Film Reviews by Alphaville

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.

Another gorgeous hand-drawn animation from Studio Ghibli, this time from a Dutch director (Michael Dudok de Wit) who understands the medium as Miyazaki did. You’ll never be satisfied with computer-based animation again. It’s about a man shipwrecked on a desert island. Don’t worry that the title makes it seem like a children’s film. The turtle makes only a brief appearance and is merely a plot catalyst. The film is full of adult themes and moving moments, but AVOID THE TELL-ALL TRAILER, which ridiculously condenses the whole 77-minute story into 2 minutes and spoils the several story twists. Why do they do that?

The sets are wonderfully scenic and colourful, with an exceptional quality of light rarely seen in animation. The director also stretches the medium to its fullest, using all kinds of pseudo-camera angles and shots that would not be possible in live-action. In short, it’s a stunning cinematic watch. The DVD also has a fascinating feature that shows the

The Rock takes on baddies in a burning supertall Hong Kong skyscraper and it’s film-making by numbers, complete with Mandarin-speaking co-stars for the lucrative Chinese market. It’s that cynical. The action scenes are so derivative they’re boring. On more than one occasion our muscled hero’s left hanging high above the abyss by his fingertips. Will he manage to pull himself up? Guess. He has to jump huge gaps. Will he manage? Guess. He has a wife and two children running around screaming. Will he save them? Guess.

It’s so predictable it’s laughable instead of thrilling. He even talks to himself to let us know what he’s up to. Danish actor Roland Moller makes an insipid chief baddie and sub-baddie Pablo Schreiber, so effective in Den of Thieves, gets bumped off too early. Expect lots of scenes of cgi flames and crowds at the foot of the skyscraper craning their necks upwards. Will they clap and cheer? Guess. The half-hour of extras on the DVD is more interesting.

A one-off superhero movie with adult depth, featuring an immortal superhero (Hugh Jackman) who wants to die. Excellent action sequences, including a fight on a speeding Japanese bullet train that brings back fond memories of the first Mission Impossible movie. Added to this is an unexpectedly moving love story, mainly thanks to the warmth of the performance of Tao Okanato as the woman Jackman must protect.

Unfortunately it all goes pear-shaped at the end, with the usual juvenile cgi-heavy climax and a terrible post-credits coda that brings the wolverine back into the X-men franchise. Without that and the unnecessary superhero powers, this could have been a superior dark action romance.

There’s nothing new in this second entry in the children’s Jurassic World franchise. People run from dinosaurs firstly on an island and finally in the villain’s underground lair, with a climax filmed in poor light.

Same dinosaurs, same people in peril just managing to escape gaping jaws, same bombastic orchestral score. There’s an adventurous girl for the kiddies to identify with but no drama for adults. Even the new ’Indoraptor’ is just another angry dino with different claws and teeth. Guess how every single baddie (every one a man) gets his comeuppance. Much more interesting is the raft of other features on the DVD, including star Chris Pratt practising his moves, interviewing the crew and playing it for laughs.

Lara Croft goes in search of her father, who has disappeared looking for a mythical queen buried on a Pacific island. It’s based on a video game but it’s nevertheless a good hook on which to base an action adventure. Without reaching any heights, it has some good jungle locations and action set pieces, and with Alicia Vikander as our heroine and Roar Uthaug (of Cold Prey fame) directing, it’s more grounded and realistic than the previous Angelina Jolie attempt. While being watchable throughout, it needs a bit more oomph and imagination to raise it above the ordinary, especially at the climax inside the cavernous royal tomb.

If you like stunts, there are a couple of good ones here: a skateboard escape at the beginning and a motorbike chase on water half-way through. As for the remainder, it’s the usual Vin Diesel macho sexist rot.

Prolific director Takashi Miike used to make interesting films, but he appears to have run out of steam. This one, based on a long-running manga, is as silly and bloodthirsty as ever, seemingly in an attempt to outdo the body count in 13 Assassins. Basically it’s a series of stylised samurai-type sword fights interspersed with boring static dialogue scenes.

The only novelty here is that our charisma-free hero can’t die because sacred bloodworms keep repairing his body. Yeah, right. He’s also cursed with an annoying shouty girl for company. The fights are bog-standard and there’s no drama abut the outcome, no matter how many posturing foes he has to cut down. The DVD has an English commentary that adds useful material, but the film hardly deserves it.