Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Anyone who's been following movie news knows this film was in Development Hell for a long, long time, and Edgar Wright was suddenly dropped as director at a very late stage for rather vague reasons. The final result is pretty much what you'd expect for a production this troubled where Disney holds the whip-hand.

Ant-Man is an iconic Avengers character, yet at the same time, deeply problematic. Therefore this adaptation sidelines his most troubling aspects within the first two minutes (meaning that another iconic character you might have been hoping to see is in the film for about five seconds), and concentrates on a later version of the hero who is himself much less controversial than the same person is in the comics. We are also almost instantly introduced to a whole raft of one-dimensional clichés. The white hero's half-witted non-white buddies who talk too much, can't act, are deeply irritating, and exist only to signal to the viewer that a "bad" hero who starts the movie as an unrepentant thief must be a good guy because he's not a racist? Check. (Ironically, Captain America's pal Falcon, a long-established black supporting character who manages to be a hero in his own right rather than an annoying fool, pops up in a cameo to remind us how stupid and accidentally racist this stereotype really is.) Scientist who is automatically a bad guy because he's bald and isn't played by Sir Patrick Stewart? Check. (Incidentally, I think that's theoretically a spoiler, but the actor's performance is so crude that if you don't know he's a baddie from the get-go, you're too young to be watching a movie with a 12 certificate.) Feisty cute lady who initially hates the hero but inevitably... oh, you get the idea...

The worst thing about superhero movies in general is that most superheroes (looking at you, Man Of Steel) are so invulnerable that the only foe who can possibly challenge them is an even tougher version of themselves. Therefore it's very disappointing that somebody like Ant-Man, whose powers are basically those of a normal man with a really clever wrinkle on stealth, ends up fighting a tougher version of himself, since this is the most boring possible thing to do with a hero whose abilities are that limited and specific. Even worse, about three-quarters of the film is a surprisingly tedious training montage in which it's not terribly clear what's at stake, except that the shrinking technology is somehow vaguely "weaponisable" in a way which matters in a universe where Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, and the rest of that crowd already exist. And I'm pretty sure that the grand finale was to a large extent stolen from a Wallace and Gromit film, with added product placement.

This is cookie-cutter superhero pap where the hero gets his own movie because Marvel canon makes it necessary, but they don't know how to make a good film about a man who is in real terms roughly as powerful as James Bond because he has to fit into a world where actual Norse gods save the universe from a billion magic space goblins. And the epilogue makes it clear that Ant Man is now officially the obnoxious comic relief character the Avengers were previously lacking. If the franchise hadn't started to rot already, it just did...

Spaghetti westerns mostly don't work if they aren't made by Italians. However, in this case, the incredibly eclectic director of everything from giant ant classic "Them!" to the shagtastic "In Like Flint" by way of Bela Lugosi comedy "Zombies On Broadway" and a film starring Oliver Hardy and an elephant almost pulls it off. The trick is to play it absolutely straight, no matter how insanely stupid and ultra-violent the subject matter may be, and this is a good example of such an approach. It's not the only western in which the hero becomes the reluctant savior of a small town, but it's one of the very few indeed in which the "hero" really, truly doesn't give a shit.

A word of warning: any militant feminists out there may want to throw furniture through all available walls at certain moments in this film. Though to be fair, I cannot off-hand think of any other movie in which Lee Van Cleef is seriously supposed to be the sexiest man on the planet. I think you all get the general idea. This is a spaghetti western spoof, but it's a pretty good one, if you don't mind a wee bit of political incorrectness. I certainly don't, therefore I object not at all to the nods to such films as "For a Few Dollars More", or indeed the less famous but well worth seeking out Budd Boetticher westerns, many of which involved Randolph Scott, that built a bridge between these two genres.

Bad stuff happens, and bad yet reluctantly good people reluctantly sort it all out. As post-spaghetti westerns go, it's not at all bad. Certainly it does exactly what it says on the tin.

