Review: The Breaker Upperers

New Zealand cinema has been serving up a steady stream of comedy gold over the last few years.  Australia, on the other hand, has been serving up Shane Jacobson. The Kiwi secret? Putting funny people into stories that let them actually be funny - and this bubbly film about a dynamic duo making their living helping people escape (or destroy) their relationships is no exception. 

Mel (Madeleine Sami) and Jen (Jackie van Beek) – the duo also wrote the script and direct – break up relationships any way they can; fake deaths, bad songs, bogus romances, fake forest searches for not-so-missing people, you name it. Their only rule is to not get attached to their clients, which usually isn't a problem: they're either grief-stricken, losers, or creeps. But then charming yet dim 18 year-old rugby player Jordan (James Rolleston) turns up wanting to shake off his, uh, "strong-willed" missus Sepa (Ana Scotney) and it's on for young (him) and old (Mel).

Meanwhile Jen is “enjoying” loveless flings (a hilarious cameo from Jemaine Clement) and doing lines of coke at grim family dinners. As the more positive-minded Mel starts to wonder if trashing relationships is really how they should be spending their lives a rift gradually builds between the best friends - and having a former victim of their services (Celia Pacquola) hanging around thinking they’re real police officers doesn’t help.

This is basically a collection of comedy bits loosely tied together, and at barely 80 rapid-fire minutes it definitely doesn’t outstay its welcome. Those comedy bits are good at worst and brilliant at best - an extended sequence where they end up at a real police station in their fake cop uniforms is a great example of building gags upon gags until the whole thing reaches a perfectly reasonable yet totally absurd conclusion, while even the dance numbers manage to be funny as much as they are toe-tapping

It's the cast that's this film's real strength. The supporting performances are perfect - both Rolleston and Scotney do wonders with characters that initially seem like little more than single joke ideas - while the real chemistry on display here is the bond between Sami and van Beek. Having a palpable connection between the duo sells the sillier stuff as just mates having a good time while also making their character's somewhat sketchy career choice seem like, well, just mates having a good time. And when the characters on screen are enjoying themselves in a comedy, it's infectious.

- Anthony Morris

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Review: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Jukebox musicals – you know, where they string together a bunch of popular songs then wrap a paper-thin story around them – make sense on stage: they’re basically a live concert with talking bits. As a movie though, they need a little extra to get them over the line. The first Mamma Mia had star power in the form of Meryl Streep and a bunch of name brand handsome guys; with Streep out the door and all the good ABBA songs used in the first film, why exactly are we coming to the cinemas for this one?

It’s been ten years since Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) first asked her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) about her three dads (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) and got a whole bunch of ABBA songs as a reply. Now her mother is dead – presumably from cancer of the StreepDidntWantToReturn – and in tribute Sophie is about to open a hotel on the Greek island she called home. Then there’s a storm and nobody can make the launch. Then everybody shows up anyway in what looks like that extremely camp remake of Dunkirk we’ve all been clamouring for.

Look, this is not a movie you’re watching for the story, despite extensive flashbacks explaining exactly how young Donna (Lily James) slept with three separate hot guys within a month (basically, it was the 70s). And for a while it’s hard to know exactly why we should be watching: young Donna’s adventures only occasionally spark up (despite Lily James going flat out selling every moment), while Donna’s mysterious death hangs over the early scenes like an unspoken deadly death cloud of death.

That’s not the only mystery here. Why is the Greek bar Donna first sings in owned by Aquaman? Why is it assumed that having Donna singing about a female teacher makes “When I Kissed the Teacher” less creepy? Why does Sophie think turning a farmhouse into a hotel on a tiny Greek island requires a staff in the dozens? What’s the deal with the white goat? And why does Sophie’s New York husband Sky (Dominic Cooper) break up with her by talking into what is clearly a light switch panel he tore off the wall?

(Actually, the goat is probably a relation of The Witch’s satanic Black Phillip; the only way to explain the mountains of food served up at the hotel launch is that the goat offered Sophie the chance to “live deliciously”.)

But at some point around the halfway mark it all somehow clicks into place: the jokes get funnier, the musical numbers get sillier, and if it never quite hits the deliriously demented heights of the first film it does at least manage to relax into an agreeably bizarre groove.

At one stage someone says ‘Jesus Christ, what kind of island is this”, and this is before Cher shows up in a helicopter to sing "Fernando" to Andy Garcia's robot double (not to be confused with Skarsgard's fat-suit wearing double, which is a thing that actually happens), let alone when Meryl Streep’s ghost turns up to sing one final number before trapping the living cast inside a church she then (I assume) burns to the ground on White Phillip’s orders so everyone can perform the final dance number in Hell.

So yeah, it all works out in the end.

- Anthony Morris

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Review: Skyscraper

You barely have to be aware of a movie like Skyscraper to know what it's about: it's called Skyscraper, it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and the rest just writes itself. So yes, Johnson's character - a one-legged ex-Special Forces-turned-security-consultant family man named Will Sawyer - spends plenty of time dangling from very high up. There are explosions, a massive fire, a group of gun-toting bad guys, various computer tablets that are Very Important, and a lot of duct tape. Seriously, Saywer fixes everything with it; it's basically an infomercial for the stuff.

