Review: Wrath of Man

It's been a while since Jason Statham headlined a movie that made it to cinemas. His career never quite bottomed out in the mid-10s, but only because he pulled the pin himself after a string of tolerable (but increasingly only just) action movies that ground to a halt with a Mechanic sequel that barely qualified as a feature film. 

It was basically a fluke of timing that saw his silly giant shark chomp-fest The Meg (which had been delayed for ages) become a surprise hit around the time he turned out to be the best thing in The Fate of the Furious. Biff bang pow, he was starring in a spin off with The Rock and his star was back on the upswing. 

His recent run has put the focus more on his comedy chops (thanks in part to his stellar work in 2015's Spy), presenting him as a somewhat gruff and lovable action geezer the whole family can cheer on. But his latest, highly entertaining film is a reminder that his career was largely built on the kind of action where a stoic tough guy kills a surprisingly large number of people and doesn't bat an eye.

Wrath of Man successfully transplants French heist thriller Le Convoyeur to LA, America's spiritual (and going by the crime statistics, actual) home of high stakes bank robbery since at least Heat - though it's more likely that the success of recent Gerard Butler vehicle Den of Thieves inspired this project. It's a slightly odd choice for director Guy "this is my fourth film with Jason Statham and I've already made a fifth" Ritchie, providing him with little opportunity for his usual light-hearted take on crime - though he does manage to squeeze in a bit of banter early on.

The story, which turns out to be slightly more complicated than it first seems, involves H (Statham) signing up for a job at an armoured car company that sends vehicles all over LA picking up vast sums of cash money. Everyone there is both extremely macho and somewhat on edge after a robbery a few months back that saw two crew and a civilian killed; it doesn't take long into H's time on the job for their jumpiness to prove to be justified.

The twist that isn't a twist is that when some stick-up crew tries to rob H's truck, they swiftly end up dead (RIP Post Malone) without H breaking a sweat. Some call him a hero; others are little more wary. It turns out that (surprise) H has an ulterior motive for taking a job at this particular firm, and that his particular set of lethal skills will come in handy for what's to come.

The story is fairly straightforward, but a few time jumps and shifts in focus flesh it out in some interesting ways. This is much more of an ensemble story than you might think (especially with Statham looming large on the poster), and the main focus proves to be as much on the people looking to steal (which include Jeffrey Donovan and an enjoyably sleazy Scott Eastwood) as it is on the people (ok, it's H) looking for revenge.

Aside from a few ominous chapter headings Ritchie strips his usual flash and flair out. What's left is some rock solid storytelling, an approach to the violence that plays up the brutality without wallowing in it (though as is traditional in LA heist films now, there is a lot of full-automatic gunfire), and a thrumming soundtrack that mostly switches between "oppressive" and "threatening". It's a top-tier heist film, packed with menace; crime fans will have little to complain about, and Statham fans even less.

There's a large number of moving parts in this film, especially when there's a heist going on, and Ritchie doesn't miss a beat. He keeps it all crystal clear without slowing things down, showing a confidence in his story that a lot of recent action films have lacked - there's a couple of moments where he skips past an obvious action beat to keep things moving, which shows a respect for the audience that's always appreciated.

It's telling that while the rest of the cast start out as cheery, quirky individuals who eventually find themselves ground down into survival mode, Statham starts out there and doesn't let up. It's the difference between an actor and a movie star - he can play one note throughout the entire film (one scene aside) and make it compelling from start to finish. It's his world: everyone else finds out too late they've only been living in it.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Mortal Kombat

The interesting thing about Mortal Kombat - which is a firmly but entertainingly average fight film best enjoyed in a cinema packed with people who will cheer like maniacs at lines like "finish him!" and "flawless victory!" - is just how violent it isn't. 

This is a film that's rated R in Australia for violence alone, which almost never happens (R ratings are largely reserved for drug use and sexual stuff), and when it does it's usually because they're worried impressionable youth might try to copy the violence. Good luck trying to freeze a man's arms off, kids.

What makes this interesting is that in a lot of the rest of the world Mortal Kombat is going to be available for home viewing as well as cinema screenings and again: see it with as many fans as you can, if only to assuage your sadness over the fact this film does not begin 0.0001 seconds in with someone yelling MORTAL KOMBAAAAAAT (okay, the song does show up eventually, but still). Because while movies the world over remain restrained by various forms of civility, on television for a long time now anything goes.