I watched this because it got some superb reviews. Alas, it seems those reviews were written in the same spirit that made tens of millions of "Star Wars" geeks attempt to persuade themselves "The Phantom Menace" was quite good because it had been a very long wait and it was the best they were going to get. In the same way, 25 years after the original "Tremors", and 11 years after the third and seemly last of those increasingly desperate straight-to-video sequels, Michael Gross is back as Burt Gummer, shooting big guns at graboids, or at any rate, second-rate CGI approximately resembling them. And that's all the connection it has with any of the previous films, having been made by an completely different creative team and shot entirely in South Africa to save money.

Another money-saving measure is the cast. Everybody is a South African you've never heard of, apart from the two big-name (well, the biggest the budget ran to) American stars, Michael Gross and Jamie Kennedy. In general, the white South Africans are creeps, caricatures, or both, while those black characters who aren't extras are dignified people who seem to be in a much more serious and genuinely suspenseful movie than the white folks. Unfortunately, they mostly end up having their adventures in parallel with those of Burt Gummer and his new sidekick but several miles away, presumably because their presence would get in the way of the comic double-act the two stars are putting on for our entertainment.

Jamie Kennedy is one of the worst actors ever to somehow be in more than one film. Here, he's playing a middle-aged man who talks like a teenager, and he talks incessantly, sometimes in a whine even more irritating than his normal voice. Every single line that spews from his lips is a feeble witticism, a juvenile slang term supposed to indicate that he's down wid da kidz, or both; and he keeps this up even when there's nobody there to hear him except, unfortunately, us. The childish tone is reinforced by the constant "funny" references to Michael Gross's age, as if they have to justify the fact that an actor who has played the same rôle on and off for a quarter of a century isn't young any more, the minimal gore and ludicrously mild swearing, and the fact that both the trailers on this DVD are for horror films apparently aimed at 10-year-olds.

So what we end up with is a bunch of rather cheap CG maggots which are kept offscreen as much as possible and only show up one at a time, fighting an elderly actor increasingly playing it for laughs, an incredibly annoying man-child who you wish would get killed from the get-go but who obviously won't be, and a shapely black lady who tries very hard to turn this dreck into a better movie, but is mainly there for the camera to linger on her tightly-clad torso whenever it possibly can. And the worst thing of all? The surprising revelation at the end sets things up so that if there's ever a "Tremors 6", Jamie Kennedy will definitely be in it. Do your bit to help prevent this obscenity from coming to pass by not bothering to watch "Tremors 5".

It's hard to know what to say about a film like this, except that if you want to watch a Surrealist spaghetti western that isn't "El Topo", it's probably your only option. In conventional terms, it's a deeply distasteful, totally incoherent mess. Which, by the way, has absolutely no connection with Sergio Corbucci's "Django", being one of about 50 unofficial sequels, many of which simply redubbed the hero's name in what had been made as a stand-alone movie. The "hero" of this film explicitly doesn't have a name at all, the only reference to Django being in the hastily-changed title. I put "hero" in quotes because he isn't what you would normally call noticeably heroic. After his initial quest for revenge becomes irrelevant very early on, he spends almost the entire film being passively manipulated by just about everybody while the town (also explicitly nameless) self-destructs around him, before finally bringing justice to the baddies in a manner which, while suitably apocalyptic, can only be described as cheating, and will be extremely uncomfortable viewing for anyone who likes horses.

Essentially, this is an ultra-violent spoof of the New Testament, with a protagonist who is mistaken for some kind of messiah by two indians who believe (wrongly) that he rose from the dead, and is only able to properly unleash his wrath after suffering an incredibly blatant parody of the crucifixion with added vampire bats! There are even suggestions that the town where all this occurs has so much profoundly wrong with it that it might be Hell - nobody actually says so, but one character does remark that "it sure ain't Heaven". This would explain why almost all the townsfolk behave exactly like the gleefully sadistic undead yankee slayers in "2,000 Maniacs".

