Review: M3GAN 2.0

The first M3GAN got by on attitude.  Killer dolls, killer AIs - it was the killer attitude that separated it from the pack. M3GAN 2.0 continues to exploit the rich, deep seam of previous movies about killbots run amok, and if it lacks some of the original's edge... well, can't a girl grow a little?

It's been two years since the first M3GAN killed a bunch of people and danced around a lot, and the world of AI has kept on moving. M3GAN's creator Gemma (Allison Williams) is now an anti-AI activist appearing alongside Christian (Aristotle Athari) to call for more government safeguards, while also working with first film survivors Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps) to create robotic exoskeletons because they have to make a living somehow.

Or do they? Gemma's house is massive and the rent is super-cheap, which you'd think would be raising alarm bells but she's too distracted by her niece Cady (Violent McGraw), who is getting pretty good with the martial arts and doesn't quite get why AI is so bad.

Someone else who doesn't get it is local tech billionaire Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement), who wants Gemma's tech for his own possibly nefarious, possibly just sleazy schemes. Oh, and the US military has their own killbot called AMELIA, which has just gone rogue and killed her creators for reasons as yet unclear.  Gee, it'd be real handy if Gemma and Cady had their own lethal robot that could protect them right about now...

Leaving the evil doll-slash-bad babysitter tropes behind, this embraces the wider yet equally well-worn field of the robot run amok, with a hefty side of sinister AI mixed in. Everything from The Terminator to Eve of Destruction to Upgrade gets sampled here - which is hardly a bad thing, as who doesn't love a killer robot? 

The various bodies M3GAN (voiced again by Jenna Davis) gets decanted into provides plenty of scope for comedy as well as action; there's an impromptu musical number at one point that's one of the funniest needle-drops this year. And yes, old-school M3GAN (Amie Donald) gets to do the robot, in a scene which is both fan service and has a decent punchline in its own right.

This is much more of an action film than the first, with the horror largely confined to a lot of nasty deaths. The comedy is bumped up a notch from the first film as well, and it's often broader too - though not so much that this slides into parody.  

None of these elements are world-beating, and the actions tropes are especially well-worn (though a Steven Seagal shout-out is much appreciated), but it's the way this skips from one genre to the next any time things start to feel stale that gets it over the line.

With M3GAN being the only character with any real spark (though the human cast do get some decent lines) this film's anti-AI stance ends up being more like #notallkillbots. This isn't as sharp as the original, but at least the comedy is a bit more pointed - and as this repeatedly makes clear, in a world full of humans rushing to embrace AI, the joke is definitely on us.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: F1

Formula One racing is, amongst other things, an endurance test. Which is why most movies about it - including F1 - tend to take the long view; each race is a stage in a campaign, each individual moment is merely part of a greater whole. It's a tricky story structure for modern Hollywood, which tends to like things simple and focused. F1 doesn't always make the turn.

After flaming out early as a F1 racer, Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) has become something of a racetrack ronin, taking any gig so long as its behind the wheel and excelling at it while stumbling at pretty much everything off the track. Ruben (Javier Bardem) is a former compatriot turned chief of a race team that can't get off the starting block, and he's got an offer Sonny can't refuse - though he tries for a minute or two.

The driver Ruben already has is not impressed by his new partner. Joshau Pearce (Damson Idris) is a young hotshot with a manager constantly whispering in his ear, giving him advice - don't trust Sonny, focus on social media - that even Pearce knows is wrong, but there wouldn't be a movie without it. 

Will Sonny mentor the rising star? Will Pearce take his rightful place on the podium to signal the generational torch has been passed? Does anyone remember how writer-director Joseph Kosinski's previous film Tom Gun: Maverick ended?

There are a lot of moving parts here and most of them work. The race footage, much of which was shot inside and from actual race cars, is thrilling; the races themselves are largely focused on tactics (tires are extremely important!), and they're explained well. This doesn't oversell the danger, but whenever something does go wrong it's gut-wrenching - if sometimes only for a few seconds.

Idris balances cocky and insecure in a winning combination, while Kerry Condon - who plays the team's top car designer - injects plenty of spark into a role that is only slightly more than a love interest for Sonny. Who doesn't really need one as his real connection is with Ruben, played with charm and endlessly likable energy by Bardem.

Pitt himself is once again the well-worn expert at his job, someone who's seen it all and taken it in his stride... most of the time at least. It's a generic leading-man role - Pitt is starting to give Harrison Ford vibes in some ways - but Pitt remains magnetic on screen. Good news, adults: he's a laid-back natural leader who's great at his job and winning with the ladies, AKA a fantasy figure aimed at people older than 12. 

