Film Reviews by Alphaville

Tarsem Singh has made some of the most beautiful films ever to hit the cinema screen. The Fall was sheer visual poetry. Here he turns his hand to a thriller and the result is engrossing.

When the consciousness of the dying Ben Kingsley is transferred into Ryan Reynolds’ body, you know there’s going to be a catch. He discovers the body has unexpected skills, like Jason Bourne’s, and this leads to a fun ride with plenty of action and intrigue as he investigates the mystery.

Singh’s own screenplays sometimes lack focus and punch, but given the well-honed material here he produces an anti-Greengrass-shakycam psychological thriller that’s as smooth as silk and a joy to watch. Get on board for the ride.

Nice idea soon runs out of steam. God is a cantankerous old man living in Brussels who hates mankind so much that he makes the toast fall jam side down. His 10yo daughter rebels and texts everyone to tell them the date they when they will die. There are some humorous moments here, but there are still 1½hrs to fill. So the daughter collects six disciples and each relates his/her boring ‘gospel’ with much use of voice-over and stagey talking to camera. Some reviewers seem to find this hilarious, but for most viewers patience will be in short supply.

Committed theists may find material here to titillate or offend them but it’s a pretty bland satire boringly filmed. Worst of all is the awful Benoit Poelvoorde, a Carry On character who shouts his way through the film as God searching for his daughter. And the Carry On score doesn’t help. Deicide was never more justified. A film for those who think that quirkiness compensates for depth of character, sustained

narrative or imaginative imagery.

If you’re drawn to check this out because it was directed by Babak Najafi prior to London Has Fallen, you’re in for a major disappointment. It’s about drugs and low-life criminals in Stockholm and is as dismal as it sounds. It’s a sequel to an execrable original directed in shakycam style by Daniel Esposito, and Najafi has the same awful characters and dire material to work with. Don’t bother.

Gerard Butler’s ‘Fallen’ series shows the Bourne and Bond franchises how to do it. No messing around with subplots or filler chat. Just pitch your hero against overwhelming odds and let him get on with it.

Like a breath of fresh air, ‘London’ deliberately sets out to combat the Greengrass shakycam school of filming by using smooth, considerate camera shots that have real pizazz. Sweeping crane and aerial shots capture the spectacle brilliantly. Kudos to director Babak Najafi on his first actioner. The hilarious dialogue makes Bond sound doubly cheesy. Sample. On-the-run American president to Gerard: ‘What happens if you don’t come back?’ Gerard: ‘You’re fucked.’

It’s hard to believe, as yet another London landmark bites the dust, that it was filmed on a Bulgarian backlot, where they even built another Piccadilly Circus. There’s an exciting car chase, an exciting helicopters v missiles aerial battle and much more. The initial assault on the baddies’ stronghold is filmed as a 2½ minute single travelling shot that would not look of place in Cuaron’s Children of Men. Brilliant stuff.

Note to Matt Damon: Paul Greengrass cannot direct film. His trademark in-your-face shaky camera shots ruin every movie he’s ever been involved with. As shot by henchman cinemaphotographer Barry Ackroyd, the camera judders uncontrollably. Snap-editing further fractures the image into mash-up cinema.

The two culprits both come from a British TV documentary background and they should have stayed there. They couldn’t film a visually coherent sequence if they tried. We know Paul is your friend, Matt, but he’s ruined what could have become a franchise to rival Mission Impossible. Instead of opening out the action, as Doug Liman did so memorably in the original Bourne Ultimatum, Greengrass closes it down.

He also had a hand in the banal script. The plot is irrelevant. Treadstone nonsense for the fourth time. The dialogue is dire. Sample (After Bourne has escaped yet again): ‘We’ve lost him. Sir.’ Lost Bourne? Who’d have thought? Motor cycle chase? Check. Car chase that involves weaving against traffic on the wrong side of the road? Check. Assassination attempt in a crowded hall (screaming crowds, confusion etc.)? Check. Yawn and pass the popcorn. And someone stop that relentless staccato muzak, please!

Talents such as Alicia Vikander and Vincent Cassel are wasted. Alicia spends most of the film in a room or a van peering at computer screens. Vincent, such a charismatic villain in superior films such as Mesrine, has little to do but wander around with a determined look on his face shooting extras as he passes. His climactic fist fight with Damon is a damp squib.

Only once the end-titles roll is there relief, when Moby’s ‘Extreme Ways’ returns to rekindle fond memories of Doug Liman’s original film and remind us how well the Bourne franchise began before Greengrass ruined it.

