about in Jackie Brown (1997) - a film that celebrated one of the most important era's for Black Cinema). It's a shame he will never see the film, as he would realise that not only does Tarantino take the matter seriously, but is the most brutal and explicit depiction of it I've ever seen. The violence is often over-the-top and cartoonish, yes, but is also disturbing and genuinely horrific (the Mandingo fight and dog scene being particular memorable). Tarantino also mocks the KKK (or an early version of it) in a scene which is in direct reference to John Ford playing one of the charging KKK in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Before the charge, they argue about the badly made eye-holes in their masks. It's a light scene given their intention, but goes on far too long to remain funny.
As much as I dislike Tarantino (as a person), his films will always be irresistibly intriguing. Regardless of whether they're self-indulgent missteps such as Death Proof (2007), or strokes of genius like Inglourious Basterds, you will always be getting something profoundly different to anything that any other director is even contemplating. Django is no different, setting out on one path and ending up wandering several detours, like a fat kid happily chasing the scent of gingerbread. When we do get to the end, it suffers from a serious anti-climax - disappointing given the 150-minute build-up. This is not the great film it really could have been, due to the neglect of its lead, a lack of real focus, and a final half hour that seems to strive for super-cool moments of iconography, rather than giving the film the satisfying ending that it really deserves. Ennio Morricone's title song is amazing, however.
Shortly before the release of Baby Driver, Wright hosted a film festival entitled 'Car Car Land' - a collection of his favourite car chase movies, featuring everything from William Friedkin's The French Connection to Walter Hill's The Driver. It has been quite rightly said that great cinematic action feels like a dance - elegant, brutal, and pieced together with delicate invention and skill. It is fitting that Wright named his festival after one of the finest musicals of recent times, La La Land. He has also taken this theory quite literally with Baby Driver, a movie as much at home with dazzling musical numbers as it is with high-speed pursuits and gun-fire, combining them beautifully without a hint of smugness. Our hero the getaway driver times his entire life to the beat ever-blasting into his ears from his loaded collection of iPods. A menial task such as making a sandwich becomes a toe-tapping dance number.
