Review: Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears is a kind of film Australia doesn't turn out often.  We're big on sombre takes on important issues; the wacky adventures of over-the-top characters occasionally get a look-in. But this is a straight-up romp: flapper-era private investigator Phryne Fisher (Esse Davis) has globe-trotting adventures in which she all but winks at the camera while getting into scrapes and flirting with handsome men. It's kind of cheesy, but that's part of its charm - but is it as charming as it thinks?

The year is 1929, the place is British-ruled Palestine, and Miss Fisher has taken her crime-solving antics global, jumping across rooftops to rescue imprisoned young agitator Shirin Abbas (Izabella Yena), niece of Sheikh Kahlil Abbas (Kal Naga).

 

Exactly how this ties into a series of murders in London, or a lengthy stay at the country home of Lord Lofthouse (Daniel Lapaine), or the mysterious disappearance of an entire village in the deserts of Arabia, or a giant emerald that might possibly be cursed (according to a professor played by John Walters) isn’t exactly a mystery, but there’s little denying this is a movie (directed by Tony Tisle and written by Deb Cox) with a lot of plot.

To be fair, this is a film that needs it: while the costumes are as fantastic as always and various Melbourne locations do a decent job of standing in for various London locations, visually this is nothing to write home about. Possibly any attempt at a more striking style would have been too much of a break from the original television series; it's still surprising that, at a time when even low budget Australian films often feature striking visuals, this is very much a meat and potatoes effort.

This results in the film's strongest stretch being the middle act, which is basically a traditional murder mystery set in an English country manor. Why the whole film wasn't like this is both obvious and annoying; clearly a big screen version of Miss Fisher needed to be bigger than the television version, and yet the closer this gets to the small screen version the stronger it becomes.

Both the scenes in Palestine - which involve a somewhat lacklustre motorcycle chase and a lot of scrabbling around on the roof of a speeding train that is clearly an old "Red Rattler" carriage from the Newport railway museum - and a final act set in the desert feel like the film biting off more than it can comfortably chew, striving for a kind of Indiana Jones energy and ending up closer to Quigley Down Under.

But this is a film where those kind of judgments are largely beside the point. The appeal here is seeing Miss Fisher looking glamourous while sticking it to pompous toffs, throwing quips around, and making the clearly infatuated Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page) squirm. On that level, this gets pretty much everything right.

Davis is clearly the shining star here, giving Miss Fisher charm and charisma to spare. If this film has a serious problem, it's that it thinks, however briefly, that widescreen locations are what people are coming here to see. Every moment that Miss Fisher isn't front and center on screen is a moment wasted; she's not just the best thing in this film, she's the only thing that makes it a film, and her fans will find plenty here to applaud.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman is not a decent film for a whole range of reasons - which, because they include Sean Penn seemingly cutting off his own dick, I will most definitely be going into later on - but a big part of it is that Mel Gibson is trying to replace how the public sees him with how he sees himself. Last year's Dragged Across Concrete worked in large part because there Gibson was playing an angry racist. Here? He's a living saint.

Based on the true story of how the Oxford English Dictionary came to be, one of the many problems this film has is that while a while lot of things take place, very few of them join up to form a story.  Professor James Murray (Gibson) is a Scottish school teacher who's religious, well-mannered, a loving husband and caring father, and a man passionately devoted to language: who better to take over Oxford university's struggling dictionary project?

Meanwhile, former US Army surgeon turned crazed murderer Dr William Minor (Sean Penn) is acting crazy at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he's been sent after murdering the husband of Eliza Merrett (Natalie Dormer). There he saves the life of a guard impaled on a faulty gate, decides he wants his army pension sent to Merrett to make amens for his crime, and then really gets into helping out Murray (whose big idea to get the dictionary done is to ask the public for help).

Conflicts between director Farhad Safinia (who's had his name taken off the film) and the producers meant this has been sitting on a shelf since 2016, and the end result has some definite rough edges in editing (plus a couple of establishing shots seemingly shot on a handicam from 2004).

But not even a skilled editor could make Penn's massively over the top performance belong alongside everyone else, or change the way that Steve Coogan's character (Murray's biggest supporter) literally just shows up at multiple points to say "I have a cunning plan" and then saves the day via some off-camera scheme. Did I mention Minor ends up teaching Merrett how to read?

It'd be tempting to say the film's biggest mistake comes when Minor - suddenly tormented by his budding romance with the wife of the man he killed - rips a metal strip from a chair and uses it to (tastefully) do something that results in him bleeding profusely from the groin. But does he actually cut off his dick? Whatever he does lop off kills the romance stone dead so it seems safe to guess he's now coming up short in the downstairs department. Did this happen in real life? No. Why did anyone think it was a good idea to put it in the movie? Well, it does star Mel Gibson.

Annoyingly, it's hard to deny that Gibson remains a strong and charismatic actor. He's easily the best thing here as the films moral centre, a man who sticks by his principles, stays true to his friends, consults his wife on all major decisions, clearly loves his children, is well read without being arrogant, is a firm but thoughtful leader and so on and so forth.

But in 2020 the fact that Gibson is an angry man with a dark side he can't hide is so firmly ingrained in the public consciousness - when the public bothers to think of him at all; if being an abusive drunk hadn't killed his career a decade ago his star would probably still be on the wane today - that his warm and kindly performance here feels like the set up for a joke that never comes.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Sonic the Hedgehog

Remember that creepy weird Sonic the Hedgehog design that so freaked out fans this movie was put back three months while the film's effects department went through the entire film and reworked the CGI character to be less... spindly? Out went the smaller eyes and long legs, in came the more compact and cartoony version fans love?

