Film Reviews by Alphaville

Do we really need another cold war submarine movie? The film is based on a 2012 book and adds nothing new to the genre. This time Gerard Butler is the captain, there’s skulduggery beneath the Arctic waves and his sub is sent in to find out what’s going on. You’ll get a laugh after five minutes when he’s hunting with bow and arrow in the high Bulgarian mountains and the caption says he’s in Scotland. All the usual tropes and chain-of-command technical dialogue is present and correct, as are the usual cgi shots of the sub skimming past the camera through murky waters. Will the Russian torpedoes sink Gerard? You get one guess.

A second even less interesting strand of plot has Gary Oldman playing a warmongering politician in Pentagon discussions about what to do. Two clichéd plots in one film not enough? Okay, let’s add in a rogue Russian general with weapons at his disposal. To say nothing of some happy-clapping at the end.

That said, this is a well-paced and never-boring film. Even the clichéd stuff has a cosy familiarity. If only Gerard wasn’t cooped up in his control room with nothing to do to flex his muscles, because there’s a third strand of plot involving a Black Ops raid on the general’s base, and this one does pack some excitement. Brit Toby Stephens is the leader but it should have been Gerard. As he’s also the film’s producer it was maybe too much for him. As he says on the DVD Xtras, that’s the part you’d expect him to play.

Overall the film gives a two-hour easy watch and the DVD Xtras are also worth catching. Gerard is always an enthusiastic interviewee and director Donovan Marsh delivers an interesting commentary for cinema buffs telling us how it was all done.

This is trashy bargain basement filmmaking from director Shane Black. It does no justice at all to one of the better sci-fi franchises. Our heroes are a clichéd bunch of macho military morons. The unique Predator visual effects are minimal. It’s all just swearing and running around with big guns. “Can I interest you in getting’ the f--- out of here?” asks one. “Getting ’ the f--- out of here is my middle name,” replies another. That’s the moronic level of the dialogue. As the plot and characters are ludicrous, there’s so little drama that the action becomes tedious. The hip-hop ditty playing over the trailer is another example of the incompetence shown in the whole project.

James Franco tries his hand at a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-type movie, directing himself as a motor bike pack leader with bad teeth, and the result is equally bad. The plot, in which a prince from The Oasis tries to reach Paradise Beach with a female robot for medicine to save his dying mum is ridiculous. None of it makes any sense. There are slo-mo druggie scenes, Lesbian scenes, sleazy brothel topless dancer scenes and too many close-ups of Franco’s teeth.

Most of the 84 minute film features Franco and his mates riding their bikes aimlessly across the desert landscape. The Sonoran Desert of Southern California is beautifully filmed with a smoothly tracking camera, but it soon feels like watching an endless motocross documentary.

This is basically another socialist diatribe from director Mike Leigh, full of tell-don’t-show speechifying in place of character and plot. He has previous. Watch with scepticism. “Liberty or death,” chant the crowd. The suffrage meeting in Manchester 1819 was certainly so poorly policed by the cavalry that it caused a disaster, but this is for the indoctrinated only.

Judging by his plot analysis, the previous reviewer seems to have been watching a different film. Compared to unwatchable gung-ho shaky-cam special forces actioners such as Mile 22, this is a virtual cinematic masterpiece. Characters have real depth, the plot is intriguing, the South African locations are beautifully filmed, Ethan Hawke and Xu Qing are winning leads, Paul Anderson makes a commendable adversary and everything builds to a surprising and compelling climax. There’s an added sci-fi element, which you’ll know if you’ve watched the spoiler trailer or read spoiler reviews, and some poignant moments along the way.

Director Brian Smrz made his name as a stunt director and this is his second film as director. His 2008 debut Hero Wanted is also worth checking out. To Peter Berg, Paul Greengrass and other shaky-cam directors: Watch and learn.

This revenge actioner begins brilliantly and becomes increasingly engrossing as it progresses. Cuba Gooding is the accidental hero who saves a child from a car accident before falling foul of a bunch of bank robbers. His nicely understated performance is a welcome antidote to the usual macho character out for revenge. The elliptical post-Pulp-Fiction plot constantly surprises and the climactic confrontation with Derek the nasty Scotsman and his gang is both exciting and poignant.

Director Brian Smrz made his name as a stunt director and this 2008 film is his first as director. His second – 24 Hours to Live – is even better and well worth checking out. He’s a director in total command of his medium. See if you can work out how the masterful opening tracking shot was done. He does a fine line in ambivalent baddies and creates characters that have real emotional depth. Hero Wanted is as much about loss and grief as about revenge. Smrz is one of the few action directors with heart. He’s worth catching. The DVD has a fascinating feature commentary by him, Gooding and one of the writers.

This is a film about a troupe of young “dancers” cavorting around a dance hall to disco music. There’s a lot of hands-in-the-air arm-waving. Someone spikes the sangria with LSD then there’s a lot of shouting and screaming. It’s an ensemble piece with no interesting characters and no plot. All the action takes place in the one location. It’s like an amateur student drama. Towards the end it’s filmed upside down in red tones. Presumably that’s meant to be a metaphor. It certainly impressed gullible critics at arty film festivals. It’s so ridiculously repetitive and OTT it’ll make you laugh before fast-forwarding to the end or just giving up on it.

