Film Reviews by Alphaville

The film begins haphazardly, with the plot all over the place, the camera matching it and a soundtrack that belongs to a different film. Once it settles down and star Donnie Yen appears things improve. It’s not a patch on director Wilson Yip’s subsequent film with Donnie – the wonderful Dragon Tiger Gate, but it becomes increasingly watchable. Donnie gets to show off some of his martial arts moves and has climactic fights with a charismatic punk hit man (Wu Jing) and the legendary (though portly, ageing and injured) Sammo Yung. There’s also a surprisingly heavy ending you won’t see coming.

Overall, there’s nothing new here and it will make no new converts to Honk Kong crime thrillers, but it’s a visceral and watchable piece of cinema. The DVD also contains a good commentary as well as an analysis of the main fight scenes by Donnie himself.

An intriguing premise drives the film irresistibly forward. We follow the daily trials of ditsy Anne Hathaway in small-town America while a monster ravages Seoul in South Korea. Somehow she’s connected to it. It begins to mimic her actions. That much is on the film poster. Then things start to get out of hand. To say any more would be a spoiler, but it’s constantly fascinating and builds to a crowd-pleasing climax. Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo keeps a steady hand on matters and shoots with a keen eye for composition. Shame the DVD has no extras.

Giant bipedal drones invade the earth in this low-budget War of the Worlds. The special effects are simple but effective and the African setting provides an original backdrop to the action. We follow our hero, an amnesiac soldier, and his female aid-worker companion as they drive, walk and fight their way through the ‘Kenyan’ backcountry (filmed in South Africa) to an American base. With excellent production values, it’s beautifully filmed by writer/director Joe Miale (his first feature). With an apocalyptic feel and a mean running time of 83 minutes, the pace never lets up and it’s far superior to other budget attempts at grand-scale sci-fi (eg Monsters). The DVD also contains an interesting Making Of featurette.

After seeing his partner gunned down by terrorists our hero joins the CIA and gets trained for black ops. There’s nothing new here but ex-Homeland director Michael Cuesta directs with good pace and captures the action with a smooth prowling camera. There’s a country-hopping plot, a worthy baddie (ex-CIA agent ‘Ghost’) and a satisfyingly silly and exciting Bond-like set-piece climax. The Cinema Paradiso review reverts to an unmerited politicised criticism, but if you like action films in the Taken mode this hits the spot.

The film opens with an exciting car chase that’s so well conceived and shot it’s almost in the same league as the one in The Villainess. But it’s downhill from thereon. The boring drugs plot meanders and loses focus. Our hero Eggsy is just as bland and difficult to engage with as before. Colin Firth’s character is resurrected from the original film but is only a shadow of his former self. Chief baddie Julianne Moore has virtually nothing to do. The dialogue is for adolescents who think swearing a lot is cool. You know the barrel is being scraped when an excruciating Elton John has a sweary bit part as himself doing kung fu kicks.

After the exciting opening the rest is played for failed sub-Bond humour. It’s almost a parody of the much better original. There’s a well-choreographed fight sequence at the end that brings back fond memories of the church sequence in the original, but it’s far too late to save the film. Two stars plus one for the beginning and end sequences as well as a ‘Making Of’ DVD extra that shows how the car chase was constructed.

If you’re into this repetitive franchise, it’s beyond criticism. If you’re not, you’ll be gobsmacked at how anyone could be. With its farcical premise, incoherent plotting, clichéd characters and ludicrous dialogue, it’s an object lesson in the dumbing down of action films.

See cars change into robots! Again! See explosions! Again! See a cgi fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron! Again! See humans on the run cry ‘Go go go’! Again!

Director Michael Bay’s back catalogue clearly shows he has the visual imagination to shoot stylish films. If only he’d put it to better use, but when the franchise makes so much money from lobotomised filmgoers, why bother? He’s gone down the George Lucas route. Makes you weep for the future of blockbuster cinema.

Star-crossed lovers play will-they/won’t-they against the backdrop of Armenian genocide in Turkey during WW1. The aching score sets the mood and there are moments both poignant and exciting. However, the film wears its earnestness on its sleeve and in places becomes burdened with its message. It aims for an epic quality but is perhaps best judged on its parts rather than the sum of them. If you’re in the mood for a good wallow, it’s a smoothly filmed piece of entertainment with a message worth airing (Turkey denies the outrage to this day).

To get anything other than initial laughter and growing boredom out of this film, you have to be able to take these motion-captured cgi apes seriously. Unfortunately that means you’d have to have a lobotomy. Top Ape Caesar is angry because Top Human Woody Harrelson, here slumming it, has killed his wife. Since when did the apes adopt human marriage rituals? Which marriage rituals? Who were the bridesmaids? Did the best ape give a speech? Who baked the cake? Where’s Top Cat when you need him?

Andy Serkis voices Caesar as though delivering a funeral oration, pronouncing every word so slowly and with such import that it’s best to fast forward his speeches to give them some approximation of realism. Indeed, after 10 minutes of this rubbish you might want to fast forward the whole film because there’s little plot and no surprises. The fact that most if it takes place in darkness further adds to the ennui. With so much cgi on view, do you think there’d be explosions at the climax? Tick.