Talking of ultra-violence, this is the uncut version, and includes two extremely gory bits missing from most prints: the scene where a greed-crazed mob dig for gold bullets in the body of a man who isn't dead yet, and a very explicit scalping. One other word of warning: by modern standards, this movie is pathologically homophobic. Several "good" characters, including the hero, are implicitly in the closet and all mixed up about it. As for the villain, he's got a private army of predatory homosexuals in matching black dude ranch cowboy suits! Thankfully the studio put its foot down and insisted on the script being amended before filming started, otherwise this director's cut would have included a scene where a boy is buggered to death.

It's a bad western and a barely comprehensible film of any kind, but it's so unconventional that normal critical standards are meaningless. Like "Eraserhead", it is what it is (whatever that is), and you're unlikely ever to see another film like it. Your mileage may vary on whether or not this is a bad thing.

In 1971, spaghetti westerns were all the rage, Charles Bronson, Toshirô Mifune and Alain Delon were A-list stars in their respective countries, and Terence Young had recently directed 3 of the first 4 Bond films. Throw them all into the mix and you've got the ultimate international action movie - right?

Well, maybe not. It's always been a basic fact of Hollywood life that gimmicky westerns are less successful than well-made ordinary ones, and "cowboys vs. samurai" is about as gimmicky as you can get without involving aliens (which, when they finally got around to it, wasn't as successful as everyone had hoped). Spaghetti westerns always lost that indefinable something when they weren't made by Italians. And Japanese actors, however good they may be, tend to be better when they're not required to act in a foreign language.

Toshorô Mifune is rather wooden, but you can't really blame him, since the character he's playing is a one-dimensional stereotype who doesn't call for anything beyond his default "hard man of few words" performance. And Charles Bronson basically just played tough guys, so he's very awkward when delivering all the wisecracks he's landed with here (given the presence of a director and a couple of actors from "Dr. No", I wondered if the part of Link had originally been written for Sean Connery). In fact, it probably would have been better if Bronson had played a ruthless sheriff who somehow winds up in Japan, and Mifune the bragging half-smart bandit he reluctantly teams up with. As for Alain Delon, while he's very convincing as a psychopath, apart from the beginning and the end he's hardly in the film. Instead, we get endless scenes of Bronson and Mifune annoying each other while they gradually bond, complete with irritating "This bit's ZANY!!!" music.

The action, while it's certainly as bloody as you'd expect with swords involved, is a bit flat, sometimes confusing - I often had trouble keeping track of which minor characters were still alive - and there isn't quite enough of it, as if Terence Young assumed that, like Sergio Leone, he could get away with long action-free stretches despite lacking Leone's visual flair and memorable characters. Instead, he uses meaningless spaghetti western tropes, such as having the baddie constantly play with his gold watch because El Indio did that in "For a Few Dollars More", except that Delon's Gotch does it for no reason at all. Clumsy and illogical plot devices, poor characterisation (Ursula Andress is basically there to get tortured more and wear less than she did in "Dr. No"), and a sense that the budget wasn't very high all help to make this film a minor oddity rather than the offbeat classic it might have been with that cast.

Poor Alex Cox. Remember how for a little while everybody thought "Repo Man" was übercool, and he was going to be the gritty, stylish bad boy of new wave cinema? But he simply didn't have the talent to build on his initial success and quickly faded into obscurity. And then a few years later, along came Quentin Tarentino and did everything Alex Cox had tried to do, only he got it right.

This is Cox's most Tarentinoesque film, right down to starring a Samuel L. Jackson lookalike in the rôle of a hit-man laying low with his gang after a chaotic robbery. And it's easy to see why Tarentino was ever so slightly more successful in the long term than Cox. Perhaps by the time he made this film Alex knew his career was going round the U-bend, because this isn't so much a movie as a romp starring all his rock-star buddies but very few real actors (apart from Dennis Hopper, who's onscreen for about 2 minutes), and some of the time they appear to be having a party rather than making a movie, as if the director knew he'd never have another chance to indulge himself this shamelessly so he might as well go for it.

