Review: Superman

Superman has always stood a little apart from the flood of big-screen costumed superheroes - or metahumans, as this film likes to call them. Batman is just a guy in a costume, who can trace his ancestry back to earlier pulp characters like Zorro or The Shadow; Spider-Man and most of the Marvel heroes that followed were built as much around a flaw as a power. Superman got there first, and that gave him more gravity, even if you did believe a man could fly.

But now, as they say, all that's changed. The Superman (David Corenswet) we meet mid-battle in Superman is one more costumed hero in a world full of them - and unlike the Snyderverse's Justice League, the other superheroes here are comic book deep cuts, not household names. Superman still soars, but the gloss has come off a little: he's a regular guy, trying to do the best he can in a world where he doesn't stand out quite as much as you might expect.

The story here bounces around a fair bit while the main thrust remains constant: Lex Luthor (Nicolas Hoult) really does not like Superman. Stopping a recent small-scale war without getting government approval has Superman on shaky ground PR wise, while Luthor and his super-powered henchman The Engineer (Maria Gabriela de Faria) and Ultraman (some guy in a mask) are off looting Superman's Fortress of Solitude and trashing his robot helpers in the process. Which is mostly just finishing the job Krypto started, because that dog (who comes in handy more than once) does not have good manners.

A Superman movie comes with a lot of expectations, and this does a decent job of ticking the familiar boxes. Despite being set three years after Superman announced himself to the world, his origin - as seen in the last two Superman movies - still manages to get a fair amount of air time thanks to a twist in the message his Kryptonian parents sent along with him to Earth, along with a late-stage recovery session at the Kent's family farm. 

Likewise, the romance between Clark and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), now in its third month and with some bumps still to be ironed out, gets a few scenes without ever really feeling like the heart of the film despite Brosnahan's strong performance. And yes, all the Daily Planet crew do make an appearance, though it's ladies man Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) who gets a surprisingly large role in proceedings.

It's all stuff we want to see and writer / director James Gunn does a good job of fitting it all in (even though it doesn't always feel central to the plot) by making this a film that's as much about showcasing Superman as it is about telling a story. The gamble here is that Superman himself is interesting enough to carry a film whatever he's up to, and for the most part it comes off.

This focus on character over plot does give Superman a slightly sprawling feel, as pretty much everyone gets their moment in the (yellow) sun - including the members of the "Justice Gang" (operating out of the cartoon Super-Friends Hall of Justice, though they haven't fully moved in yet). Blunt force Green Lantern Guy Gardener (Nathan Fillion), the equally bludgeoning Hawkgirl (Isabella Merced), and scene-stealing brains of the outfit Mr Terrific (Edi Gathegi) pull focus in the back half as Superman is brought low - so he can come back in the final act, of course.

Superman is usually a solo act when it comes to super-action - we haven't even mentioned Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), who can change his body into any element and that should probably set alarm bells ringing - so having him share screen time with a bunch of second stringers does dilute his impact a little. Again, Gunn steers into that, giving us a Superman who's a bit dorky and a little square (his taste in music is not great), the kind of hero who sees asking for help when it's needed as a strength rather than a flaw.

(also, it seems his Clark Kent disguise now involves "hypno glasses" to throw everyone off) 

Balancing that, Luthor gets plenty of screentime to evil up the place, freely admitting to being envious of Superman for distracting humanity from his (human) greatness while swinging between moments of extreme supervilliany and all-too-grounded brutality. Plus his evil scheme is, on one minor level, something of a callback to the first Superman film: seems Lex just can't resist a real estate deal.

This doesn't take itself anywhere near as seriously as the recent Snyderverse films, which isn't surprising: there are films about death camps that don't take themselves as seriously as Man of Steel. It's a charming, highly entertaining film that isn't afraid to keep things light (and light-hearted); the mood here is pure comic book, throwing out concepts and characters at a rapid pace with a breezy vibe underlying it all. 

Well, a breezy vibe and an anti-proton river from a pocket universe that flows to a black hole that might destroy the Earth, but that's all in a day's work for your friendly neighbourhood Superman.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Jurassic World Rebirth

What if, after the massive success of Jaws, the only shark movies ever made were sequels to Jaws? Every single movie about a shark was about a shark threatening a small coastal town, no exceptions? Good thing that never happened - sharks are such great movie monsters, it'd be a real shame if they were endlessly corralled into the same handful of scenarios over and over and over again.

