Review: Biosphere

Post-apocalypse buddy comedies aren't quite as rare as you might think - having nobody else left is a great way to force two miss-matched types together - but they're not so common that Biosphere ever feels run-of-the-mill. Co-written by and co-starring Mark Duplass, who's best known for a string of mumblecore films with his brother Jay but has an extensive acting career as well, it's a film that starts out as one thing and turns into another. Which, as it turns out, is strangely appropriate.

Billy (Duplass) is the former President of the United States. Ray (Sterling K Brown) is his childhood friend, a scientist who was also his former advisor. They are the only two people left alive after an undefined catastrophe that it seems likely Billy had something to do with. The dome they live in is the only thing keeping them alive, though that's not quite correct: the fish they live off are also keeping them alive, and the last surviving female has just died. Uh oh.

What follows touches on a lot of issues and topics without ever really digging down onto any of them, which is possibly the point. At its heart it's a story about a connection between two people going through a lot of changes, and like any kind of real connection its going to take in a lot of external factors. While it seems like the set-up is ripe with possibilities to explore politics, race, sexuality and so on, for the most part they're only glanced at. It's a film about two people building a new world, not what destroyed the old one.

In this loose-limbed and sometimes ramshackle comedy, what matters most is the chemistry between the leads - it is a buddy movie after all, and Duplass and Brown are convincing buddies. Ray is seemingly the more progressive of the pair values-wise, but he has his limits; Billy is more of a "let's go with it" guy, which may not have been the best possible trait in a President. Together, they're well matched and have an easy charm: it's not hard to believe their lives now aren't all that different from back when the world wasn't a barren lifeless wasteland.

That said, as written the characters are more types than plausible people (there's a lot of talk that feels more like internet confessional speak than things people would actually say, but that's where the comedy lies). It's a common stumbling block in two-handers: if people don't overtalk, what is there to say? Thankfully the performances keep things grounded. Or as grounded as an end-of-the-world story gets. 

Sharply directed by co-writer Mel Eslyn, Biosphere turns out to be surprisingly optimistic: this is not a story where a potential food shortage leads directly to cannibalism. It takes a little while to get past the nagging feeling that the pair are exactly the kind of guys who created the situation that wiped out everyone else, but eventually the film earns its optimism and the duo earn their future. It's all about moving forward. As the saying goes, life finds a way. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Equalizer 3

There aren't a lot of surprises left in the vigilante genre. What made the first Equalizer movie stand out was a third act swerve into slasher-style horror that made it pretty clear that Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) was basically the good guy murder version of someone like Friday the 13th's Jason. He was an unstoppable killing machine happy to use the tools at hand - and the first film's final showdown took place in the hardware store where he worked, so you know there were plenty of tools handy - to get the job done.

This third installment (the less said about the disappointing second film the better) opens with McCall having already murdered an entire Sicilian Mafia stronghold, casually waiting (at gunpoint) for the boss to arrive so he can also murder him - and finish off a few other henchmen foolish enough to still be sticking around. But when a shock twist sees McCall catching a bullet in the back on the way out, it looks like he might be on his way out for good. Roll credits? Not yet.

Rescued by the only cop on the planet who takes a gunshot victim passed out in his car to a kindly old local doctor, McCall slowly heals up and makes a few calls to the CIA (played here by Dakota Fanning) to tip them off about the dead Mafia guy's shady stockpile of drugs and cash. Unfortunately, the living Mafia has its eye on the small Italian town McCall has come to love, seeing prime real estate being sat on by a bunch of fish sellers and cafe owners they plan to move on by any (nasty) means necessary. Guess it's time once again for McCall to take out the trash.

Being the human embodiment of Death itself, there's not a lot of suspense (but definitely a lot of satisfaction) when McCall goes up against the bad guys. Director Antoine Fuqua turns this to the film's advantage, in part by staging the big action scenes as stalk-and-slash horror sequences (complete with over-the-top gore), where the end result is never in doubt. Seeing the bad guys get what's coming is the whole point of the exercise, and McCall does not disappoint.