The acting is uniformly dreadful, and the movie's basic reason to exist - parodying one of those ridiculously hostile spaghetti western towns where they kill strangers on sight for no reason at all - is funny enough for a 3-minute sketch, not an 80-minute feature film. Every joke is stretched far too thin, and the constant visual quotes from Alex Cox's favorite films only serve to remind the viewer how much better those movies are than the one you're watching right now. It cost $1m - peanuts for a feature film, even 30 years ago - but it didn't even come close to making it back. These days a movie like this would be crowdfunded, as Cox's most recent no-budget straight-to-DVD production indeed was. Watching this woefully self-indulgent mess, it's not hard to understand why the director of "Repo Man" and "Sid and Nancy" had such a short mainstream career.

Then again, if you're very stoned indeed, or simply not fussy what you're watching so long as stuff happens and people get shot, 80 minutes of Alex Cox's celebrity pals who are neither actors nor comedians trying to do comedy acting may perhaps float your boat. It may also appeal to people who enjoy spotting references in movies to other movies, the more obscure the better, more than the movies themselves - if you know why the butler played by Elvis Costello is called Hives, you're good at this game! Otherwise, it's of interest only if you've always wanted an answer to the question: "Whatever happened to Alex Cox?"

This quasi-sequel to "Black God, White Devil" forgets all about the two main protagonists in that film, the hopelessly confused hero and his long-suffering wife, concentrating instead on a supporting character, the glum, tubby assassin Antonio. Although 29 years have passed between movies, this lugubrious nihilist has apparently spent the whole time sitting in a bar whining about what a bad man he is, though on the bright side, his failure to move on has rendered him immune to the aging process, something which also applies to his clothes. Called upon to get rid of a new bandit who looks and dresses exactly like his old enemy Corisco, and when we first see him, is pretending to be Corisco in a piece of street theatre, naturally Antonio jumps at the chance, only to belatedly find out that he was wrong, and must therefore try to put things right by doing what he does best - killing the bad guys.

If you think this sounds exciting, you're sadly mistaken. As in the previous film, almost every shot goes on far too long, starting with the death agonies of the nameless fellow who pops his clogs during the opening credits, which are so protracted that they turn into unintentional comedy. He's also the first of many terrible actors we'll encounter. Just as in the first movie, almost the only times it really comes alive are the scenes in which local extras exuberantly perform religious rites or hold festivities, ignoring the camera and basically just being themselves. The actors, in contrast, mostly declaim long, deeply symbolic monologues in flat droning voices while staring vacantly into the distance, or sometimes straight at the camera, which their characters seem to be aware of.

The whole film is like this. The camera is so static that sometimes it appears as if the cameraman's idea of doing his job was to switch it on and go for a drink, and the actors wander very slowly towards or past it, sometimes for the entire length of a ridiculous folk-song being sung on the soundtrack. Occasionally the characters will stop everything (including dying) and sing a song themselves straight to the camera while the rest of the cast sit around looking bored and miserable. And the lengthy sort-of-erotic sequence involving one woman, two men, and a dead body more closely resembles a Pythonesque parody of a pretentious foreign arthouse movie c. 1970 than a perfectly serious scene in a real movie of that type.

The ambitious though amateurishly staged gunfight at the end, along with the opening credits and the hero's appearance, suggest that this film was trying to be a spaghetti western all along. Unfortunately, for 90% of its running time it's a deeply pretentious, painfully slow mystery play with political overtones. In other words, another dull slab of overrated "world cinema" that the critics love because it's from Brazil and it's terribly, terribly meaningful, but everybody else will be as bored as the actors seem to be. On the plus side, the extras are clearly having fun, and some of the scenery's nice.

When watching an underground film made half a century ago in a country with very limited cinematic resources, you have to make allowances. But even so, this frequently resembles an unusually pretentious home movie. The acting ranges from adequate to atrocious, the action scenes are woefully unconvincing, and in a laugh-out-loud moment, the tragic death of a major character is turned into slapstick by a hilariously inept edit obviously meant to cover the actor's inability to fall flat on his face like a corpse is supposed to. Also, while a homage to the Odessa steps massacre in Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" is a handy way of establishing your credentials as both an auteur and a Marxist, if you're going to rip off a legendarily well-directed sequence from somebody else's movie, it helps to be able to direct fairly well yourself.