On an unrelated topic, Jurassic World: Rebirth is the seventh in the Jurassic Park / World series, and after the last film brought pretty much everyone back for a farewell that was... better than some of the other films in the series... this one strikes out for all new territory. Only joking, it's basically the same movie as at least two of the other ones.

After being a world-spanning threat in previous films, revived dinosaurs have suddenly realised that they're not built for Earth's modern climate and have died off everywhere but a narrow band around the equator - one uninhabited island that was formerly used as a research lab in particular. Just because everyone who goes there dies doesn't mean it's not worth a visit, especially when "worth" is measured in billions because once again dinosaurs hold the key to a world-changing medical breakthrough.

So shady rich dude Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) has hired one mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and one dinosaur expert (Jonathan Bailey) to in turn hire some disposable sidekicks to help them take blood samples from three different kinds of very big dinosaurs - a flying one, a swimming one, and one just walking around.

Meanwhile, cool dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is taking his family on a yacht trip across the Atlantic, just in time for them to get crashed into by an ocean-going dinosaur. Older daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), her stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono), and younger daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda) cling onto the wreck with a new-found dislike of dinosaurs, only to be rescued by the one boat where the crew think going to Dino Death Island is a good idea.

As you might have predicted if you've ever seen any of the previous movies in the series, things do not go to plan and not everyone survives to be wrecked on the island. Those that do are split into two groups - the family, and the professionals - who alternate mildly scary encounters with the wildlife while trying to make it to the abandoned research base where they can either be rescued or eaten by a demonic genetic freak dinosaur we first saw in the opening scene.

To be fair, just because the overall story is a blatant retread of what has gone before doesn't automatically make this a bad film. Director Gareth Edwards (Monsters, Godzilla, The Creator) serves up a number of thrilling sequences and even a few moments of genuine awe, while the script (from David Koepp, back after scripting Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: The Lost World) does at least drop Isabella into numerous psychologically scarring situations - so much so that her only path back to sanity turns out to be adopting a cute (and confirmed plant-eating) dinosaur.

Friend, playing the superficially charming but eventually amoral business executive that's been a staple of these kind of films since Aliens, does a good job of portraying his character's arc from "maybe he's not so bad" to "hurry up and fall into a dinosaur's gaping maw", while Johansson and Bailey's charisma helps distract from the fact they're basically playing action figures in a child's backyard game. Everyone else is fair game for the dinos, though fewer people end up eaten than you might have expected. 

Being aimed at a slightly younger audience than your average blockbuster usually puts the Jurassic films at a disadvantage, but by sticking to the basics and over-delivering on them this one manages to be both serviceably entertaining and largely forgettable. And if your child is the kind of dinosaur expert who'll complain that the movie versions aren't realistic (where are the feathers?), don't worry - we're told early on that the dinos on and around the island are "genetically modified", so all bets are off.

If nothing else, this does feature an amazing Final Destination-style opening sequence where a dropped Snickers wrapper single-handedly destroys a billion-dollar lab and leads directly to at least one person being eaten alive. Just like life, death finds a way.

-Anthony Morris 

Review: M3GAN 2.0

The first M3GAN got by on attitude.  Killer dolls, killer AIs - it was the killer attitude that separated it from the pack. M3GAN 2.0 continues to exploit the rich, deep seam of previous movies about killbots run amok, and if it lacks some of the original's edge... well, can't a girl grow a little?

It's been two years since the first M3GAN killed a bunch of people and danced around a lot, and the world of AI has kept on moving. M3GAN's creator Gemma (Allison Williams) is now an anti-AI activist appearing alongside Christian (Aristotle Athari) to call for more government safeguards, while also working with first film survivors Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) and Tess (Jen Van Epps) to create robotic exoskeletons because they have to make a living somehow.

Or do they? Gemma's house is massive and the rent is super-cheap, which you'd think would be raising alarm bells but she's too distracted by her niece Cady (Violent McGraw), who is getting pretty good with the martial arts and doesn't quite get why AI is so bad.

Someone else who doesn't get it is local tech billionaire Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement), who wants Gemma's tech for his own possibly nefarious, possibly just sleazy schemes. Oh, and the US military has their own killbot called AMELIA, which has just gone rogue and killed her creators for reasons as yet unclear.  Gee, it'd be real handy if Gemma and Cady had their own lethal robot that could protect them right about now...