Watching the finished movie, that original design makes sense: this Sonic is, for most of the movie at least, an awkward, hyperactive teen trying to figure out if he has a place in the world. It makes sense that he'd look a bit off; then again, he also looked a bit off, and the new and improved version is a lot closer to the super-fast blue alien hedgehog we all know and possibly have feelings towards.

           (the original model Sonic - note the legs and tiny face)

Opening mid-explosion in the kind of "that's me - Sonic. Bet you're wondering how I got into this predicament" introduction that even the kids this is aimed at have seen too many times, this rushes through Sonic's origin (alien raised by an Owl, has magic teleporting rings, is sent to Earth to hide out, is given the not at all psychological damaging advice of "never stop running") to get to the status quo: he lives in a cave of the outskirts of the small town of Green Hills, where he spies on everyone and talks to himself in an attempt to prevent the isolation from driving him insane. Good luck with that.

James Marsden was having a bit of a career comeback when he signed on for the role of local cop Tom Wachowski, so that's probably over now. But he remains the most likable man in Hollywood and brings a lot of charm to a largely thankless role as firstly a bored cop and then secondly a surrogate parent to Sonic after an emotional outburst from the depressed and frustrated hedgehog results in an energy burst that attracts the attention of the US military's most unhinged drone pilot, Doctor Robotnik (Jim Carrey).

Carrey is doing a greatest hits tour here, dusting off all the old tics and antics that made him a star twenty five years ago. The good news is they still work, putting the film in the awkward position of having its star hedgehog as the weakest performance in the film. But there are a bunch of decent speed-related action sequences, and Sonic's emotional arc - he knows he should flee the planet but his next stop is a lifeless mushroom planet and he can't keep living alone and on the run - is strong enough to hold everything together.

This is much more aimed purely at kids than last year's Detective Pikachu, and it moves fast enough (sorry) to keep them entertained while the grown ups wonder why Marsden doesn't get better roles. The ending leaves the door open for at least one sequel, though there's nothing much here that'll leave you wanting more; guess Sonic'll have to be happy with the games and comics and TV series and collectable figures and hoodies and phone cases and whatever else the Sega official store is selling this week.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Birds of Prey

It's always a surprise when a superhero movie turns out to be good. That's because most superhero movies are more like Birds of Prey: just erratic and uneven enough to leave you feeling vaguely unsatisfied, even if most of the elements for a decent film are present and accounted for. It's not hard to be better than predecessor Suicide Squad (and this is), but DC haven't cracked the formula for a successful ensemble film just yet.

The hook here is that this is girls versus boys, straight down the line; the days when this kind of film would have a wimpy guy on the good girls team, or the bad guy would have a female assassin so the girls had someone to fight are over. This battle of the sexes works better than something like last year's all-female gangster film The Kitchen did, mostly because the superhero genre is literally about empowerment fantasies - even if Margot Robbie's now-single Harley Quinn is largely a quirky, garish bad guy who snorts cocaine mid-fight to level up.

(she does get something of a redemption arc, but it's slight: you don't make money changing a successful superhero)

Quinn is the lead here, with bad guy Black Mask / Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor) in second place camping it up entertainingly when he's not having faces removed or ordering a terrified guest in his club to dance on a table while her date is forced to peel her dress off with a knife. The rest of Quinn's girl gang - Diana / Black Canary (Jurnee Smollet-Bell), Detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) - tend to get one character trait each, some of which work better than others. Montoya's 80's cop movie banter falls flat every time, while Huntress' failure to maintain her stern avenger persona is fun.

A movie that contains five - six if you count the main bad guy - origin stories is bound to have a lot going on in the script department. Sensibly, the actual plot is extremely straightforward: everyone wants a diamond that has a bunch of bank account details laser-coded into it, and when a character swallows it then we have a reason for this search across a somewhat gritty Gotham (it's like a sunnier version of the city seen in Joker) to run movie length as the good guys wait for it to be pooped out while keeping the swallower away from the bad guys willing to just cut it out.

(is there an article to be written about movies that use someone swallowing the mcguffin as an excuse to drag things out? It feels like there is)

What is a surprise is that so much of the story is a mess. Initially Quinn is telling it and her unbalanced state of mind after being dumped by the (unseen) Joker kind of justifies the going back and forth, but there's a reason why opening a movie mid-action then freeze-framing while a narrator says "let me explain how I got here" is a comedy cliche, and this does that more than once.

All this ducking and weaving eventually settles down, but this definitely feels like a film that's had a going-over in the edit. The multiple origin stories are either told piecemeal or repeatedly, characters are introduced more than once, other characters are built up then vanish (what happened to the DA?), and the "birds of prey" don't even get together until the final act. While none of this is exactly fatal, if this is trying to sweep an audience along on sheer energy alone then it's not exactly Goodfellas.

The good news is that this does get right the only things we really care about in superhero movies: the characters are mostly memorable and the fights are largely entertaining. Not all the cast get a real chance to shine - this probably could have lost at least one Birds of Prey team member, especially as their girl gang chemistry isn't great - and the fights occasionally feel a little samey, but by the final act it's all settled into a groove that's solidly, if not all that spectacularly, entertaining.

- Anthony Morris