Review: Heretic

Hugh Grant has always been fun to watch in movies, even more so in recent years where he's been going big in supporting roles rather than giving the more restrained performances leading man gigs so often require. Heretic sees him stepping up to front man for a film with an exceedingly simple hook: what if Hugh Grant was evil? 

This isn't Grant playing some twisted variation of his usual type: Grant is providing 100% pure Grant here, no accents or fake teeth or abrasive harshness to blunt his appeal. "What if the charming Hugh Grant you all know and love invited you in and then turned out to be evil" is the premise, and it delivers on that premise.

Enter the two Mormon missionaries who are our guide into the world of Hugh Grant horror, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East). Barnes is the more worldly of the duo, the one who's got a bit of experience under her belt and has thought through things a bit. Paxton is the chirpy fresh-faced newcomer, someone who means well and hasn't yet had the thrill of doing good works knocked out of her - though the fact she hasn't yet actually converted anyone is a bit of a bummer.

Right from the start, this is a duo you don't mind hanging with. You may not want to sign up to their church, but they're likeable, intelligent, self-aware and committed to what they're doing without being pushy about it. They turn up on the doorstep of Mr. Reed (Grant) because they've been invited, and they only go inside after asking all the right questions - mostly about his unseen but definitely a real person wife.

Of course, once they get inside things start going wrong, but importantly a): the missionaries continue to ask the right questions and do the right thing (Paxton wants out the second things get iffy - nobody's failing to read the room here), and b): this is Hugh Grant at maximum charm they're dealing with, so even when he starts going on a little too much about religion he does so in a way that's very disarming.

Which is, of course, where the scary side of things comes from. We know he's bad news - just look at the poster! - but in the world of the movie it's perfectly reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt. Should we panic at the first suggestion of not-quite-rightness from anyone we meet? Of course not; we'd never get any shopping done for starters. And yet there are people out there willing to exploit their charm and our desire to get along for their own ends - why look, there's one on the screen now.

Heretic is at its strongest when the threat is simply that someone as charming and likable and fun to listen to as Hugh Grant is using those powers for an evil you can't quite figure out. There's a point around the middle of the film that's possibly the highlight, where the missionaries - having been drawn deeper into Mr Reeds creepy church-like house by his promises that the only way to leave is to go further in - are given a choice of two doors to leave by.

One, we're told, is the good door, and the other is the bad. Mr Reed, as is his want, poses this choice in big terms, saying their choice will reveal the very core of their beliefs. Sister Barnes, just wanting to get the hell out, brushes off this choice, opens one of the doors, looks inside, then quietly closes it and goes to the other door, refusing to say what she's seen.

It's a chilling moment, largely because it's the point where Mr Reed's creepy preaching enters the real world. What's beyond the door - a literal gateway to Hell? Another door? The bathroom? And once we find out, it becomes a more traditional scary film, the core mystery gone.

Which is kind of the point: Mr Reed is someone in love with his own voice, his own ideas, and to him everyone else is just a prop.  Sadly his ideas are, when you boil them down, bog standard internet troll blather about religion that our heroines can see right through. Seems charm alone will only get you so far.

Of course, this being a horror movie, what lies behind his charm isn't all that pleasant.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Wicked

One of the big questions when a fan-fave hit moves to the big screen is, what do you change? It's not like adapting a regular book or a play: it's already a success with an army of fans. They know what works (everything), but film is a different medium, with different requirements and needs. So how do you make it work while keeping the fans on side?

In the case of Wicked, the answer often seems to be "go bigger". And to be fair, why wouldn't you? A revisionist take on the pre-Wizard of Oz life of the Wicked Witch of the West, aka Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), and her complicated relationship with Glinda (Ariana Grande) in the years before all that business with Dorothy, there's plenty of scope for big sets and big costumes to go with the much-loved stage version's big songs.

Born green thanks (we assume) to her dead mother's fondness for hard liquor, Elphaba grew up withdrawn - and filled with a rage that occasionally bursts forth in magical form. When her wheelchair-bound younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) is accepted into Oz's Shiz University, Elphaba's only along for moral support, but when the usual color-related snickering sets off a magical outburst it attracts the attention of university bigwig Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), who brings her on board to get the training she needs.

Director Jon M Chu (everything from G.I.Joe: Retaliation to In the Heights) knows how to create arresting visuals, and he constantly opens up every scene, largely grounding his characters (even the non human ones) in actual sets for the big musical numbers. Movie spectacle almost never replaces the magic of seeing someone actually sing on a stage in front of you, but this does a better job than most.

Big singing, big dancing, big sets; also a big run time of 2 hours 40 minutes, and a teeny tiny "Part 1" under the opening title to let you know there's a very big story ahead. Fortunately, this half of things ends up coming to a fairly satisfying conclusion - there's clearly more to come, though if you decide you've had enough it works as an origin story on its own.

It's strengths are pretty much what you'd expect. Composer Stephen Schwartz's songs are quality stage musical gear, Chu gives the big set-pieces some real zing, and the performances are first rate (Jeff Goldblum as The Wizard is a role he was born to play). Fans of the stage version have nothing to fear.

The flaws are no surprise either. Did we really need an origin story for the Wicked Witch's hat? Or the Yellow Brick Road (though at least that does involve a cool diorama)? There's an overstuffed feel to proceedings that makes a few scenes drag, every moment milked for main character drama while a few of the subplots feel underserved (presumably they're needed for later).

Some parts of this revisionist take are interesting. The Munchkins' glee at the demise of the Wicked Witch in the opening scene is pitched as just a little disturbing. Others parts are just the usual elbow-to-the-ribs reminder of bigger moments from a better film (and at one point, where someone is zooming around the sky in a flapping CGI black cloak, that better film is The Matrix)

Whether this film will win over many new fans is up for grabs. The epic tone at times feels more interested in fan service than pure entertainment, the story not entirely sure where it wants us to focus and the ending could have ended sooner. 