Leaving the evil doll-slash-bad babysitter tropes behind, this embraces the wider yet equally well-worn field of the robot run amok, with a hefty side of sinister AI mixed in. Everything from The Terminator to Eve of Destruction to Upgrade gets sampled here - which is hardly a bad thing, as who doesn't love a killer robot? 

The various bodies M3GAN (voiced again by Jenna Davis) gets decanted into provides plenty of scope for comedy as well as action; there's an impromptu musical number at one point that's one of the funniest needle-drops this year. And yes, old-school M3GAN (Amie Donald) gets to do the robot, in a scene which is both fan service and has a decent punchline in its own right.

This is much more of an action film than the first, with the horror largely confined to a lot of nasty deaths. The comedy is bumped up a notch from the first film as well, and it's often broader too - though not so much that this slides into parody.  

None of these elements are world-beating, and the actions tropes are especially well-worn (though a Steven Seagal shout-out is much appreciated), but it's the way this skips from one genre to the next any time things start to feel stale that gets it over the line.

With M3GAN being the only character with any real spark (though the human cast do get some decent lines) this film's anti-AI stance ends up being more like #notallkillbots. This isn't as sharp as the original, but at least the comedy is a bit more pointed - and as this repeatedly makes clear, in a world full of humans rushing to embrace AI, the joke is definitely on us.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: F1

Formula One racing is, amongst other things, an endurance test. Which is why most movies about it - including F1 - tend to take the long view; each race is a stage in a campaign, each individual moment is merely part of a greater whole. It's a tricky story structure for modern Hollywood, which tends to like things simple and focused. F1 doesn't always make the turn.

After flaming out early as a F1 racer, Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) has become something of a racetrack ronin, taking any gig so long as its behind the wheel and excelling at it while stumbling at pretty much everything off the track. Ruben (Javier Bardem) is a former compatriot turned chief of a race team that can't get off the starting block, and he's got an offer Sonny can't refuse - though he tries for a minute or two.

The driver Ruben already has is not impressed by his new partner. Joshau Pearce (Damson Idris) is a young hotshot with a manager constantly whispering in his ear, giving him advice - don't trust Sonny, focus on social media - that even Pearce knows is wrong, but there wouldn't be a movie without it. 

Will Sonny mentor the rising star? Will Pearce take his rightful place on the podium to signal the generational torch has been passed? Does anyone remember how writer-director Joseph Kosinski's previous film Tom Gun: Maverick ended?

There are a lot of moving parts here and most of them work. The race footage, much of which was shot inside and from actual race cars, is thrilling; the races themselves are largely focused on tactics (tires are extremely important!), and they're explained well. This doesn't oversell the danger, but whenever something does go wrong it's gut-wrenching - if sometimes only for a few seconds.

Idris balances cocky and insecure in a winning combination, while Kerry Condon - who plays the team's top car designer - injects plenty of spark into a role that is only slightly more than a love interest for Sonny. Who doesn't really need one as his real connection is with Ruben, played with charm and endlessly likable energy by Bardem.

Pitt himself is once again the well-worn expert at his job, someone who's seen it all and taken it in his stride... most of the time at least. It's a generic leading-man role - Pitt is starting to give Harrison Ford vibes in some ways - but Pitt remains magnetic on screen. Good news, adults: he's a laid-back natural leader who's great at his job and winning with the ladies, AKA a fantasy figure aimed at people older than 12. 

If there's a flaw in this two and half hour film it's that Kosinski can't seem to find a compelling story in all these parts. It feels at times like an off-brand Michael Mann film, but Mann builds his stories about men who are driven, not drivers. Pearce has the motivation, but he's in the second seat and he's not fully formed; Pitt, playing a character seemingly tailor-made for him, rarely makes us feel the stakes.

Sonny is helping out an old friend, and also getting one last chance to prove himself, and also being a mentor to the next generation. Which is one too many motivations, especially when at least two of them are in opposition and none of them run counter to him being just a good old boy who likes to go fast. When you're at the pointy end of a multi-million dollar organisation based around hurtling around racetracks across the globe at terrifying speeds, there's such a thing as being too nice. 

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: 28 Years Later

Everyone remembers the superfast zombies (well, technically not zombies, but...) from 28 Days Later. Largely forgotten is everything else. Director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland used the broad outlines of the zombie movie - and a bunch of other British horror: the memorable opening owes a lot to The Day of the Triffids, for one - to lure audiences in to something that was at times fairly experimental. And so it is again.