Well, on pay / cable TV at least: last time I checked The Chase wasn't ending with the loser having their face sliced off. But if you were a fan of the classic series Spartacus: Blood and Sand almost a decade ago you saw exactly that, and while that was a bloody high (or low) point for a series notorious for its gore, it's not like television - which in the US at least, is bound by no external rating system whatsoever once you hand over your cash - has ever backed down from a challenge.

So while Mortal Kombat is possibly slightly extreme gore-wise as far as franchise movies in 2021 go, it's baby's day out as far as the small screen is concerned. And even then it seems more likely that R is the result of a combination of marketing and the censorship board being worried that youngsters might come out of this trying to stab people with garden trowels (who knew the secret origin of Scorpion, a character who literally burns with hatred fresh from the fires of Hell, would be so closely intertwined with gardening?). Just to be completely clear, while this does have a handful of cool finishing moves, it's not like you've stumbled into Robocop and just seen a man doused in toxic waste explode into slurry when a car hits him.

That said, this in no way disgraces the memory of the previous Mortal Kombat film despite the lack of Christopher Lambert. It's surprisingly well paced and structured, with just enough fights early on to keep things interesting even as the story involves a pair of bland chumps (Lewis Tan and Jessica McNamee as Cole Young and Sonya Blade) plus Josh Lawson as Kano - easily the funniest and most entertaining human here - wandering around trying to figure out what their weird dragon marks mean.

(bonus points for having the reveal of "Mortal Kombat" promptly followed by someone saying "they spelt it wrong")

The gaps between the fights narrow as the film goes on until the final twenty minutes or so is one big biffo, which honestly is all the fault of chief bad guy and evil magician Shang Tsung (Chin Han): if he'd simply played by the tournament's rules (it seems Mortal Kombat is a regular punch-up between Earth's champions and Outworld's, and if Outworld wins this time they get to invade) his side would easily have won - but because he was so evil he just couldn't help himself and had to cheat, which allowed the good guys to go around bashing his guys in return.

Speaking of which, while the fights aren't amazingly amazing - hard core fight fans have been well served in recent years so what's offered here has a high bar to kick - they generally do the job as far as decent moves go while the (also decent) special effects are well integrated into the fights (and usually provide the method of finishing someone off, thus making it slightly less likely that little kids will be able to copy what the ratings board doesn't want them seeing).

More than most films of recent times, this is one best enjoyed as a slightly ironic group activity. It takes itself seriously enough to work as cheesy viewing, but never so seriously that things get embarrassing. It's based on a video game that was a series of fights held together by gore and catchphrases: anything extra is a bonus.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Voyagers

Earth is dying, humanity's only hope for survival is a planet 86 years away, and the plan to check it out relies entirely on sending a bunch of teens into space and drugging them up so they don't get horny. What could possibly go wrong? With this level of forward planning, we should probably be grateful the spaceship didn't explode on the launchpad - from the unstoppable energy that is pure lust.

Back here on Earth the trend for YA movies has largely passed (sorry Chaos Walking) but this set-up is classic YA through and through, being science-fiction that barely makes sense intellectually but is a near-perfect set-up emotionally when it comes to exploring just how tough it is to be a teenager... in space.

With the only habitable planet a lifetime away, the plan to reach it is to send off a crew, let them have kids who will then become the crew, and then their kids' kids (also crew) will be the ones to reach the planet. To stop the original kids from freaking out over leaving Earth behind and being confined on a spaceship, they'll be given virtual reality headsets no knowledge of what they're missing, being bred in test tubes from Earth's best and brightest then raised in shipping containers until they're sent into space.

To help them leave on their mission earlier (and because he's got nothing keeping him on Earth), their teacher Richard (Colin Farrell) goes with them to supervise, because obviously having a single solitary authority figure on a ship that'll soon be full of teenagers couldn't possibly cause problems. 

But just in case, they're all constantly dosed with "blue", a drug that keeps them sexless robots, which works just fine until somebody realises they're on board a closed system and blue is toxic to plants. Earth spent a decade putting this mission together and nobody picked up on that?