Like its title, the film is in two distinct halves, the first of which works far better. The theme of the downtrodden citizens of a repressive state joining a fanatical and ultra-violent religious sect out of sheer desperation has considerable relevance in 2015, the mad "saint" Sebastian is quite effectively portrayed, though he never develops into anything more than a one-note enigma, and the director's habit of dwelling on everything for much too long (unless it's a technically difficult scene to direct, in which case he resorts to frantic MTV-style editing to get it over with as quickly as possible) actually works very well in the sequence where our resolute but rather dim hero performs a ludicrously masochistic and utterly pointless religious penance simply because his master says so.

Unfortunately, the second half, in which the protagonist teams up with the dreaded bandit Captain Corisco and his mighty outlaw army (all three of them), gets very silly indeed. Corisco, who is played by the world's worst actor, is given numerous lengthy swathes of incredibly pretentious dialogue to declaim, sometimes straight to the camera. To make matters worse, for some unexplained reason he believes himself to be possessed by the spirit of a deceased revolutionary leader, and is therefore required to have several extremely confusing conversations with himself. And of course, it winds things up with a bit of symbolic imagery which you probably aren't meant to take literally.

This is the kind of "important" movie which people who still insist that "Citizen Kane" is the best film ever made pretend to like so that they can have deep discussions about what it really means. But in the end, it simply isn't very good.

Although this is billed as a thriller, it would be more accurate to call it a very, very black comedy with a ludicrously melodramatic plot featuring a string of outrageous coincidences and absolutely no truly sympathetic characters whatsoever. It's also a rare example of a film noir that takes place in blazing sunshine, but nevertheless it's still as dark as they come.

Right from the start, with our smugly privileged heroine relentlessly over-mothering her adult, implicitly gay son who obviously can't endure even one more day with the old bat, while outside people casually drive past a run-over dog with their car radios spouting a ridiculous sermon about "anti-satan missiles", this is obviously going to be a film about how little anybody really cares about anybody else. Which it turns out to be in spades. When a freak power failure traps the slightly disabled protagonist in a precursor of the stairlift with the most poorly-thought-out safety features imaginable, she soon discovers that ordinary, decent folks completely ignore alarm-bells that are none of their business, though they do attract the attention of people who have their own reasons for being interested in houses whose occupants are helpless...

The characters are as caricatured as the situation is contrived, and there's a lot of outrageous overacting on display, especially from veteran character actor Jeff Corey as a spectacularly demented alcoholic tramp, and second-rate Brigitte Bardot impersonator Jennifer Billingsley as a wild child so dimwittedly amoral that she not only has absolutely no objections to casual murder, but appears to be sexually aroused by the thought of dying in the electric chair. In true film noir tradition, everyone does their best to ruthlessly double-cross everyone else, and having even a glimmer of humanity is a weakness that the real predators soon pick up on, so it's not surprising that the standout performance is from an unknown young actor called James Caan as a truly terrifying psychopathic hoodlum with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever.

Steadily mounting paranoia combines with utter cynicism at every turn - in one delightful throwaway detail, we see that a shady pawnbroker's shop is so sleazy that several customers have apparently pawned their lavatories! And having tried appealing to her tormentors' better nature only to find out that they haven't got one, our oh-so-civilized heroine's final solution to her problems is genuinely shocking. It isn't for everybody, but if the idea of a grand guignol pitch-black comedy with a dash of high camp and a weird presentiment of the crimes of the Manson Family (I wonder if Charlie ever saw this film?) appeals to you, I'd recommend it highly.

In some quarters this film has been praised to the skies, but it doesn't seem to be making any massive waves. That's because it's the kind of movie a certain breed of film critics of the more refined sort automatically love, but most people see as pretentious. That's not to say it's without good qualities. It often looks beautiful, it's trying really hard, and sometimes it works.