McCall is also a vigilante who likes to be proactive. Despite the utterly predictable story, the film keeps the suspense up by messing with the usual rhythms of an action thriller; the bad guys suffer a defeat, they sulk back to regroup, we're expecting a breather but McCall is already waiting there to get back to work. It's not a trick audiences will fall for forever, but in a 100 minute thriller it's pretty effective.

Everything else is solid without distracting from why we're here. The cute town that needs protection is a maze of steep stairs and cliffside dwellings so it's interesting enough to look at, the locals are all cliches but they only get a scene or two so they're never boring, and the Mafia guys are scum through and through - we first meet chief dirtbag Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio) throwing a wheelchair-bound old man out a window - so their gruesome and occasionally prolonged deaths are well deserved.

As for Washington, he's having fun playing a man who doesn't seem particularly tortured by a lifetime of perfecting the art of mass murder. There's hints of nuance here and there (he's too good an actor not to mess around a little), but this feels like one of the installments in a long-running series where the lead's backstory remains in the background. He's a professional: both he and The Equalizer 3 get the job done in admirably efficient fashion.

- Anthony Morris

Review; Gran Turismo

Despite all the early focus on gamers, Gran Turismo turns out to be a fairly traditional sports movie, where "extremely good at playing Gran Turismo" serves roughly the same function as "naturally talented but from the wrong side of the tracks". Fortunately, as sports movies go this is a good one: sometimes sticking to the basics pays off.

Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) is a UK teen who's extremely good at the Playstation racing simulator Gran Turismo and not all that good at getting through to his father (Djimon Hounsou) that his pastime is just as much a real sport as soccer (which his father played at a professional level, with his older brother firmly on the same path). Sadly, professional racing is a rich man's game, and there's no career path from racing simulated cars to driving the real thing. Or is there?

Meanwhile in Japan, marketing guy Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) is pitching an crazy idea to his bosses at Nissan. Today's drivers don't care about cars, but Grand Turismo players do: what if they created a contest where the winner got to drive race cars for real, thus inspiring a generation of gamers to take their skills onto non-virtual roadways? Management says yes - so long as nobody dies.

To manage this, Moore turns to grumpy burnt out mechanic Jack Salter (David Harbour, who gives a performance way above and beyond what this kind of film requires), mostly because nobody else wants to be responsible for a bunch of gamers losing control of race cars at lethal speeds. His approach is to basically neg the drivers constantly, and rightly so. Oh wait, here comes Jann: could he possibly he the one to melt Salter's heart and make good on the track?

There aren't a lot of surprises here (being based on a true story obviously limits the possible twists), but the stakes are just low enough that the challenges have real dramatic tension. Jann obviously isn't going to win a big race first time out, but is he good enough to come fourth once in six races and earn his formal qualifications? Is his faltering media presence going to be so big a stumbling block (this is a marketing campaign after all) that Moore might cut him loose even if he's the best racer? Is he ruthless enough to survive in a world where fatal accidents are part of life?

Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie) pulls out a bunch of camera tricks and a lot of game-style graphics to give the races that something extra. But fast cars going extremely fast is the real appeal here and he films the races with a punchy mix of hyperbole (camera zooming into engines, drone camera zooming across the track) and gritty realism that makes them thrilling viewing. 

The off-track plot strands are less flashy but equally effective, stripping a collection of traditional subplots (the disapproving father, the cocky rival, the new girlfriend, the evil adversary, the disapproving mentor who has to be won over) down to their bare essentials and throwing them all into the mix. 

Add in a range of winning performances - Bloom's marketing man is just sleazy enough to be convincing without being a bad guy, Harbour is deserving of his own spin-off where each movie he trains up a new batch of out-of-their-depth kids, and an always likable Madekwe is convincing as a slightly awkward teen whose only real drawback is his lack of confidence in himself - and you've got a rock-solid sports film that's a lot better than it should be. 

