Review: The Current War

As possibly the last major new release appearing in Australian cinemas for a while, The Current War is suddenly surprisingly relevant - and not in a "as the lights go out..." fashion either. It's a film about a lot of things - too many, most of the time - but on thing it does make clear is that human progress is as much about science as it is about business. Knowledge makes money, not the other way around.

The year is 1880, and Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) has invented the lightbulb. Well, a lightbulb; as this movies make clear (often to its detriment), the field of electrical discovery in late 19th century America was a crowded one, and no sooner had someone invented something than a half dozen imitators were selling their wares. Fun fact: the reason why light globes have that strange turn-and-lock arrangement for fitting into a socket is because Edison trademarked the screw-in light globe (which then failed to take off).

One of these competitors is successful industrialist (he makes train brakes) George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), who invites Edison to dinner to discuss ways they can work together. Edison snubs him, leaving him standing on a train station platform while his personal train rushes by. But Westinghouse is not a man who rushes into revenge; rather, he decides to champion Alternating Current (the AC to Edison's preferred Direct Current or DC) in the rush to electrify America's cities. DC is cheaper and safer than gas; AC is cheaper still, and can be sent further. But Edison believes it is too dangerous, and as the publicity war heats up he's desperate for any sales angle he can get.

There's a third player in all this: Nicola Tesla (Nicolas Hoult), who has big ideas and a history of being fired from everywhere he works (including an early stretch working for Edison). For much of the film it's unclear exactly where all this is heading (Tesla mostly lurks on the sidelines), and while director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon does a solid job of storytelling within each scene, eventually it becomes clear that not all of those earlier scenes were heading anywhere.

This scattershot storytelling is The Current War's biggest flaw. Visually Gomez-Rejon does an excellent job, giving much of the film the muted glow of the candlelight the cast are looking to supplant, while the script (by Michael Mitnick) constantly keeps an eye out for the human side of these technological advances - the wonder of mass electrical lighting, or being able to hear your voice played back to you for the very first time.

While the cast is strong all round, most notably Tom Holland as Eidson's 2IC, Tuppence Middleton as Edison's wife and Katherine Waterston as Westinghouse's spouse, it's Cumberbatch and Shannon that carry the film. This is a more sympathetic portrayal of Edison than the norm lately: he's a huckster and arrogant with it, but he also deeply cares about his family and has real concerns about AC's safety - even if he's more than happy to use those concerns for publicity purposes.

Likewise, Westinghouse is a largely sympathetic figure (there are numerous side references to his refusal to fire his workers) who is driven as much by an urge to build a better society as he is to turn a profit. It's clear this is more of a race than a war, and when a destination finally comes into sight - who will electrify the upcoming Chicago World's Fair and display their technological prowess to the world - the film finally finds its way.

But for much of its length the storytelling is muddled by subplots (is AC so deadly it can be used to kill a man in an electric chair?) and side characters (the aforementioned Tesla, who only becomes relevant when he comes up with an advance Westinghouse needs). There's enough material here for a half dozen films; sometimes too much light can blind instead of illuminate.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Bloodshot

As comicbook characters go, Bloodshot's name recognition isn't exactly up there with Batman's. It's not even up there with Bat-Mite's, which kind of defeats the purpose of a comicbook adaptation. Still, Bloodshot's publisher Valiant has stumbled in and out of business for over twenty years now, so the regenerating killer with a mysterious past and a lust for vengeance must have some fans out there. Right?

This film has exactly one twist, which the trailer spoils and is handled poorly in the film itself anyway: after special ops soldier Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) is brutally murdered by a terrorist for extremely flimsy reasons, he wakes up with no memory but a bunch of generic nano-technology powered abilities like super-strength and rapid healing.

No sooner has Dr Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) explained the set-up than Garrison remembers who killed him - and that first he watched his wife (Talulah Riley) die (by a cattle bolt gun no less). Enraged, he races off, uses his new nanite abilities to instantly locate the terrorist, and gets into a moderately cool battle with the bad guy's hired goons before finishing the job. So the movie's over? Not quite.

The basic set-up - dead soldier brought back to life with false memories implanted so he'll kill who he's told and think it's all his idea - was stale when Bloodshot the comic ripped it off from Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's (far crazier) comic Hard Boiled, which itself was using a bunch of ideas left over from when Miller was writing the Robocop sequels. Also: Wolverine. And Universal Soldier, come to think of it.