Then again, sometimes it doesn't. Director John Maclean provides a peculiar introduction which I honestly think he may have recorded when he was stoned, given his borderline incoherence, and the fact that he seems to think he had to go to New Zealand to find a gap between rocks exactly big enough to be blocked by a buffalo skeleton (a visual detail which has precisely nothing to do with the plot). But his belief that avoiding obvious western clichés makes his film totally ground-breaking is just plain wrong, especially as he doesn't really do so. Hard-boiled world-weary tough guy teaming up with naïve innocent and thus regaining touch with his humanity? Gee, that's never been done before! See in particular "True Grit", specifically the recent Coen brothers remake, to which this movie is so indebted that it directly homages that scene where a completely irrelevant anonymous dead guy is discovered so that a joke can be made about it. In the case of the Coens, it's a very clever reference to an earlier scene homaging another film that most viewers won't get, plus a really good one-liner so that everybody laughs whether they got the more subtle underlying gag or not. In the case of John Maclean, it's a jarringly anachronistic reference to the Darwin Awards.

Much of the movie suffers from the same problem. I'm pretty sure that upper-class Scotsmen in 1870 never said "You're always dissing me!"; and when the cynical badass character meekly leaves his gun on the counter of a shop just because an unarmed storekeeper tells him it's a condition of browsing, events unfold precisely as if he was the helpless puppet of a wildly implausible script. According to the director it's supposed to be "dreamlike", but that kind of vibe doesn't work unless you know how to achieve internal consistency. Alternating between fairly direct Tarentinoesque quotes from every movie, western or otherwise, that you think is cool, and drifting off into stylized overacting and a ludicrously symbolic plot that wears its politically correct heart on its sleeve is not the way to do it.

John Maclean obviously knows how to make his films look pretty, but has trouble choosing good scripts. The much more industry-savvy Michael Fassbender clearly knows it, and is on autopilot here, picking up his cheque for a lazily generic performance and moving swiftly on. By the way, at no point in the film do the protagonists travel significantly more slowly than they would in any other western whose characters are required to go a long way on horseback, so the Daffy Duck title makes no sense whatsoever, unless you're a director so stoned that you think it does.

I suppose you have to give some sort of kudos to a film about psycho nympho man-hating militant feminist bikers who are heavily implied to be the lesbians they logically ought to be, yet are somehow rampant heterosexuals with a harem of strangely submissive men, directed by a college professor who invented the splatter movie genre in his spare time because his day-job didn't pay enough.

The trouble is, like almost every other "legendary" movie that the likes of Quentin Tarentino drool over, it's about 1% as much fun as that synopsis implies. All of the above is technically true, yet it's surprisingly boring. A one-dimensional girl biker gang clash with a boy biker gang who literally have no dimensions at all. Along the way, actors who would have been rejected by Ed Wood try to act, lengthy orgies occur in which absolutely no nudity is ever shown or even implied, and several moments of unconvincing gore attempt to justify the 18 certificate.

It's ahead of its time in that its major protagonists are for all practical purposes amoral, and the theme song is actually rather good. Doubtless numerous much later trendily ironic cover versions exist. In all other respects, including technical, this film in no way transcends is visibly barely-existent budget. There is zero inspiration on display here. Rarely have I seen both male and female sexuality portrayed in such a depressingly negative light in the same movie (which is especially surprising given that nobody of either sex takes their clothes off). Women are evil nymphomaniacs, therefore men have to be depraved rapists who need to go a lot further than rape to upset those psycho bitches. And so on.

There's no plot to speak of. The biker action is minimal, since Herschell Gordon Lewis couldn't dream of the resources that even Roger Corman commanded, therefore instead of massed phalanxes of the actual Hell's Angels, we get about eight ladies with "Man Eaters" hastily stitched on their jackets tootling down the highway and doing some very brief and sedate "racing" somewhere or other that clearly isn't a public road. And the fight scenes are about as well choreographed as the sex these people are supposed to be having with most of their clothes on.

This is an exploitation non-classic which is legendary by reputation rather than content - the title is better than the actual movie. Though if you do feel obliged to watch it, have fun counting how many times you see that very bad (and visibly wrinkled) painting appear and spin rapidly for a few seconds to indicate a change of scene. But be sure to keep your finger near the mute button if it looks as though any two characters of opposite sexes might like each other enough to have a bit of meaningful dialogue.