Especially as it's basically a commercial for both the Playstation version of Gran Turismo and Nissan. If this leads Hollywood to decide the more brands your film features the better the film is, when we get a slasher movie that cross-promotes McDonalds, Black & Decker, Adidas, Patagonia and Kings Funerals we'll know who to blame.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Sisu

Is Sisu the best movie of 2023? If what you want from a film is a series of increasingly nasty and brutal execution-style killings of various thoroughly unpleasant Nazis, then let's go with "probably". An extremely satisfying slice of pulp violence, it knows exactly what it's doing and delivers in every scene. As far as films go where the hero uses a mining pick to hook himself onto a plane as it's taking off so he can kill everyone on board, this is at the head of the pack.

It's the dying days of World War II and Finland - which for a while there was fighting alongside the Nazis - has switched sides. Not that it matters to Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), who has retired from war and is now just a gold prospector hoping to strike it lucky. 

Which he does and then some; now he has to get the gold into town and into a bank, and the only thing standing between him and his goal is the retreating German army. They're operating under a scorched earth policy; some of their cannier soldiers - most notably Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) and his sidekick Wolf (Jack Doolan) - have one eye on how they're going to get out of Europe entirely.

When Helldorf an his men encounter Korpi they let him pass: he's an old man with a horse and a dog and not much else, plus there are more soldiers coming along to take care of him. Unfortunately for those other soldiers, Korpi is a killing machine who wipes them out when they discover his gold. Helldorf turns his tank back to investigate, and an extremely bloody chapter of the war is about to begin. 

As much (or more) a spaghetti western as it is a war movie (think Tarantino without the dialogue), this carefully ratchets up the carnage scene by bloody scene. By the time things start to get a little (well, a lot) implausible it all fits seamlessly into the insanely violent world that's been established. 

Killing someone by throwing a land mine at their helmet is only the beginning, and while the violence is the main draw here there's just enough plot and characterisation going on to tell a highly entertaining story where a lot of scumbags get what they deserve.

Korpi survives an implausible amount of damage, but that's what the film is about. "Sisu" is a uniquely Finnish characteristic that means something like "too stubborn to die". And so he proves to be. 

At 90 minutes it gets the job done and then some with a minimum of messing about; the one subplot about the women the Nazis have kidnapped just opens the door for some bonus vengeance.  If Finland wants to be the home of thrilling pulp action, they're off to a rip-roaring start.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is all about power, though only occasionally the kind that scours the Earth black with atomic fire. A relentless, thudding portrait of the man who led the multi-billion dollar (and that's 1940s dollars) project to build the atomic bomb, on one level - and this is a film with no shortage of levels - it's about someone who decides that if the system won't give him the power he desires, he'll go outside it. Which is a problem if you have a head full of atomic secrets and your government never trusted you in the first place.

Skipping across multiple timelines - this is a Christopher Nolan film, after all - much of the meat of the story comes framed by a grey-haired Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) testifying in a shabby little room to a group of men who, it rapidly becomes clear, do not have his best interests at heart. Youthful, frizzy haired Oppenheimer's past studying "the new physics" across Europe is skimmed across; when he settles down in Berkley to teach, the clouds of war are already boiling and his dalliances with Communism are raising eyebrows.

Meanwhile in a black & white 1959, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) is going before a senate committee hearing to confirm him as a member of Eisenhower's cabinet. Post war, he gave Oppenheimer a job at Princeton; now, it gradually becomes clear, the father of the Atomic Bomb has fallen from public favour. Will their past connection cost Strauss a cushy government job? And what exactly was the nature of their connection anyway?

Nolan is good at a lot of things, and juggling plot points to create suspense has been a strong point of his all the way back to Memento. The final hour of this three hour film pulls together a range of well-woven strands to build a solid drama around the fall of an American Prometheus (though Icarus seems almost as appropriate). For a film touted for its stunning visuals and IMAX cinematography, it's surprising how much of this is just men in suits in small rooms; there are other ways for a film to be big, and when it counts this delivers big time.

For one, there's a cast stacked with stars (a repeated pattern is a recognisable name getting one big scene, then a muted callback set years later); for another there's plenty of sweeping desert scenery at Los Alamos - at times it feels like Oppenheimer's trademark hat should have been a cowboy one. Despite many of the scientists being refugees from Europe (and wanting to beat Hitler to the Bomb is shown as their primal motivation), Nolan makes sure to frame this as an American saga, stars and stripes flying high.