If there's a flaw in this two and half hour film it's that Kosinski can't seem to find a compelling story in all these parts. It feels at times like an off-brand Michael Mann film, but Mann builds his stories about men who are driven, not drivers. Pearce has the motivation, but he's in the second seat and he's not fully formed; Pitt, playing a character seemingly tailor-made for him, rarely makes us feel the stakes.

Sonny is helping out an old friend, and also getting one last chance to prove himself, and also being a mentor to the next generation. Which is one too many motivations, especially when at least two of them are in opposition and none of them run counter to him being just a good old boy who likes to go fast. When you're at the pointy end of a multi-million dollar organisation based around hurtling around racetracks across the globe at terrifying speeds, there's such a thing as being too nice. 

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: 28 Years Later

Everyone remembers the superfast zombies (well, technically not zombies, but...) from 28 Days Later. Largely forgotten is everything else. Director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland used the broad outlines of the zombie movie - and a bunch of other British horror: the memorable opening owes a lot to The Day of the Triffids, for one - to lure audiences in to something that was at times fairly experimental. And so it is again.

It's been 28 years since the rage virus was unleashed on the UK (turns out the European spread seen in sequel 28 Months Later was short-lived). The few uninfected survivors live in isolated settlements, such as the island Lindisfarne, where 12 year old Spike (Alfie Williams) has two worries on his mind: his mother Isla (Jodie Corner) is ill, swinging between coherency and delirium, and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is about to take him to the mainland for his first kill.

Connected to the mainland by a causeway that can only be crossed in low tide, the island community needs to scavenge to survive - and the only way to survive a scavenging mission is to be ready to kill any infected that come along. After a generation, some infected are now bloated crawling things, while others remain the usual screeching running horrors. 

And then there are the Alpha's, giant killing machines that are almost impossible to stop. Suffice to say running into one of them can turn a straightforward hunting trip into a nightmare, and even they're not the worst things on the mainland. When Jamie and Spike see a fire off in the distance, Jamie tells Spike about a doctor he once knew who went mad and became obsessed with the dead. But all Spike hears is "doctor" - the only person left who could possibly save his mother.

Boyle can still generate the usual terrors when he has to. There's plenty of sneaky zombies, unstoppable zombie hordes, people backed into a corner by zombies, and people having their heads torn off and spines ripped out by Alphas, who are extremely scary and clearly big fans of Predator. 

But there's also a fair amount of experimentation going on, starting with much of the events being filmed on iPhones to continue the digital feel that made the first film stand out (and look extremely dated today). Deaths often occur in freeze-frame, there's night vision footage of glowing-eyed zombies, and the journey to the mainland is sound-tracked by a century-old recording of a Rudyard Kipling poem about marching to war.

Spike's story is more about coming-of-age than merely of survival, as he eventually strikes out from his village - probably a good idea, as the whole place feels a little cult-y in an inbred UK way - in search of the fabled doctor (Ralph Fiennes). After a fair amount of slaughter in the first two acts, the third turns into something closer to a meditation on death and its meaning - before a final twist that sets up a sequel due early next year.

The first film ran counter to the established zombie tradition; two decades later, that tradition is as strong as ever, and this film is even less interested in its cliches. There's plenty of scares here; there's also plenty to think about. It's the most exciting film Boyle has made in years; seems it took the living dead to bring him back to life.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: How To Train Your Dragon

Live action remakes of animated hits are just one head of the remake / reboot / reworking hydra that currently dominates pop culture. With the media so splintered, the only way to get people to notice something new is for it to be connected to something they already know about. Sometimes that's a way to slip something new in audience's diet; other times it's the new version of How to Train Your Dragon.

On a Viking island constantly under attack by dragons, Hiccup (Mason Thames) does not fit in. He wants to kill dragons like everyone else, but being a nerd more suited to building gadgets than swinging an axe has made him a misfit who's shunted aside for every battle. 

Being the son of the chief (Gerard Butler) doesn't help either, as his fellow teens see him as the islands nepo baby - which hurts coming from determined up-and-comer Astrid (Nico Parker), who shows zero interest in returning Hiccup's crush.

Then when Hiccup's latest invention secretly brings down the most feared dragon of all - a Night Terror - he's forced to face facts: he's just not a killer. In fact, he soon befriends the crippled dragon, naming it Toothless (it does have teeth, they're just retractable). 