Alternatively, rent "Faster, Pussycat - Kill! Kill!", which covers almost identical territory, can't have cost much more, was made by an equally cynical exploitationeer, and yet is somehow about a thousand times more entertaining. And the theme-tunes even better!

When the trailers I'm bombarded with before the film starts include a film that sank without trace about old people doing stuff that's surprising just because they're old, and another film which sank without trace about gay people being gay, I start to worry, because although Sir Ian McKellen is a perfectly fine actor, his age and his sexual orientation (which he manages to bring up in every single interview for no reason at all) are the two least interesting things about him. And by the way, this is a film about a man who at no point is represented as being gay. If they're trying to flog it on the assumption that gay men will enjoy it because they share its star's real-life sexuality even though this plays no part in the movie, they're really struggling!

Sherlock Holmes is 93. Alzheimer's Disease is taking its toll, but apparently you can at least partially cure this incurable condition by admitting your feelings, so that's just fine. Does this movie sound like fun yet? Sir Ian acts his heart out as a miserable and borderline senile old man ridden with angst over what might have been with the only woman he ever loved (not Irene Adler - some other lady you've never heard of until now), but that simply isn't enough, given that there are basically two other people in the movie, neither of whom can act (how long is it going to be before Hollywood catches on that "male child actor who can genuinely act" pretty much means "that kid from The Babadook"?), and maybe 5% of its running-time shows Sherlock Holmes using his amazing intellect to solve problems, as opposed to having to be helped up because he's so old that he randomly fell over, or whimpering about the one very contrived chance at true love that he failed to take.

Sorry, but this is just depressing. I actually prefer Guy Ritchie's view that Sherlock Holmes can use his exceptionally high IQ to win boxing matches (as you do), in between random visual quotes from spaghetti westerns. And I never thought I'd find myself admitting that. One extra star because Sir Ian really is doing his best. Otherwise, nada.

This is a thriller which makes the serious mistake of not actually being thrilling until the last 15 minutes, before which almost nothing happens. The previous reviewer mentioned a problem with the sound which I personally didn't experience, so maybe there's one defective DVD out there, but I could have done with subtitles anyway because the thick Australian accents are at times hard to understand. But more importantly, almost nobody in this film is even remotely likable. The hero is a bit of a nonentity who we're supposed to automatically like because he's a black man in a racist society standing up for what's right, but that's no substitute for good scriptwriting, and virtually everybody he meets is either irritating or evil.

There's also a major problem with the crimes he's trying to solve. We're expected to care about murder victims we know almost nothing about, including a dead cop who isn't in the film at all, there's something about drugs which the hero eventually finds, apparently by magic, by which time I'd forgotten why they were supposed to matter, and a very weird subplot about hunting humans with genetically modified superdogs is repeatedly hinted at right from the beginning but goes literally nowhere at all, presumably because at the last minute it turned out to be too expensive to show on screen. Aaron Pedersen is probably a good actor, but the script gives him far too little to work with. It's the kind of movie in which howling great clues are clumsily signposted early on, then not mentioned again until the very end, by which time we need to stop and think why we're supposed to remember this detail which, the way things work out, doesn't really matter anyway, except to indicate that the people we've just found out are guilty are in fact even more guilty of the same crimes.

This is a slow, dull film with an abysmal script which I would have rated even lower if its heart wasn't clearly in the right place. If you specifically want to watch a thriller about endemic racism in the Australian police force (a rather small genre, but each to his own), you'd probably have much more fun with "Red Hill", which may not be the best movie in world, but definitely does what it says on the tin, and doesn't make you wait almost two hours before the bullets start flying. By the way, if you're the kind of scriptwriter who has the hero arrange to meet some people at Slaughter Hill near Mystery Road to sort out a crime that occurred at Massacre Creek, you really ought to be writing scripts which contain at least one deliberate joke.