The core of this story is the Manhattan Project, though the mechanics and technical challenges are largely kept off-screen. Background reading isn't essential but wouldn't hurt, if only to keep track of the hurricane of scientists swirling around Oppenheimer's eye. We get the drift: the Bomb was a big deal, and on the rare occasions when this film wants to hammer home the point about the awful forces being unleashed - they do have to test the Bomb, even if there's more than zero chance it will ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world - rest assumed the hammer hits hard.

More important here is Oppenheimer himself; it's his name on the poster after all. This is a big budget epic with a recognisable human being at its center, which is to say Oppenheimer is often a smug jerk who turns his back on one wife (Florence Pugh), cheats on another (Emily Blunt), informs on his commie friends to a government he knows contains people who will torture or kill them, is wracked with guilt maybe a little too late, and is shocked to learn that the US military isn't his best friend once he's given them the city-destroying Bomb they wanted.

The film focuses tight on Oppenheimer, and intentionally so. The Atomic Bomb may have changed the world, but this isn't a film about that world; if he didn't see it, or imagine it, then - Strauss's confirmation aside - neither will we. He's a man who could and did inspire others, a leader of personal charm and charisma (how else could he have kept a rabble of top scientists working in the desert for years on a super weapon?), but here much of that is told, not shown. 

When Oppenheimer does speak to a crowd or group, Nolan will often use that moment to show us his thoughts (sex scenes, charred corpses) rather than the effect of his words. Whatever he had in him to inspire such loyalty - beyond the natural attraction of Murphy's always compelling performance - remains a mystery.

What we do see clearly is that the world around him is one of overlapping modes of power, whether the systems of the state, the unity of organised labour, or personal commitment to an individual. Each are in violent dispute with the other, and giving your loyalty to one earns you the lifelong enmity of the rest. It is a world of eternal, brutal conflict; no wonder Oppenheimer came to regret giving it the Bomb.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

Nobody ever watches a Mission:Impossible movie for the story. The series has been legendarily incoherent from the very first installment: a big part of the fun is the surprise reveals - there's always at least one mask-removing twist - as the Impossible Mission Force battles some world-ending threat that involves a mix of computer hacking and old-fashioned physical risk.

Much like the Fast & Furious franchise (which this resembles more than it would like to admit), it had a bumpy run after the first film, taking a few more movies to fully find its feet. The result now is a franchise stripped of everything but the basics. All but gone are the shock betrayals and complicated high-tech heists, replaced by what seems to be the sole remaining selling point: Tom Cruise risking his life doing incredible stunts he probably doesn't need to do.

As is traditional, the plot revolves around various factions trying to obtain an object that will give the owner global dominance - you know, like the plot of the current Indiana Jones movie, only the hi-tech is ultra-modern rather than steeped in antiquity - but this time the object (a key) comes in two parts so double the chase sequences.

All the usual suspects are back: hacker Luther (Ving Rhames), slightly more energetic hacker Benji (Simon Pegg), with pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) possibly being of use to the IMF while ex-MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) continues to be out there going rogue. Even IMF boss Eugene Kitterage (Henry Czerny) returns for the first time since the first film to be somewhat competent yet never quite ahead of our hero Ethan Hunt (Cruise).

For a film where the action sequences are so carefully worked out, the story is a bit of a mess, and not just in the usual "let's keep the audience guessing" fashion. It's your standard globe-trotting between action set pieces (at one point they stop in at a nightclub seemingly awaiting a visit from John Wick) while various evil forces - and some good guys led by Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham, in his usual flustered but competent mode) - join the fray.

This is yet another blockbuster that's either tapped into the zeitgeist or is stitched together out of bits of other recent blockbusters, only more so. Often we know major plot points before any of the characters do, while one major development is that an important gadget breaks for no reason; the standard scene where everyone explains everything to each other takes place while Hunt is off riding a motorcycle elsewhere. Hopefully someone fills him in before part two.