So it's the little things that count here. For one, the bad guys' evil scheme is astoundingly considerate: their plan is to set fire to The Pearl, a super-high Hong Kong skyscraper built by Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) in the hope that when he flees, he'll take the thing they're really after with him. But while they're clearly happy to machine-gun literally dozens of people to sabotage the security systems, they've also planned to set fire only to the empty part of the building (it seems getting insurance for the upper floors was tricky) and as that's where Sawyer is staying with his family, their plan involves waiting until both he and his family are safely out of the building before lighting the fire. Thoughtful!

Of course, the family end up trapped anyway, so Sawyer has to bust into the burning building to bust them out. Comparisons to Die Hard have been plentiful, but they kind of miss the point; despite featuring various gun toting bad guys with complicated schemes to steal stuff from a tall building - okay, so they don't totally miss the point - this is much more of a disaster movie than it is an action movie, and Sawyer's real opponent is the building itself. Which is a good thing, because the bad guys largely get forgettable deaths (Noah Taylor's suited snob just falls out of frame with a scream).

Exactly why Sawyer only has one leg is a bit of a mystery. Well, it's not a mystery in the film; he gets it blown off in the opening scene by a hostage taking good old boy dad who just happens to be wearing a suicide vest. But aside from one point where Sawyer ends up dangling from his artificial leg, it doesn't really slow him down or impede his progress. Which may be the point: having an artificial leg doesn't mean you can't be an action hero, please support our troops. But it mostly feels like a blunt attempt to suggest that this time around The Rock just might be destructible after all (spoiler: he's not).

But that artificial leg does provide one major plus for this otherwise solidly made and competently entertaining film: it means The Rock has to spend the entire film running through flames, literally holding a crumbling bridge together with his bare hands, offing various heavily armed bad guys with household items (he swore he'd never use a gun again) and dangling hundreds of stories in the air all while wearing a slightly flared pair of baggy, comfortable business slacks. These are seriously the least stylish set of pants ever to be involved in a high-tech "hall of mirrors"-style shootout; hopefully someone made sure they went directly to the nearest museum for safe-keeping.

Anthony Morris

Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp

Confidence will take you a long way in life, and the Marvel movies ooze that stuff. Ant-Man and the Wasp never doubts for a second that its audience is totally here for pretty much anything it feels like serving up, up to and including basing a large chunk of the plot around things that happened to lead character Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) between movies. What's next? Starting the next Iron Man movie with Tony Stark played by a dog while Pepper Potts says "oh yeah, remember when you had your brain transplanted last week, that was so cool"?

So if you're wondering how you missed the moment when Lang was arrested, cut a deal, and was placed under house arrest, don't worry about it: you've got bigger fish to fry. For a film that's probably the lowest-stakes Marvel movie to date* by a very wide margin, this features a lot of plot threads, including but not limited to: Lang waiting out the final days of house arrest, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) wanting to shrink down into the micro-verse to rescue his long-lost wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), Pym’s daughter / fellow shrinking super-hero The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) slowly restarting her low-key relationship with Lang, a sinister arms dealer (Walton Goggins), a vanishing villain named Ghost (Abby Rider Forston) and Lawrence Fishburne because why not? 

Throw in a half dozen supporting characters left over from the previous film and what this lacks in big drama it more than makes up for in big casting. Combine those low stakes with a super-power more suited to (often excellent) visual gags than slam-down fights (though there are a few of those thrown in too), and the whole thing has a vaguely retro-70s caper feel even before the whole "lets get in a tiny spaceship and shrink down to microscopic size via a cheesy-looking tunnel" thing kicks into gear. Also, there are giant ants.

Director Peyton Reed took over the first Ant-Man film when writer-director Edgar Wright was pushed out, and while a handful of Wright's gags from the first film return here (tiny cars are funny; Michael Pena doing a rapid-fire monologue is also funny) Peyton isn't going for big laughs so much as he is a general feel-good vibe. It's a hang-out movie: there's just enough going on to keep the central characters interesting, while everyone else is pretty much there to get a laugh or two.

Marvel have worked hard to turn every movie genre into a branch of superhero-ville, with limited success (Thor only really worked when it gave up on fantasy; they haven't even tried horror despite having The Hulk right there). Superhero comedy is definitely something that can work, but the Mighty Marvel Manner is currently built more around the occasional quip than going full-bore for laughs and this does a decent job of showing why.

Marvel superhero movies work because they're pretty much the best superhero movies around; why settle for second best? But Ant-Man and the Wasp isn't a great superhero movie, and it's not really a great comedy. The banter isn't all it could be, and the lack of any consistent laugh-out-loud moments leaves things feeling a little lightweight. Which is fatal, because while Marvel might not have much competition on the superhero front, there are plenty of other movies and television shows that do lightweight really really well. This might have charm and a strong cast having a fun time, but the worst thing a superhero movie can currently be is inessential; enjoyable this might be, but a must-see it ain't.

Anthony Morris 


*it's set before Avengers: Infinity War