Film Reviews by Alphaville

China’s first full-on big-screen disaster movie and director Simon West’s best film for ages. The plot? Forget it. This is all-out action at a tourist resort on a gorgeous Pacific island with an exploding volcano. When it’s as well done as this, what more do you need? Even more exotically for Western audiences, it’s mostly in subtitled Chinese with no dubbed-for-morons option. Not that there’s much dialogue or that any of it matters. After some brief character set-up the lean 90min runtime is chock full of action.

The short runtime was caused by production problems that left a story gap concerning the flooding of a village, but that doesn’t detract from the viewing experience. This is what an escapist disaster movie should be. The colourful set-pieces are silly, OTT and brilliantly realised, resulting in stunts that are both exciting and fun. There are many ‘How can they get out of this’ moments. It’s spectacular, it has great special effects, it’s a ride.

Solid, stolid biopic of how young mime artist Marcel Marceau helped save Jewish children during WW2. It’s a heroic story given due reverence, but a bitty plot, bland characters, bland dialogue and bland direction make it more of a Sunday night TV drama than a great film. The two-minute trailer is able to tell the whole story and shows snippets of what little action there is.

Sad to say, Jesse Eisenberg is miscast as Marcel and the mime scenes are embarrassing. Interest lifts only when evil Nazi Klaus Barbie appears half-way through to give us someone to boo, although it’s unlikely he’d have become so personally involved in Marcel’s affairs. It’s a film with its heart in the right place, but it won’t be remembered as a great war film.

Timothée Chalamet wanders around New York telling us his thoughts in voiceover as he meets people as wealthy as he is (he’s called Gatsby, but he’s really a young Woody Allen in disguise). His ditsy girlfriend Elle Fanning from Tucson (cue jokes about the backwardness of Arizona) meets other people but doesn’t get a voiceover. Not that we need any voiceovers, because most of the dialogue is little more than people telling us their thoughts anyway.

The monologues/dialogues are full of elderly and pretentious references to New York and artists that Allen likes, but they sound ridiculous coming out of the mouths of the young actors, who sound almost embarrassed to be speaking their lines. As for the score… Bing Crosby, anyone? It’s all so lightweight that every scene disappears from memory as soon as it’s over.

It does improve slightly as the characters move from one mildly awkward encounter to another, but all attempts at humour fall embarrassingly flat. Allen continues to get to make the films he wants, so good for him, but sad to say this one is a completely empty exercise. Sorry, Woody.

For a martial arts actioner, this is an incredibly dull and dour film, with zero plot, zero characterisation and loads of talkie close-ups. The action consists of little more than a bunch of fighters practising their moves on stuntmen who attack one at a time and fall in exaggerated poses. It was filmed in Cyprus but you wouldn’t know it as no attempt is made to utilise the island’s dramatic landscapes. Thai star Tony Jaa deserves better, while Nic Cage in a minor role probably doesn’t by now. Cage’s stuntman gets more air time than Cage himself, while even Jaa, sadly, is credited with two stunt men.

Most of the blame must go to director Dimitri Logothetis, who has no idea how to film a fight scene except by hurling a hand-held camera into the stagey action. A Predator-style alien turns up as the chief baddie, but he has no more moves than any of the other stuntmen. Never has so much martial arts action been so repetitive and boring. Don’t be fooled by the trailer. 2mins of this stuff might appeal, but 100 mins is 98mins too long.

Lily Collins’ wealthy father dies, leaving her to find Simon Pegg (in a straight role) chained up in an underground bunker in the woods. He’s been there for 30 years yet greets her as though she’s the next-door neighbour dropping by for a chat. It’s a dumb premise followed by a plot that’s too ridiculous to believe. How did this ever get the green light?

Pegg acts his socks off in an American accent but you might as well be listening to him performing on a darkened stage, babbling interminable screeds of exposition for the benefit of the audience. Eerie soundtrack music attempts but fails to add some tension to proceedings. The plot does move above ground as well, but you won’t care a jot.

If you’re looking for an exciting female assassin movie, this isn’t it. All hope is dashed at the first set-piece, when star Jessica Chastain beats up loads of bad men and shoots a load more, none of whom can shoot straight. With imaginative direction it might have worked, but the bog-standard action is sliced and diced in the editing room into a tedious mess.

Chastain doesn’t have the charisma to carry the film and her boss John Malkovich is his usual hammy self. The clichés are highlighted by the presence of Geena Davis, a former action heroine who is now stuck with playing the mother laid up in bed from a heart attack (cue mother/daughter soul-searching).

Plus points? Colin Farrell adds some much-needed grit as the chief baddie, but he’s underused. And the thumping soundtrack, which adds pace lacking in the script, deserves a better film. To see how it should be done, watch the exciting South Korean movie The Villainess.

This is an okay remake of the superior French film Nuit Blanche. It’s a good story that will keep you interested, but by Hollywood-ising it for an American audience it comes over as silly and contrived. Why aren’t baddies with guns ever taught how to shoot straight in Hollywood? The French original is much more real, intense and in-your-face, with a great set-piece fight in a chef’s kitchen that is so much more exciting than in the remake. Watch Nuit Blanche before seeing Sleepless to see how the French do some things better.