It's been 28 years since the rage virus was unleashed on the UK (turns out the European spread seen in sequel 28 Months Later was short-lived). The few uninfected survivors live in isolated settlements, such as the island Lindisfarne, where 12 year old Spike (Alfie Williams) has two worries on his mind: his mother Isla (Jodie Corner) is ill, swinging between coherency and delirium, and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is about to take him to the mainland for his first kill.

Connected to the mainland by a causeway that can only be crossed in low tide, the island community needs to scavenge to survive - and the only way to survive a scavenging mission is to be ready to kill any infected that come along. After a generation, some infected are now bloated crawling things, while others remain the usual screeching running horrors. 

And then there are the Alpha's, giant killing machines that are almost impossible to stop. Suffice to say running into one of them can turn a straightforward hunting trip into a nightmare, and even they're not the worst things on the mainland. When Jamie and Spike see a fire off in the distance, Jamie tells Spike about a doctor he once knew who went mad and became obsessed with the dead. But all Spike hears is "doctor" - the only person left who could possibly save his mother.

Boyle can still generate the usual terrors when he has to. There's plenty of sneaky zombies, unstoppable zombie hordes, people backed into a corner by zombies, and people having their heads torn off and spines ripped out by Alphas, who are extremely scary and clearly big fans of Predator. 

But there's also a fair amount of experimentation going on, starting with much of the events being filmed on iPhones to continue the digital feel that made the first film stand out (and look extremely dated today). Deaths often occur in freeze-frame, there's night vision footage of glowing-eyed zombies, and the journey to the mainland is sound-tracked by a century-old recording of a Rudyard Kipling poem about marching to war.

Spike's story is more about coming-of-age than merely of survival, as he eventually strikes out from his village - probably a good idea, as the whole place feels a little cult-y in an inbred UK way - in search of the fabled doctor (Ralph Fiennes). After a fair amount of slaughter in the first two acts, the third turns into something closer to a meditation on death and its meaning - before a final twist that sets up a sequel due early next year.

The first film ran counter to the established zombie tradition; two decades later, that tradition is as strong as ever, and this film is even less interested in its cliches. There's plenty of scares here; there's also plenty to think about. It's the most exciting film Boyle has made in years; seems it took the living dead to bring him back to life.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: How To Train Your Dragon

Live action remakes of animated hits are just one head of the remake / reboot / reworking hydra that currently dominates pop culture. With the media so splintered, the only way to get people to notice something new is for it to be connected to something they already know about. Sometimes that's a way to slip something new in audience's diet; other times it's the new version of How to Train Your Dragon.

On a Viking island constantly under attack by dragons, Hiccup (Mason Thames) does not fit in. He wants to kill dragons like everyone else, but being a nerd more suited to building gadgets than swinging an axe has made him a misfit who's shunted aside for every battle. 

Being the son of the chief (Gerard Butler) doesn't help either, as his fellow teens see him as the islands nepo baby - which hurts coming from determined up-and-comer Astrid (Nico Parker), who shows zero interest in returning Hiccup's crush.

Then when Hiccup's latest invention secretly brings down the most feared dragon of all - a Night Terror - he's forced to face facts: he's just not a killer. In fact, he soon befriends the crippled dragon, naming it Toothless (it does have teeth, they're just retractable). 

The closer the two get, the more Hiccup realises everything the islanders know about dragons is wrong. But will the insights he's getting from Toothless - which are helping him ace the warrior training the teens are going through under the watchful eye of Gobber (Nick Frost) - lead his people on a new path? Or will things go horribly wrong and make Hiccup even more of an outcast until the teens hey look we all know how this wraps up.

Story-wise this sticks extremely close to the 2010 animated film, which is neither surprising (2010 film director Dean DeBlois returns for his first stab at live action), nor automatically a bad thing. That effort (itself based on a book) was a high point in Dreamwork's animation: making this a do-over is a good way to make a good film, which this is.

What it isn't is a great film, in part thanks to the limitations of live-action (even in a film where numerous scenes have enough of a CGI sheen to feel more than a little unreal). The best performances are the most cartoony - that'd be Butler and Frost - while the teen leads make their characters feel grounded and down to earth when a bigger presence wouldn't go astray - they're standing next to dragons, after all.