But the story's heart - the central relationship between the two future witches - is a strong one. When they're together, Wicked sings.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Gladiator II

In an era of remakes and reboots, Gladiator II is a good old-fashioned sequel. Which is to say, it's a step down from the first film while still having enough going on to make it watchable. In fact, its big problem is that in some ways it has too much going on: someone should have said "this Rome isn't big enough for the both of us".

The story we've come to see is the tale of Lucius (Paul Mescal), who, after his African home town is conquered and his arrow-shooting wife killed by a Roman army led by Marcus Acaius (Pedro Pascal), is enslaved, becomes a gladiator, and starts stabbing his way through Rome on a mission of revenge.

Complicating matters somewhat is the fact - known to us but not him - that Marcus is sick of Rome's endless lust for conquest, and together with his wife Lucilla (Connie Nielsen from the first film) is plotting to overthrow the creepy twins currently ruling the place and restore some semblance of good governance, aka "the dream of Rome" that everyone in the first film was going on about.

And just to add another layer to proceedings, Lucius' owner is Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave turned wheeler-dealer who clearly has plans of his own. He's promised Lucius that, if he plays along, he'll have all the vengeance he thirsts for and more. But if Marcus is secretly a good guy, then that means vengeance is... bad?

It's not hard to see how Lucius's character arc is meant to play out: revenge against one man becomes revenge against the system becomes trying to restore the system. Unfortunately the script is too busy with everything else going on to give Mescal (who does a very good job with the whole "leader of men" side of things) time to work through his character's multiple changes of heart.

Usually what would happen in this situation is that other subplots would be whittled down to provide that room. But when you have Denzel tearing up the place, you'd be a fool to limit his screen time - and whatever his many flaws, director Ridley Scott is no fool. Washington lights up the screen every time he's strutting around, and while he's technically a bad guy (what with not being on board with the whole "dream of Rome" deal) all that bad ain't nothing but good for the film.

And the film needs it, because while there's plenty of very impressive surface spectacle here, there's rarely much of anything to sink your teeth into. It's telling that the opening battle - which is the only one where anything is actually at stake - is also the most impressive and compelling. 

We're told that Rome is rotting from within but the sleazy decadence is barely on show, the fights are competent but rarely brutal, and the big coliseum spectaculars lack narrative heft. They don't move the story forward, they're just Lucius's day job. He doesn't even make any gladiator friends we can be worried will be killed off.

The other solution to Lucius' lack of agency - his role for much of the middle of the film is to slowly have his real status revealed to him - would be to present his arrival as a wild card, a rogue element tossed into an already complicated situation. There are traces of that, but this is so intent on looking back to the first film and presenting his arrival as a continuation rather than a new story that the longer this story goes on the less of his own man Lucius becomes. 

By the end his own motivations have been forgotten entirely, replaced by those of long dead characters whose story ended in the distant past. Even for a tale of ancient Rome, that's a bit on the nose.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Here

Robert Zemeckis' movie Here is based on Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here, and you only have to be familiar with the work of one of them to wonder how the heck this is going to work. Shock twist: it doesn't, and sad to say the blame lies pretty much entirely on the Zemeckis side of the ledger, because on the rare occasions when he seems to realise he can use the substance and not just the surface of McGuire's work there are glimmers of a worthwhile experience.

Here (the novel) uses the grammar of the comic book - panels on a page - to unfold an experience that remains fixed in space while roaming freely in time. Each page shows the exact same view onto the world, presented randomly from the dawn of time to the distant future as it goes from wilderness to wasteland to jungle to a suburban lounge room and back. Smaller inset panels show other points in time - a person in the 1950's is seemingly handing a drink to someone there decades later while around them a primeval forest thrives, and so on as all of time is layered before us.

How does this work as a movie? Not well; Zemeckis does use the device of panels as windows into different times, but mostly just as a way to transition from scene to scene. The real power of McGuire's book is the way events and situations echo across time, revealing patterns and interactions even as the human scale shrinks down to nothing. Here (the movie) isn't interested in that.

Instead, we're mostly shown moments in the lives of the people living in the house. Or the time before it: there's a bit of dinosaur versus meteor action early on, and both a Native American couple and the residents (Ben Franklin's son!) of the colonial-era mansion across the road get a few scenes as they travel to and fro. But the main focus is on two generations of the one family, led by WWII veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and then his son Richard (Tom Hanks) and wife Margaret (Robin Wright).

Aside from folksy sayings like "time flies" and "there's no place like home", there's not a lot of substance in their stories (suburban life is tough, especially when you're a cliche), and the smaller lives around them don't add much. It seems the house was once owned by the inventor of the La-Z-Boy Recliner Chair, but said chairs play no part in future events (though a new couch and a fold-out bed do).

The rare moment where something does echo across time - the pandemics of 1919 and 2020, for one - provide a brief window into a much more memorable film. Emphasis on brief: it seems much more likely that the driving force for Zemeckis here was the requirement to digitally de-age his cast to cover their decades of puttering around the lounge. The technology used is competent.

Here (the movie) is surprisingly busy - that lounge room sees strokes, funerals, bedridden invalids, sex scenes and a lot more - and yet resoundingly hollow. It tells a handful of cloying, uninspired stories using a conceit that constantly hammers home the small and inconsequential nature of our lives. 

It wants to be a warm look at connection over the years. Instead, its centuries-spanning gaze into a structure that outlasts and erases all who dwell within tells us the opposite: trying to slap a feel good ending onto the march of time is both futile and pointless. 

Sadly for Here, that's not just a matter of perspective.

- Anthony Morris