So original this is not; unfortunately, it doesn't do much of anything interesting with the conceit of a killer who can't trust his memories, tossing aside the idea of his constantly reliving the same moments as soon as possible and not bothering to play with the idea that "the real world" could also be based on fiction. We never even find out whether the story of his death is real - though that may just be leaving the door open for a sequel that seems increasingly unlikely to come.

Harting's squad of tech-augmented semi-super-soldiers are sketched in broad but effective strokes, with morally tortured swimmer KT (Elza Gonzalez) the sidekick in waiting while the others at least get interesting techno-abilities (robot limbs, artificial eyes). They also seem more entertainingly plausible than Garrison, who's just a stocky middle-aged man whose chest glows red if you shoot him too much.

Fortunately his job here is largely to stomp around while people shoot at him, and there's the occasional effective moment here and there where his ability to constantly regenerate creates some interesting visuals. The action is what you're here for and it's the strongest part of the film, which is to say it's the only part of the film that uses Vin Diesel well.

The trouble with pretty much every Vin Diesel movie that doesn't have Fast & Furious in the title is that if you're not extremely careful everyone else in the movie can seem more interesting than him. That's definitely the case here, and even though he's actually meant to be a brick-like unstoppable force that the rest of the plot turns on, every single person in every single scene is still more charismatic than he is, including some of the generic goons he uses as human shields.

Still, at least nobody calls him "Bloodshot".

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Way Back

The main reason to see The Way Back - a competently made and engaging if by-the-numbers redemption story about a losing high school basketball team and the former star turned boozehound who coaches them (and himself) to victory - is because famous celebrity drunk Ben Affleck is playing the one-time celebrity turned drunk. How good is he in the role he was born to play? Let's find out!

The trick when watching drunks on the big screen is to check out the eyes. Affleck has the beady-eyed puffy squint down pat, but you can tell he's an actor drawing on past memory rather than an active drunk. For one thing, his eyes just aren't watery enough - fans of watching a drunk pretend he's not really should check out Jon Hamm in (the extremely forgettable) Keeping Up with the Joneses, in which he plays someone who doesn't take a drink throughout the entire film but most definitely looks like he's on the sauce.

While he looks the part with his slump shouldered stance, the decision to keep the actual drunk acting here to a minimum is a smart one because Affleck's physical drunk acting isn't up to much. He stumbles, he staggers, but it's all pretty pro forma: there's nothing here that comes close to the scene in Bad Santa where Billy Bob Thornton is gradually revealed coming up an escalator and every fiber of his being screams "I am so wasted". Affleck looks like a heavy drinker, but he doesn't move like one.

What Affleck does get right - and presumably he's the one getting it right because the script doesn't call for it - is a vague sense of explosive menace. Being around a drunk isn't a whole lot of fun because you're never quite sure what's going to set them off or what they're going to do once they've been set off. Affleck taps into that, but only briefly: there's a moment early on where he slaps a beer car across the room and nobody really bats an eye, but it's pretty much the only moment where his boozing feels really felt.

Obviously he can't really be a dangerous drunk because this is a heartwarming movie about him coaching teenagers; nobody's going to stick around if he starts slapping the kids. There's even a scene towards the end where he's blind drunk and being threatened by an aggressive stranger and he goes out of his (drunken) way to defuse the situation. He's a drunk who's only a danger to himself, and even then only because drinking messes up his sense of direction.

Reportedly the can slapping moment was improvised by Affleck, and the more you think about it the more out of character it is for him - despite being one of the few deeply felt moments here. That's because the script really has nothing to say about drinking beyond the standard "he's drinking to dull the pain". The more backstory we get, the less interesting and more easily explained his drinking becomes, until it ends up as a simple equation where pain = drinking.

Affleck's presence here is the big selling point and he does give a powerful performance, but his presense also distorts the story. The Way Back is a straightforward and relatively heartwarming tale of a man who's lost but finds redemption in coaching a group of plucky youngsters who help him reconnect to the only meaningful thing in his life (sports). Being drunk is just a plot device and the film has nothing at all to say about it; if being addicted to anything else was remotely family friendly, this film would work exactly as well with him hooked on crack or sex or an insane amount of exercise.

Worse, this doesn't even deliver on what it promises. No doubt Affleck's experiences of hitting the bottle shaped his (again, strong) performance, but the script doesn't allow him to express anything particularly new or insightful about alcohol addiction. All that he manages to get across is that when he's on the sauce he's not having a great time. Hopefully he had a plucky bunch of thinly sketched basketball-loving teens to inspire him to get off the booze too.

- Anthony Morris