The big visual scenes still soar. Hiccup and Toothless flying together is thrilling; the epic final battle has some awe-inspiring moments. And the story's big messages around family and acceptance and the pointlessness of tit-for-tat conflict pack a punch. It feels a little unfair to compare this decent live action film to an excellent animated one made a decade and a half ago - or it would, if they didn't both share the same name.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Ballerina

What's a John Wick movie without John Wick? The original appeal of the franchise was that super-assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) was committing all this carnage over a dead dog; take that away and all that's left is a whole lot of action, which is not exactly something in short supply at the movies. 

Sure, there's all the stuff with the tattoos and gold coins and The High Table. But as anyone who saw the prequel TV series The Continental knows, that alone does not a decent story make. So Ballerina (tagline: From the World of John Wick) is doomed to fail? Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Left on her own after a bunch of opening-scene gunplay with bonus explosions, a young girl named Eve is collected after the carnage by Winston (Ian McShane), who is presumably on holiday from running his hotel or something, it doesn't really matter. He drops Eve off at the New York ballet school-slash-murderer academy run by The Director (Angelica Huston), where she spends the next twelve years learning how to dance and kill people, as you do.

Now all grown up (and played by Ana de Armas), Eve starts work as a kind of proactive bodyguard; she protects people by murdering a lot of people around them. But when she finds one of the many, many people she's killed has the same mark as the people who killed her father back at the start of the movie, it's payback time. Which is something the world of John Wick has had a bunch of experience with.

The good news is, Ballerina is close enough to the source material to feel like a John Wick movie, and just different enough to keep the franchise feeling fresh. Having a smaller, self-contained story definitely helps; this also avoids the feeling with the later Wick movies that what we were watching was a string of 20 minute action scenes glued together with some inessential lore and Reeve's charm.

Oh yeah, Reeves makes an appearance here (it's set between John Wick 3 and 4), in a role that's possibly bigger than you might have expected but doesn't pull focus from Eve's story. It feels like Reeves is doing a favour for a friend by appearing here - which is a coincidence, because that's what Wick is doing too.

Otherwise this is your last chance to see the great Lance Reddick (this was his final outing as Charon before his death), McShane is always fun, Huston gets to be a bitchy teacher (also fun), and Gabriel Byrne hams it up in scene-stealing form as the big bad. As for de Armas, she easily sells Eve's angst in the quieter moments while being convincing in the action scenes, which swing between slick professionalism, flustered desperation, and at her most charming, "I can't believe this shit".

The action scenes, which as you'd expect make up a large percentage of the film (which was directed by Len Wiseman; producer and John Wick director Chad Stahelski oversaw extensive reshoots), continue the Wick tradition of combining movement and stylised gunplay with exciting new ways to kill people. Here that includes a fair amount of grenade work and excessive use of multiple flamethrowers towards the end, which is pretty impressive even for a series such as this.

You wouldn't call this a comedy, but there's just enough humor running throughout to provide texture. Early on, someone gets beat to death with a remote control; each blow changes the channel to bring up another influence on the franchise (who doesn't love the Three Stooges?). And it's always entertaining to see John Wick's reputation preceding him.

Backstory and lore isn't enough to create a decent spin-off, and this knows it. If you've had enough of Wick this probably won't turn you around, but if you're already a fan this'll remind you why. It builds (a little) on what came before, adds just enough to stand alone, and then sits back and has some fun with a constantly escalating climax featuring a whole lot of implausible action. This Ballerina's worth a spin.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: Bring Her Back

Nobody really expects a horror movie to stand up to serious examination. By their very nature they're often full of implausible stuff: the trick is to get the vibes right and hope that'll put off any serious questions until after the credits roll. For much of the run time, Bring Her Back does a solid job with the vibes - just don't look too hard for a pool fence and it'll be fine.

Blind teen Piper (Sora Wong) and her older stepbrother Andy (Billy Barratt) are out on the street after their father dies in the shower, but good news: seasoned foster parent Laura (Sally Hawkins) is more than happy to take Sora in and yeah, guess she'll take Andy as well if she has to.

Things seem suspect from the start. Laura's shaven-headed nephew Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) is a creepy silent presence, while she's subtly wearing down the bond between the siblings every chance she gets. Andy is already on shaky ground due to a troubled past, and Laura seems more than happy to exploit things to get the result she wants.

But what exactly is that result?  A well-worn video tape showing glimpses of a sinister ritual suggest something more unnatural behind her unsettling antics (having her along at the dad's funeral was not a good idea), while Oliver has to be locked up constantly and that big white line running around the house seems to be there to keep something in.