This is one of those films from the last great flowering of the Hollywood western which initially inspired and later tried to rival those upstart audience-stealing spaghetti westerns, of which "The Wild Bunch" is the best-known and probably the best all round. Unfortunately this isn't one of the classics. Its glaring flaw is that, having introduced us to a super-competent hard-as-nails quartet of mercenaries, it doesn't give them enough to do. Apart from two fairly large battles, one of which doesn't involve our heroes at all, there are surprisingly few action scenes, and some very long stretches in which the protagonists dither about in the desert arguing about the morality of their mission, or inexplicably running away from small groups of adversaries they could easily defeat.

The casting is interesting. Lee Marvin does what he always does and Woody Strode is just Woody Strode, but Burt Lancaster, who always gave a far better performance when he was playing a man who wasn't altogether nice (if comic-books had grown up a bit sooner, he might have been a very convincing Batman), steals it as the most amoral of the heroes, and the casting director was savvy enough to realize that Jack Palance had enough charisma to sometimes play a character who wasn't his usual one-dimensional baddie. Robert Ryan, however, is totally wasted. It's a logical nod to realism to include as part of the quartet a man whose speciality is looking after horses, but in visual terms he has nothing interesting to do, so he does almost all of it offscreen and ends up appearing to be a waste of space.

It's quite well-made (apart from the terrible day-for-night photography typical of that era) and the cast do a good job, but there simply isn't enough action. I got the impression that the movie probably went over-budget and they had to scale down the firefights at the last minute. For example, Lee Marvin's character is signposted as an expert with ultra-modern weapons such as machine-guns, which are indeed shoehorned into the plot and repeatedly referenced, but he barely gets to use them at all. And Burt Lancaster brings up a subplot involving a vast horde of buried gold which is completely forgotten about for the rest of the film.

Overall it's not bad, just a bit slow and lacking in the excessive gunplay it promises to deliver. For similar films that do exactly the same job far better (and have some of the same cast), see of course "The Wild Bunch", and also "Vera Cruz", which is vastly more spectacular, surprisingly hard-hitting considering it was made in 1954, and features a much better antiheroic performance from Burt Lancaster as a charming rogue you can't help liking even though you really shouldn't.

It's very hard to rate films like this. As a mainstream movie it merits one star in every department except manic energy, but in terms of what it sets out to be, it's almost a masterpiece. The classic test of whether or not an actor makes a good James Bond is to ask yourself: "Do I believe this man would kill me?" Although in most other respects he'd be a dreadful Bond, I believe wholeheartedly that Sonny Chiba would kill me, and grin like the Joker as he stared at the vital organ he'd just torn out of my body with his bare hands, as he does in this film more than once. I do not have that feeling about Bruce Lee. It's also worth remembering that Sonny Chiba was so much bigger than life that he made manga movies 20 years before animé was a thing - check out his live-action performance as the unstoppable assassin Golgo 13.

Can he act? No, of course not. But when he pulls faces and makes funny noises in the middle of fights (is that actually a vital part of being good at non-cinematic martial arts, or just a deliberate attempt to remind us of Bruce Lee?), the feral quality he brings to all his films prevents it from being laughable. As does the hideous blood-soaked carnage he perpetrates, and his utter amorality which frequently crosses over into outright evil. The "plot", insofar as there is one, makes no sense whatsoever beyond being an excuse for people to hit each other. Women are treated abominably by everyone, including the "hero', who is quite a lot worse that most of the bad guys. The nicest person in the film is the incredibly annoying and utterly superfluous "comic relief" character, who is of course the person you most want to die from the get-go; fortunately it's no spoiler to reveal that in a film this dark and vicious, his chances of long-term survival are roughly equivalent to those of Jar Jar Binks getting his own spin-off trilogy.

But hey, if you want non-stop over-the-top demented seventies kung fu action with buckets of blood, and you don't give a spring roll about those subtle qualities that make a film good in the conventional sense, you'll absolutely love this! Nobody involved was ever going to win whatever Japan has instead of Oscars, but I certainly wasn't bored. And if I ever see anyone who looks like Sonny Chiba walking down the street, I'll walk in the opposite direction very quickly indeed.