The closer the two get, the more Hiccup realises everything the islanders know about dragons is wrong. But will the insights he's getting from Toothless - which are helping him ace the warrior training the teens are going through under the watchful eye of Gobber (Nick Frost) - lead his people on a new path? Or will things go horribly wrong and make Hiccup even more of an outcast until the teens hey look we all know how this wraps up.

Story-wise this sticks extremely close to the 2010 animated film, which is neither surprising (2010 film director Dean DeBlois returns for his first stab at live action), nor automatically a bad thing. That effort (itself based on a book) was a high point in Dreamwork's animation: making this a do-over is a good way to make a good film, which this is.

What it isn't is a great film, in part thanks to the limitations of live-action (even in a film where numerous scenes have enough of a CGI sheen to feel more than a little unreal). The best performances are the most cartoony - that'd be Butler and Frost - while the teen leads make their characters feel grounded and down to earth when a bigger presence wouldn't go astray - they're standing next to dragons, after all.

The big visual scenes still soar. Hiccup and Toothless flying together is thrilling; the epic final battle has some awe-inspiring moments. And the story's big messages around family and acceptance and the pointlessness of tit-for-tat conflict pack a punch. It feels a little unfair to compare this decent live action film to an excellent animated one made a decade and a half ago - or it would, if they didn't both share the same name.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Ballerina

What's a John Wick movie without John Wick? The original appeal of the franchise was that super-assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) was committing all this carnage over a dead dog; take that away and all that's left is a whole lot of action, which is not exactly something in short supply at the movies. 

Sure, there's all the stuff with the tattoos and gold coins and The High Table. But as anyone who saw the prequel TV series The Continental knows, that alone does not a decent story make. So Ballerina (tagline: From the World of John Wick) is doomed to fail? Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Left on her own after a bunch of opening-scene gunplay with bonus explosions, a young girl named Eve is collected after the carnage by Winston (Ian McShane), who is presumably on holiday from running his hotel or something, it doesn't really matter. He drops Eve off at the New York ballet school-slash-murderer academy run by The Director (Angelica Huston), where she spends the next twelve years learning how to dance and kill people, as you do.

Now all grown up (and played by Ana de Armas), Eve starts work as a kind of proactive bodyguard; she protects people by murdering a lot of people around them. But when she finds one of the many, many people she's killed has the same mark as the people who killed her father back at the start of the movie, it's payback time. Which is something the world of John Wick has had a bunch of experience with.

The good news is, Ballerina is close enough to the source material to feel like a John Wick movie, and just different enough to keep the franchise feeling fresh. Having a smaller, self-contained story definitely helps; this also avoids the feeling with the later Wick movies that what we were watching was a string of 20 minute action scenes glued together with some inessential lore and Reeve's charm.

Oh yeah, Reeves makes an appearance here (it's set between John Wick 3 and 4), in a role that's possibly bigger than you might have expected but doesn't pull focus from Eve's story. It feels like Reeves is doing a favour for a friend by appearing here - which is a coincidence, because that's what Wick is doing too.

Otherwise this is your last chance to see the great Lance Reddick (this was his final outing as Charon before his death), McShane is always fun, Huston gets to be a bitchy teacher (also fun), and Gabriel Byrne hams it up in scene-stealing form as the big bad. As for de Armas, she easily sells Eve's angst in the quieter moments while being convincing in the action scenes, which swing between slick professionalism, flustered desperation, and at her most charming, "I can't believe this shit".

The action scenes, which as you'd expect make up a large percentage of the film (which was directed by Len Wiseman; producer and John Wick director Chad Stahelski oversaw extensive reshoots), continue the Wick tradition of combining movement and stylised gunplay with exciting new ways to kill people. Here that includes a fair amount of grenade work and excessive use of multiple flamethrowers towards the end, which is pretty impressive even for a series such as this.

You wouldn't call this a comedy, but there's just enough humor running throughout to provide texture. Early on, someone gets beat to death with a remote control; each blow changes the channel to bring up another influence on the franchise (who doesn't love the Three Stooges?). And it's always entertaining to see John Wick's reputation preceding him.

Backstory and lore isn't enough to create a decent spin-off, and this knows it. If you've had enough of Wick this probably won't turn you around, but if you're already a fan this'll remind you why. It builds (a little) on what came before, adds just enough to stand alone, and then sits back and has some fun with a constantly escalating climax featuring a whole lot of implausible action. This Ballerina's worth a spin.

- Anthony Morris