Eight years after the excellent original, this disappointing sequel does little but go through the motions. The plot is minimal, the baddies are uninteresting and indestructible star Tony Jaa proves he can’t act. There’s lots of biff-&-bash in the Jackie Chan style but the set pieces lack the visual panache that the same director brought to the original. Even the girl-power moves of pint-sized JiJa from Raising Phoenix add little to proceedings.

This was the first Thai actioner to be filmed in 3D and maybe that accounts for the flatness of some of the shots in 2D, such as a fist thrust towards the camera. There are a few good stunts but that’s all. Only worth watching for completeness after the superior first film.

If you’re into martial arts films, this is a must-see. Athletic Star Tony Jaa famously does all his own stunts without cgi or wirework. Even if martial arts aren’t your thing, this is still a beautiful film to watch. For the first colourful fifteen minutes in the Thai jungle you’ll believe elephants can act. The plot then moves to the urban jungle of Australia and the real action kicks in.

Some of it is just biff-&-bash, but there are two glorious set-pieces. One uses a long single take to follow the fighting up several storeys of a building, the tension mounting as you wonder how much longer the superbly-choreographed shot can be sustained. The second is an almost balletic scene in a shallow pool of water where our Tony tries his moves on another gymnastic fighter. Martial arts films aren’t supposed to be this artfully directed or beautiful to behold. If you like this, check out the equally good-looking Thai actioner Raging Phoenix.

This is a complete mess of a film, mostly featuring poorly directed Portuguese actors failing to breathe life into a series of static interior scenes. Although the DVD blurb fails to mention it, most of the dialogue is in Portuguese and French. The setting is the war against Napoleon but there are zero action scenes. Wellington appears only fleetingly as a grumpy man in a tent, giving John Malkovich no chance of giving the man any character. It’s hard to believe how bad this is. It’s dull, it’s dour, it’s a pain to watch.

The film’s actual title is Lines of Wellington. No, me neither. Surely the whole miserable project falls foul of the Trades Description Act.

This is a family film complete with mawkish sentimentality, slapstick and bloodless battle scenes, so don’t expect a Kurasawa-type adult epic. Everything in it, from interiors to skin tones has had the life airbrushed out of it to look like a child’s picture book. The theme of female empowerment is lathered on but seems somewhat at odds with the Chinese government-friendly message of bringing honour to the family.

With bland dialogue and disappointing action scenes, it nevertheless remains surprisingly watchable. Reasons for staying awake include the lovingly photographed Chinese landscape, supporting characters played by action stalwarts such as Donnie Yen and Jet Li and, above all, the gobsmacking incongruity of the whole project. There’s even a warbling pop song over the end credits to send you away bemused.

Tsui Hark’s first film The Butterfly Murders (1979) is worth seeking out. Since then his prolific output has been, to be kind, hit and miss. This 2000 effort is a complete mess. His in-yer-face scattergun direction, waving the camera around like a child, leaves actors and viewers to fend for themselves, making this Hong Kong actioner virtually unwatchable.

The film begins with an intriguing plot that is subtly developed… until you realise that it’s going nowhere. The more you watch the more you’ll want to put your foot through the screen for letting it waste your time. It’s billed as a comedy thriller but there are no thrills and no laughs. Disconnected scenes promise a set-piece climax but the eventual shootout is both brief and dismal. The trailer tries to add zest to proceedings by adding an exciting score, but the film plays out to no score except an intermittent opera.

Why is it called The Whistlers? Because a group of poorly-characterised thieves can talk to each other without the police knowing by using the La Gomera whistling language. It’s a neat selling point, except for the fact that they never have to use it! Maybe that’s a comment on the pointlessness of the whole exercise. Slow, deliberately paced and staidly directed in Romania, this is the kind of film that sounds interesting enough to watch only to leave a bad taste in the mouth for having duped you into sitting through it. If only film festivals would stop championing this kind of arthouse bore. The two stars are only for glimpses of the beautiful La Gomera scenery. A documentary on that would have been more interesting.

This Zhang Yimou epic is a curious hybrid of the bad and the beautiful. For the first hour it’s such a hammy melodrama that you wonder why no-one’s had a word with him. It’s beautiful to look at, if course. He’s a master of composition and movement. But the palace-intrigue plot is uninteresting and there’s nothing to look at but interiors with talking heads. It’s filmed in striking monochrome with odd flashes of muted colour, such as flesh tones, but this can’t sustain interest on its own.

But fast forward to 63 minutes and you reach a dynamic battle sequence set in a walled city on the edge of a deep gorge. The main weapons of choice are umbrellas made of sharp blades. There are some jaw-dropping scenes here that are like nothing you’ve ever seen before, even in a Kurasawa film. It even reminds you of Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai because the whole battle is filmed in torrential rain. It’s a spectacular cinematic vision. If only the remainder of the film could match this it would be a masterpiece, but after the battle it’s back to interior melodrama. If you have any interest in film at all, however, it’s worth watching for that central 20min sequence.

Better than most disposable Marvel films. The scientific gobbledegook gets a bit wearing at times but the novel special effects, involving miniaturisation and enlargement of people and material are a visual feast. Paul Rudd makes an appealing hero and it’s good to see Michael Douglas still strutting his stuff as the tech guy. Add to that some good jokes about quantum physics (yes, really), a Bullitt-style car chase through San Francisco and bad girl Ghost, who can quantum phase between different realities, and you have a superhero film that’s above average. Not a patch on 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, but much better than you might expect from a ‘Marvel universe’ Film.