Pity director Matt Reeves. To think he once made the innovative Cloverfield before getting embroiled in this embarrassing franchise. Most critics who like the film do so because the apes look real. Is that all it takes? Okay, we’ll give it one star for animated ape hair.

This is a dreadful mixture of superhero origin plot, comedy and virtue-signalling. Watching it is like being bludgeoned into submission by an anti-war demonstrator. It starts as a generic origins movie with the standard cgi combats. See over-edited fight scenes! See wonder woman jump high in slo-mo! Hear the bombastic orchestral soundtrack!

At first it’s no worse than other superhero origin nonsense, but it soon degenerates even further into an old-fashioned World War 1 spy movie with wonder woman just along for the ride. Who knew that WW1 was started by Ares, the god of war? Cue lots of bog-standard derring-do and attempts at humorous asides.

This would be harmless enough, but what really makes you want to put your foot through the screen is the incessant virtue signalling. The anti-war hectoring is heaped on with a trowel and alleviated only by time-outs to tick boxes on racism, sexism and even North American Indian rights among others.

What the film desperately needs is a worthy bad guy, but only at the end does Ares turn up with a few silly cgi flash-bangs. Even then his main function is merely to ram home yet another anti-war message with endless exposition about how awful human beings are. By the time the end-credits roll you’d have to have a heart of stone not to want to punch something. And even then end-credit readers are submitted to a soundtrack that features a mind-numbing ballad by a warbling clone.

Wonder woman’s message for mankind? ‘Only love can save the world.’ Yep, that’ll do it. Superhero films in general set the bar extremely low, but this one plumbs a new nadir.

Although laughably compared to House of Flying Daggers, this is one of the most poorly filmed of all Korean historical epics. ‘Non-stop action’ raves the Sky movies site. Cue an opening half-hour of boring exposition with acting of Carry On quality. Sometimes you wonder if critics have seen the same film.

The bow-and-arrow action is repetitive to the point of tedium and filmed in fast-edited close-up shakycam with ugly zooms and pans thrown in to add to the visual confusion. The DVD making-of extras show the cameraman stumbling around with the camera on his shoulder as if he’s shooting an old 8mm family holiday. ‘It makes sure to get your blood pumping’ says the Cinema Paradiso review. Yes, with anger at having wasted time on it. This is shoddy am-dram film-making.

This is emotionally cold but grown-up sci-fi, intriguing both visually and philosophically. It’s a pity the characters are so bland and earnest, with actors delivering their lines in such a stylised flat manner that they’re difficult to engage with. Much of the film is shot in darkness with lots of intense whispering. Even the futuristic cityscapes, although beautifully rendered by cgi, are never as thrilling as in animated versions of the manga.

It comes over as a downbeat mood piece that needs more pace and characters to root for. The plot only really kicks in half-way through, when Michael Pitt appears as an adversary to our heroine Scarlett Johansen (a human mind in a robotic body). This adds some much needed drama to proceedings but only leads to a silly climactic fight with a ‘spider tank’.

In summary, the whole is less than the sum of its parts but there’s much to look at along the way.

Unaccountably playing at Cannes, and despite being liked by some critics, this bog-standard, one-paced Korean gangster drama soon palls. Noirish and pulpish, with no action to relieve the who-cares-anyway gang in-fighting, it’s a long 2hr haul to the end credits.

The first ten minutes are wonderful, then we meet our hero and heroine, who turn out to be government agents so juvenile as to be unbelievable. The only character with any depth is a shape-shifting pole dancer played by Rhianna. If you can ignore character and plot the visuals are nevertheless a feast for the eyes, with more imagination on show here than in all the Star Wars films put together. With so many interesting images to look at the film’s more enjoyable than it has any right to be.

Based on a comic book that director Luc Besson liked as a kid, it’s not intended to be 2001-deep, but if only some effort could have been made to engage the mind as well as the eyes. It’s still worth catching for some astounding scenes, and those first ten minutes are a wow.

Another inconsequential Hong Kong crime drama about rival gangs. You’ve seen it so many times it’s hard to care, especially when directed in such a pedestrian documentary-style fashion.

THE VILLAINESS ***** Bravura cinema

27 years after Luc Besson’s Nikita, writer/director Jung Byung-gil takes the same premise of a bad girl turned government assassin and comes up with a startling, twisting concoction of action and love story. In the pre-titles sequence alone, our heroine dispatches hordes of heavies in a single amazingly choreographed POV shot.

There’s so much to admire here, including some stunning compositions and beautiful scene transitions that indicate a director in love with the possibilities of film. The love story is delicately filmed and engaging. The action pieces are hectic and the restless camera draws you right into it. The frenetic chase sequences will make you gasp and have you wondering how they did it. Wonderful stuff.

There’s so much originality in this movie it must be like seeing Citizen Kane in the 1940s or Breathless in the 1960s. The DVD commentary by a couple of South Korean cinema buffs is equally fascinating and explains how some of the shots were filmed.