And oh yeah, Laura's daughter - who was also blind - died not that long ago after falling into the now empty backyard pool. But there's a big rain storm on the way, and that pool is going to fill up fast... 

There's no denying there's some memorably nasty things going on here; it's everything in between that's a little thin. The whole trauma angle is enough to keep things ticking along, but it's not exactly fresh or insightful. You may not have seen it before, but at times it feels like it.

Writer / directors the Philipou brothers (Talk to Me) are clearly pretty canny when it comes to horror, so it's a bit of a surprise that the story here all but fades away in the final act once the various mechanisms to wrap things up are in place. It's more predictable than it should be: once we know what's going on, that's what we get even though there feels like there's room (and need) for an extra twist or two.

Hawkins is, as you'd expect, excellent as a creepy foster mother, and the middle stretch where she's up to no good but it's not quite clear how or why is the film's strongest. Barratt does pretty well too as someone in over his head, while Wong has to wait a while before her time to shine.

It all adds up to a film that features a cast of characters driven by grief in a story that doesn't really have much to say about grief. Piper feels betrayed that her brother has shut her out from his loss, but by the time he fully explains what he's feeling it's too late to have much impact on anything. Likewise, Laura's grief motivates the plot, but because this is a horror movie we just see her acting creepy without explanation until well towards the story's end.

On the other hand, there are some very nasty moments of body horror here that won't easily be forgot. Which is probably more important in the scheme of things than speeches about how having a dead relative really sucks.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Something the marketing for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning doesn't want you to remember is that it's the second half of a bigger film. Don't worry, it goes out of its way to remind you of previous events via an astonishingly sluggish first hour that at times feels like a chopped-down version of something that probably would have made this into a trilogy. But tonally? Once this gets going, it's a final act all the way.

In practical terms, that means a hefty slice of what traditionally makes a M:I film fun to watch is now in the rear-view mirror. This still holds up as a stand-alone film (just), but it's a much narrower version of previous installments, like star Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie started believing their marketing and decided that so long as Cruise was in a couple of real-life death traps the rest of the film didn't matter.

So the first hour is mostly muddled recap with some half-hearted gestures towards franchise requirements: there's a torture scene, a mask reveal, and a lot of exposition which can be summed up as "an evil computer program called 'The Entity' wants to take over the world's nukes and kill everyone, some people want to help it, some want to harness it, and Ethan Hunt (Cruise) wants to shut it down".

As always, the way to do that requires a fair amount of globe trotting. What it doesn't involve this time is a whole lot of traditional action. There are a couple of fight scenes, plus a shootout or two - almost the only joke in the entire film comes in early, when an especially brutal fight is shown solely in the horrified expressions of Grace (Haley Atwell) and some nasty sound effects. But again, the big action beats (remember the car chase through Rome in the previous film?) are a thing of the past.

Pretty much everyone from the previous film returns (it's a part 2 after all), with evil assassin Gabriel (Esai Morales) now wanting to control The Entity, previously evil assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) now helping the good guys, computer genius Luther (Ving Rhames) now confined to a sick bed and spare computer genius Benji (Simon Pegg) now looking pretty worn down. Possibly because there's multiple leaden speeches here about the power of choice and saving those we'll never meet and so on, like this was a series about teaching serious life lessons and not people constantly pulling off rubber masks.

Angela Bassett is back too, only now she's the President and gets some surprisingly tense scenes as it becomes increasingly clear that the only options left are either she nukes everyone else or The Entity nukes everyone. It's also a reminder that this is a franchise where a large amount of the tension often comes from scenes the star has nothing to do with - they're spy thrillers where Hunt's role is basically that of a human screwdriver, a tool used to defuse the bomb.

Defusing a bomb can be a lot of fun to watch though, and as benefits a film that is basically one big climax to a five-hour story, this features two big dialogue-free set-pieces that make this worth the price of admission on their own. In one Hunt has to navigate the insides of a wrecked sub; the second is a biplane chase that somehow involves Hunt crawling all over the outside of not one but two planes mid-flight.

The big selling point is supposedly "Cruise does all his own stunts!", and fair play, his stuntwork is extremely impressive. But it's telling that the sub sequence (which may involve Cruise inside what is basically a giant washing machine set on spin dry, but did not take place in an actual sunken sub) is just as thrilling as the plane chase, which does involve actual planes flying not-that-high above the real earth. Watching a 62 year-old multi-millionaire risk his life purely for our amusement is fun, but not as much fun as a well-crafted suspense sequence.