The big bad here is a self-aware computer program known as "the Entity" that is designed to falsify data but is also so good at reading patterns it can predict the future. Every government in the world wants to use it, while letting it roam free will result in an internet where nothing can be trusted (clearly this movie is set in 2016 and the good guys lose).

There's a clear split set up here between the virtual bad guys - Gabriel (Esai Morales), a sinister figure from Ethan's past who's never been mentioned before is the Entity's embodied henchman, with hitwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff) by his side - and the physical IMF force. One works online and has everything under control, the other is clearly winging it and specialises in physical deception and running around a lot. The film doesn't really do anything with this split, but it does add a nice contrast.

Much more importantly, the action scenes - which are the whole point of this relentlessly energetic film - are very good. Setting-wise they're not always that inventive (there's a car chase through the streets of Rome a la the last Fast & Furious film) but they're extremely well crafted whether they're going for blunt force or fluid motion, and they often have enough of a sense of humour to them to work as more than just a pile of increasingly unlikely developments. 

All the really big stunts are in the trailers, but that doesn't lessen their impact here. The final sequence on board the Orient Express (which seems to still be a steam train in the M:I universe) is worth the price of admission alone, an ever-escalating series of nail-biting events where Cruise riding a motorbike off a cliff and parachuting away is only the mid-point.

Also, despite the whole "part one" thing, this actually has a solid, satisfying ending. Ironically enough, this only makes the prospect of the next installment more appealing. Who knew that making a good film was the way to get people interested in your next one?

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Indiana Jones was never supposed to grow old. Created as a homage to the Republic serial heroes of the 1940s, he's the kind of stock pulp hero designed to have adventures, not character. He was out of date the moment he hit the screens, and much like the other remaining pulp heroes - James Bond, and that's about it as far as the box office goes, though it's possible to argue the success of superhero movies is in part because superheroes are largely stock pulp characters - every time they come back they seem a little less suited to the times.

As the self-proclaimed last ever Indiana Jones movie until a combination of deep fake technology and licensing agreements brings Harrison Ford circa 1984 back from the grave permanently, Dial of Destiny has to deal with endings and time passing and all the things pulp heroes are explicitly designed not to have to worry about (does anyone want to watch a movie where Doc Savage gets old?). It can only do so good a job: there's only so much baggage you can add before things start to break down.

The other big issue is that it's a homage to something hardly anyone remembers any more. Even the previous Indy film, 2008's Crystal Skull, felt like it was an imitation of previous films for much of the time. And before that there were only three films, and only two of them were better than pretty good. James Bond has been going for 60 years, but there were over a dozen books to work with even before the movies; what makes a great Indiana Jones movie is pretty much limited to "what they did in Raiders of the Lost Ark".

So going in the bar has been set at "good enough". Worst case, it's a reminder that Indy's days have passed; best case, it's a fond farewell to yet another one of Harrison Ford's iconic characters. Either way, it's had enough money and talent thrown at it - and there's enough examples of what's worked in the past to work from - to ensure that the financial viability of the character for theme parks and other spin-offs is somewhat restored.

On the plus side, Harrison Ford is a charming and charismatic actor (obviously), and while his recent returns to iconic characters have been relatively brief (he was firmly in a supporting role in both Blade Runner 2049 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens) here he's the star from start to finish. He starts out digitally de-aged in a WWII-set flashback, but even that is mostly handled well so long as you don't spend the entire sequence thinking about how, now that they have trained the various programs on the real-life Ford, just how much easier it'll be to replicate him in the future.

The film itself is, if you can ignore everything around it, good enough. Set mostly in 1969 and mostly involving various factions (including Indy's god-daughter, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a very Phoebe Waller-Bridge fashion) fighting to recover an artifact that could change the course of history, it's a mostly fun romp where most of the parts work. 

It's not as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that was never going to be an option. Maybe one day someone will make a big exciting thrill ride movie that's based on their love for the Indiana Jones movies while delivering something new. Until then, this is the world we live in, no matter what ancient magic gizmos we uncover.

- Anthony Morris