It’s rare for a socially important film to be any more interesting than a Ken-Loach-type diatribe against the establishment, but Mustang is wondrous cinema. It’s an absorbing, beautifully realised film that will both uplift you and make you as angry at Turkey as Midnight Express did.

Five sisters, as free-spirited as the Wild West horses that give the film its title, are scolded for playing innocently with boys on their way home from school. For this they are subjected to a virginity test. ‘One minute we were free and then it all turned to shit,’ says the youngest, Lale, in voice-over. Their house becomes a prison and a ‘wife factory’. They’re forced to wear ‘shit-coloured dresses’.

If the premise sounds unpromising, the viewing experience is a revelation. Filmed in a style that is both naturalistic and luminous, it’s like an amalgamation of two other brilliant films: Virgin Suicides and Innocence.

Director Deniz Gamze Erguven is a French-Turkish Sofia Copola. Provocatively, she films her innocent girls in various states of undress around the house, which has drawn howls of reactionary outrage in Turkey. This merely proves Erguven’s point that Turkish society defines everything women do in terms of their sexuality. The backlash to Mustang in her home country has been violent, with she and her cast subjected to such threats that she has vowed never to make another film there.

In Turkish cinema it has been a long time since the heady days of Yilmaz Guney, who directed his amazing 1982 film Yol by proxy from a prison cell. Mustang is searing, shining cinema that bears comparison. As well as being a trenchant critique of rural Turkish society, it’s about coming of age, making the most of one’s options whatever one’s circumstances and much more besides.

Can the girls escape their lot? You’ll be rooting for them, especially the feisty Lale, Deniz’ alter ego, as the narrative builds to a tense climax.

MI6 agent Mark Strong buddies up with his moronic brother Sacha Baron Cohen for action japes. From the DVD extras, it at least seems to have been fun to make. Shame none of that transfers to the screen. Wanna see naked fat people run? Wanna see Cohen suck poison out of Strong’s testicle? To cackling fans of gross-out images it’s pointless to say that this film has no redeeming cinematic merit, but less brain-dead viewers may well find it unfunny, formulaic, irritating and abysmal.

A dark Danish medieval fairy-tale melodrama the likes of which you won’t have seen before. It’s supposed to be the first in teenage-type trilogy but don’t let that put you off. The intriguing premise pits a shamer and her daughter, who can see what people are ashamed of and make them atone, against the evil Dragonlord, who unfortunately isn’t ashamed of anything.

It’s beautifully realised and played as an emotionally real cat-and-mouse chase through the Dragonlord’s city, a kind of dark Alice in Wonderland. There are lapses of pace but 12yo Rebecca Emilie Sattrup is convincing as the lead and a tone-setting melodramatic score perfectly underscores the action.

The film draws you in inexorably and builds to a rousing climax. As for the alligator-like dragons in their pit, shorn of Hollywood-style glitz, surely there have never been scarier CGI reptiles than these. Such an odd film that it will stay with you.

Terrific chase movie that plays like Terminator 2’s T-1000 cyborg chasing Bear Grylls in the hot desert. Rabbit hunter Jeffrey Dean Morgan is out to stop the unjustly deported Gael Garcia Bernal and his fellow Mexicans from illegally entering the States. Even as we root for on-the-run Bernal, Morgan brings to the screen the same charismatic presence that bewitched The Good Wife on television. He’s impossible to dislike, even when he’s picking off Bernal’s party with his high-powered rifle.

A lesser film would wallow in moral judgements and intersperse the action with boring backstory, but Desierto just gets on with it and let’s us thrill to a classic cat-and-mouse chase. Director Jonas Cuaron, following impressively in the footsteps of his father Alfonso (Gravity) directs flawlessly, making the most of the big wide landscapes: rocks, canyons, playas, cacti… And the percussive score by Woodkid provides rousing support.

Ignore American reviews that overload the film with political symbolism. At a mean, lean 84 minutes it’s as impressive a master class as Duel in showing how to make an unrelenting thriller. The only downside is a mawkish end-titles song. Also: avoid the tell-tale trailer.

This is one of those films that must have been more fun to write and make than it is to watch. It consists of three interleaved but independent fairy tales from a 17th century Italian book and is sheer nonsense. It’s directed by ex-painter Matteo Garrone, so any production still will look good, but as a whole the film has no more life than Peter Greenway’s painterly 1980s films. Yes, it’s just a silly fairy tale so we shouldn’t expect too much of it, but Branagh’s Cinderella showed you can still make an audience care. Here the characters are cyphers and the plot paper-thin ludicrous.