The DVD Extras are far more interesting. There’s a discussion of the music used and a feature on director Gaspar Noé’s career, which will make you want to watch his next film even less.

Another in-yer-face actioner from director Peter Berg and this one’s a complete mess. In SE Asia a team of US special forces has to move a defector 22 miles from a city centre to a plane. Characters shout and swear at each other incessantly. The camera shoots them too close-up, often focussing on irrelevant detail. The action is shot with a handheld camera and chopped up by over-editing into a complete mish-mash. It’s difficult to get a handle on anything that’s happening, especially as the plot doesn’t set in until half-way through the movie. To confuse matters further, there are even unnecessary time jumps to a future debriefing of the operation.

As if this wasn’t all gung-ho enough, usual Berg lead Mark Wahlberg this time plays a character with a hyperactive disorder. His macho monologues are painful. Indonesian star Iko Uwais plays the defector, but he’s basically shoehorned into the film for a couple of martial arts fights that are shaky-cammed and edited to oblivion.

Any good points? It’s so ridiculously bad that it’s a primer on how not to shoot action and the DVD contains a raft of extras on filming for the first time in Bogota, Columbia.

Although promoted as an erotic thriller, this is more of a mystery than a thriller and will be too deliberately paced for many. It’s lifted out of the ordinary by its weirdness, its erotic charge and Francois Ozon’s faultless direction. The stunning opening close-up, for example, dissolves from a vulva into an eye.

All you need to know is that our heroine gets herself involved with two psychiatrists, who are physically identical but have very different personalities. If you don’t know what trisomy is, you will after this, to say nothing of the medical condition that leads to the film’s climax.

The DVD includes an interesting interview in which the director talks about the techniques he used (split screen, zooms, mirrors etc.) to add playfulness to the film. If only he’d added a faster pace and more danger. Worth a watch, though.

Austere inconsequential Polish paint-drier set in 1960s Poland and shot in more than fifty shades of grey. It’s little more than a series of stark stills that capture a downbeat mood but zero drama. The trailer adds dramatic music and fast edits to make it look interesting, but you’ll be disappointed if you expect the film to do likewise.

It’s about a novitiate nun finding out about her Jewish past. Scenes are shot with interesting off-kilter compositions, sometimes containing heads that actually talk, but there’s nothing of any interest being said and what little plot there is goes nowhere. It seems to last much longer than its 80 minute run-time. It’s Emperor’s Clothes cinema that sucks the life out of the medium and has naturally won awards from juries who love to wallow in arty minimalism.

Another exhilarating instalment in the MI franchise. The characters are likeable, the plot is mind-bendingly complex, the screeds of exposition that interleave set-pieces are hysterical and Christopher McQuarrie directs all this with absolute command. But it’s those set-pieces that define MI and Fallout certainly delivers, with Tom Cruise doing incredible stunts the old-fashioned way without cgi. Among other highlights there are great chases around Paris and a terrific climax in the mountains of New Zealand (standing in for Kashmir). MI fans will not be disappointed.

Another instalment of the franchise that dumbed sci-fi down to the level of a children’s video game. It opens with the same old space battle to John Williams’ excruciating bombastic score, but what else did you expect? As in the previous instalment, the only character with any charisma, although he has little to do, is Ben the Baddie (Adam Driver). Ade Edmondson appears briefly but it’s a missed opportunity. If only he was playing his Vivien character from The Young Ones, come to wreak havoc and add some interest to affairs. At a grinding 146 minutes, this is for mindless drones only.

This is a slight story filmed as a comedy, reduced to school-play level by the terrible OTT acting. On the plus side, lauded director Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers) can certainly film landscape and light. The outdoor scenes are set in the Rainbow Mountains of Zhangye and are absolutely glorious. Even if you’re not a fan of the Coen Brothers’ more prosaic original, this Chinese version of Blood Simple is worth a look to see a masterclass on how to film figures in a landscape. Shame it has little else going for it.

You can imagine the pitch: Scream meets Groundhog Day. It’s a good pitch, but the high school vibe dumbs it down to a puerile level full of annoying teenagers. Our heroine gets murdered over and over again, but the thrills aren’t thrilling and the resolution’s unbelievable. And guess what? She learns life lessons along the way.

Still, it’s well-paced, with odd flashes of humour that work, and makes an agreeable time-passer. Among several Extras, the DVD has a darker alternative ending that is much better than the one in the released film.

Detective Ko’s in a fix. He’s killed a guy in a hit-and-run accident and driven off with the body in the boot. Fortunately his mother has just died and there’s space in the coffin… And that’s just the beginning of his troubles. Who was this guy? In a plot that constantly wrong-foots the viewer, Ko’s life soon spirals out of control. The bleakly humorous situations he finds himself in add to the tension. With a bit more subtlety – if our hero was a bit more convincing and we could believe he was really in peril – this could have been an edge-of-seat thriller. It remains an above-average action adventure that builds to an exciting climax.