More than most Mission: Impossible films, which don't exactly have a reputation for smooth storytelling, this feels like a grab-bag of parts. The good parts are extremely good and build towards a thrilling climax that's a shot of pure adrenaline guarenteed to send you out the cinema on a high. 

The bad parts? Well, if they ever make another one - and this most definitely does not shut the door on that possibility - maybe Hunt could stay out of those endless crumbling brick tunnels he's always running down.

- Anthony Morris

 

 

Review: The Surfer

You can't go home again. If home is A Land Down Under, you're a fool to even try. For Nicolas Cage's unnamed character (okay, he's "the Surfer"), a return trip to try and salvage his shattered life by purchasing the house he spent some of his childhood in goes horribly wrong seemingly for no other reason than, well, it's Australia. Surf's up.

Things are looking shaky from the start. The deal to purchase the house is on a knife-edge, his son (Finn Little) doesn't seem all that impressed with stories of past glories, and when they head down to the beach to hit the waves they're bluntly told that the only thing that's going to be hit is them if they don't piss off. 

Localism (a real thing) is where surfers don't take kindly to outsiders - after all, good waves are a finite resource, and the locals rarely like to share. So they retreat, his son heads off (his parents are separated, obviously; no prizes for guessing which one has moved on with her life) and our hero sticks around to make a few calls from the carpark.

Getting away turns out to be surprisingly difficult thanks to a mix of urgent phone business, some extremely aggressive teens, a local hobo (Nic Cassim) even more hated than the Surfer, and a slowly growing sense that maybe he doesn't want to go anywhere - he was a local once too, even if nobody will acknowledge it.

What follows is a nicely balanced decent into madness as the Surfer takes up residence in the beach carpark, partly to spy on surf thug cult leader Scally (Julian McMahon), partly because events seem to conspire to strip everything from him, and partly because everything seems to be going wrong at such a rapid rate we're not quite sure how much of everything is all in his mind. Maybe even none of it?

Fortunately this is Nicolas Cage we're dealing with, and his ability to finely judge just how over-the-top his performance should be is put to good use here. He maintains an element of desperation throughout that keeps the insanity grounded - he's just a regular guy, with a past that may or may not be as solid as it seems, and while he certainly plays a part in his downward spiral he's still the victim here.

Scally's cult (their big marketing hook is rhyming "surfer" with "suffer") brings in themes of toxic masculinity, but they're there more to motivate the hilariously aggressive locals than provide any real social commentary. What this film is really about is simply seeing Cage become increasingly sunburnt and shabby as the world wears him down. Sometimes the waves carry you out, sometimes they bring you back.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Thunderbolts*

The golden age of Marvel movies was three and a half stars at best. A decade or so ago, when Marvel ruled the screens, the secret of their success was consistency: while they only rarely served up something truly exciting or memorable, they never (well, almost never, looking at you Thor: Dark World) delivered a real dud.

And then suddenly they were serving up misfires, and turning out for every movie in a series seemed a lot less essential when you knew there was a good chance you'd be sitting down to watch something bad. What Thunderbolts* does - and does well - is reset the quality counter. It's not great, but it's good enough: if Marvel can just make another few movies like this, they might really be onto something.

Depressed after the death of her sister and basically just going through the motions of being a professional murderer, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is looking for a change. She's thinking a move to more public facing superheroics might do her good; her employer, shady spy maven Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) sees her as more of a loose end. With political pressure being brought to bear on her in Washington, it's time to tidy up.

When Yelena's next mission turns out to be something of a circular firing squad - with a bunch of fellow shady types including John "U.S. Agent" Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamden) pointing guns at each other - they all realise they've been set up. Figuring out what dazed regular human Bob (Lewis Pullman) is doing there will have to wait: escaping the bunker and getting past the guards is job number one.

Once they do get free, with the help of Yelena's dad Alexi "The Red Guardian" Shostakov (David Harbour), they're still in trouble. Valentina wants them gone; Congressman Bucky "The Winter Soldier" Barnes (Sebastian Stan) wants them to help him take her down. Could there be an even bigger threat lurking in the wings? One that will force this rag-tag group to come together as a team and learn to trust one another? And let's not even get started on the power of love.