Garrone has an eye for an arresting image and the film has impressive production values, but characterisation, narrative thrust and subtext are so simplistic that the viewer has no reason to care. One story, for example, is about a princess forced into an arranged marriage. Yawn, yawn. In the DVD extras Garrone sees the film as ‘an emotional journey’. In which case he’s failed completely. One star for the pretty pictures. Best fairy-tale picture remains Ridley Scott’s magical Legend, but only in its American release version with Tangerine Dream score.

You’ll soon give up on this over-edited, frenetic tracking of an ex-FBI agent searching for her kidnapped baby in Marrakesh. Lots of local colour and annoying use of slo-mo and overlapping dissolves. Neither situation or characters convince. Plot and dialogue is irrelevant. Fight scenes look ridiculous owing to the modern scourge of shooting too close up with a shaky camera, then over-editing into bite-sized clips.

According to the trailer Howard J. Ford is an ‘acclaimed director’, but if you’ve seen his previous zombie effort The Dead you’ll know what to expect. This one is like a cheap knock-off of a good action movie, like all those unwatchable Italian westerns that followed Leone’s. Truly boring but one star for a British director who at least isn’t bogged down in social realism.

If you thought Jeremy Saulnier’s film Blue Ruin was sluggish, this boring mumblethon, best watched with subtitles, is worse. Even Patrick Stewart, here slumming it, is reduced to a muttering monotone. A band is trapped in a room and attacked by drug dealers. With poorly drawn characters, ugly lighting and a plot that has nowhere to go, it’s purgatory to be stuck in there with them. It’s like sitting through a lo-budget, drawn-out student film. Doses of gore are added to arouse those who find such things arousing, but they’re pure cliché. Worst of all, as in Blue Ruin, Saunier can’t direct actors, none of whom will be putting this on their résumé. It has received good reviews from obscure journals and gore geeks, but when Imogen Poots finally utters the line ‘Tell me those stupid fucking words are his last’ it’s a relief that her wish comes true. Assault on Precinct 13 this isn’t.

This is an affecting true-life story about a family searching for each other in the aftermath of the 2004 Thai tsunami. It’s so well staged, acted and directed that you’d have to have a heart of stone not to warm to it, especially with swelling violins telling you how to react. It wastes only 15 minutes in getting to the exciting tsunami sequence, but the majority of the film is spent in hospitals afterwards, where things get a bit maudlin and samey. No opportunity to manipulate audience emotions is spared. It certainly wouldn’t bear a second viewing, but if you enjoy a good tearful wallow get a box of tissues ready and draw up a seat.

Yet another ugly-looking, boring British film with zero visual imagination. It’s a simple story with an annoying twist ending, but you probably won’t get that far before bailing. It’s more of a concept than a film, as the ‘making of’ feature proves. Lottery funded? You guessed it. The concept may have worked in book form, but you need more than a concept to transfer it to the screen. The execution is awful. No sense of pace or narrative drive. Just a series of ugly, poorly chosen, handheld, too-close-up shots cobbled together to no particular purpose.

Why handheld? Why so close up? It’s cinema. Open it out. Hold the camera steady. Add a sleep-inducing score and you’re in for a bum-numbing hour and a half. Writer/director Omer Fast makes those pretentious concept video installations you may have tried to watch in art galleries. This is in the same category. It’s his first ‘feature’. Makes you weep for British cinema.

This irresistible cgi extravaganza about gods and mortals in ancient Egypt is a wonder to behold. There’s more imagination packed into its two hours than in all the Marvel films put together. The images are ravishing, chock full of imaginative design. The fantastical non-stop action, with elements of Star Wars and Indiana Jones thrown in alongside the swords and sandals, is seamlessly executed with technical brilliance. Sure it’s nonsense, but the fact that it revels in its cheesiness just makes it all the more engaging.

Gerard Butler as a strutting 10ft-tall Scottish Egyptian baddie-god who can metamorphose in to a monster? Geoffrey Rush as a cantankerous spaceship-dwelling sun god who burns every mortal who looks at him? A forlorn giant sphinx who’s response to having his riddle solved is ‘Oh, bother’? Air chariots pulled by flying beetles? You gotta love it.

Alex Proyas, totally in command of his green-screen medium, directs with sweeping style and verve. His best film since The Crow and Dark City. Ignore the disdain of arthouse reviewers, engage child mode, sit back and enjoy the sense of wonder that only cinema can engender.