When best buds Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Foinn Whitehead) finally figure it out (why do they only notice it a decade into their mission?), they're not impressed. "Decrease pleasure?" says Zac, "I want to increase pleasure!". Coming from the chief engineer on a spaceship billions of miles from anywhere, this is A Bad Sign. Before you know it, he's tipping his Blue down the sink, getting high on life, checking out Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) and making everyone else think they probably should have put a few online courses on consent on the ship's mainframe. 

Pretty much everything you can think of that could go wrong promptly does, though some of the mishaps they encounter may be more to do with their hyperactive imaginations than what they're really facing. And speaking of hyperactive imaginations, while the trailers for this promised a whole lot of Freaky Space Orgies (c'mon, what else are the kids going to get up to? They don't even have TV), this limits itself to a bunch of lustful stares, some intense hand holding and one (1) single sex session on a piece of gym equipment. 

(then again, these are kids whose idea of a good time is sniffing sage and running down the corridors: figuring out how to bone on a weight bench is the kind of initiative mission control would be proud of)

This occasionally teeters on the verge of delivering something really nuts (largely in the form of brief bizarro montages as the kids finally access their full emotions), but it's basically Lord of the Flies in Space mixed in with Rise of A Space Trump. If nothing else, the last four years of US politics have given us all a fairly extensive course in how would-be demagogues use enemies both real and imagined to unite their base, and that's one more thing this spaceship has taken on board.

Still, despite being set entirely inside a bunch of bland corridors and visually unimpressive rooms, this manages to be somewhat engaging on a fairly basic level. That's largely thanks to committed performances from a cast that deserve better and a script that never realises its potential lunacy but still manages to set up then pay off a string of moderately interesting developments. 

Teens have sex, hot dudes go shirtless, someone goes out the airlock; mission accomplished.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: The Father

What's surprising about The Father is that unlike every other Alzheimer's-themed movie in recent memory, this one goes for the head rather than the heart. Obviously there's loads of heart-wrenching moments as we see the lead's very sense of himself slipping away, but the main point here isn't to make you feel for an Alzheimer's sufferer, but to feel like an Alzheimer's sufferer.

As that implies, this isn't exactly a fun night out at the movies. The script (adapted by Florian Zeller from his successful play) is designed to constantly keep you on edge, wondering when and if events have taken place, struggling to match faces to characters while being shocked by scenes of abuse that may have been exaggerated if not imagined entirely.

The events of the film take place largely in a single London apartment - or do they? It seems likely that what we're seeing is jumbled highlights over a number of years, with dialogue making it clear that at least one major shift takes place over that period. The (extremely impressive) set design changes things up in ways that echo each other, constantly reminding us of somewhere else while possibly being somewhere entirely new.

Likewise with the casting, as a range of performers (Olivia Coleman, Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots, Mark Gattis, Rufus Sewell) play characters that may or may not overlap, with roles - his daughter, his carer, his son-in-law - constantly changing as the film progresses. At least in his dementia Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) consistently sees his son-in-law as a sleaze, with both Sewell and Gattis being reliably smarmy.

It's a powerhouse showcase for Hopkins, charting his character's disorientation and decline in a fashion that never quite submerges the man he once was, giving us - and his family - just enough to cling onto as he loses his moorings, behaviours left behind with nothing underpinning them. A scene of brutal nastiness hammers home that he was once a man capable of great cruelty, only now more often than not it's only the cruelty that remains.

It's on Hopkins' shoulders to give this film what emotional impact it has. With a lesser actor in the lead it would come off as a dry exercise in recreating the confusion and decline of Alzheimer's, a familiar story that the movies have pretty much plumbed dry yet keep coming back to (Supernova, a more heartfelt look at dealing with the disease, is out in a few weeks). Unsurprisingly Hopkins, who can do subtle but has never been shy of scenery-chewing when need be, makes Anthony a lion in winter, a pushy, demanding man who refuses to face the crumbling ruin he's becoming.

The Father is undoubtedly successful in every way that counts, a deeply affecting film that brings home the horror of Alzheimer's in a way few films dare - and rightly so, because it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to sit through this type of thing twice. It's an experience in helplessness, in losing yourself to confusion and pain until all that's left is despair; maybe find a cinema that lets you take in a drink.

- Anthony Morris