Almost none of these characters are original to this film, but there's next to no backstory required, making this feel a lot fresher than most of Marvel's recent output. The usual mix of relatively grounded action and wisecracks is more of the same, but the action generally makes sense and it's surprisingly how well the usual zingers land when they're delivered by decent actors.

The ensemble is Thunderbolts* real strength. Just about everyone here could support a solo feature (c'mon, Dreyfus has already has multiple TV series), while Pugh is a genuine movie star and Marvel doesn't really have a surplus of those. You want to see what happens to these characters, even when it's the usual run of scenes standing around throwing quips at each other; when the post-credit sequence propels them into the next stage of the MCU it's hard not to think "hang on, why can't we just hang out for a while?"

Marvel movies have to be good at what they do because what they do is pretty restricted. The action can't be too violent, the jokes have to be PG, forget about sexual tension. If this feels like a James Gunn movie without James Gunn, that's because he's the first director since Joss Whedon who figured out how to thread this particular needle - the secret ingredient here being sincerity, as it turns out super-powered beings get depressed too.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: The Accountant 2

Even back in 2016, The Accountant was the kind of action movie that felt a little behind the times. A complicated plot built around a surprisingly good hook - what if Ben Affleck was fake-named Christian Wolff, an autistic super-accountant who laundered money for top criminals and was also really good at murdering henchmen - it didn't really deliver anything special but it did serve up a lot of it. And now, in a move nobody saw coming, he's back.

This time around the whole "crime accountant" thing is dismissed in a single phone call (the film spends more time on a scene where Wolff rigs a speed dating event, only to find his personality is so off-putting everyone bails on him), leaving the plot mechanics to an overly-complicated set-up involving the abrupt death of a supporting character.

This leads to newly promoted supporting character Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) taking on a mystery only "The Accountant" can help her solve. As she is a high level Federal law enforcement officer, this is the one part of the story that's actually convincing, even if her reason for contacting an organised crime figure is that the investigation is off the books and not because government law enforcement has collapsed in the USA.

They run around, Wolff cracks some heads - much to Medina's dismay - and then he realises he's going to need some help to figure out how to solve what seems to be a human trafficking case. Enter his equally murderous but slightly more socially adjusted brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), who takes time out from being a hitman who's trying to collect a cute puppy to come to LA to use his ability to act like an actual human being to murder the people his brother can't.

Their double act is easily the best part of the film, and while it's unlikely we'll ever get a film that's just one lethal killer trying to help another lethal killer pick up women in cowboy bars, that's Hollywood's loss because that kind of thing is the only time this really comes alive.

Otherwise the story is by-the-numbers in that generic action movie way where everything builds to a big shootout where the stakes are like "eh, whatever", while the few weird elements from the previous film (most notably Wolff's backup team of autistic super-hackers) only get the occasional look-in. Nothing here is actively bad, but aside from the Affleck-Bernthal pairing it's difficult to figure out what exactly about this is meant to be luring audiences into cinemas.

Then again, it is a pretty solid pairing. The pair have strong chemistry, they're both better actors than the material requires, and their characters mesh well together. Wolff gets to warm up and show some interest in Braxton's feelings, and Braxton's tough shell cracks at a moment that actually makes good use of the fact that this is a sequel and the characters do have an on-camera history that goes back almost a decade.

It's rare to see an action movie these days where the action isn't the whole point (what action we do get here is solid but not spectacular), but that means the main plot ends up feeling a little beside the point. It's the buddy comedy stuff that works here.

If someone suggested a version of The Odd Couple with these two leads as bickering roommates who occasionally have to murder a warehouse full of goons, they'd have a winner on their hands; maybe get the Accountant to run the numbers on that project.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Sinners

 

The year is 1932, and the SmokeStack brothers (both Smoke and Stack are played by Michael B Jordan) have returned to their southern home town with a load of money and guns. They're looking to invest in a juke joint, so over the course of a day they buy an old sawmill, source a couple of musicians, stock the place with supplies (the booze they've bought themselves) and get ready for one hell of a good time.

Thanks to Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O'Connell), that good time eventually does turn hellish, but the turn is a long time coming. Writer / director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther) takes a long time setting things up, and not a moment's wasted: Smoke (the serious one) and Stack (the free-spirited one) split up to get what they need, and their adventures gathering supplies and young guitarist Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) plus experienced blues harp player Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), keep the energy levels way up.

Once the music starts this really takes off - literally at one central point, when Sammy's playing reaches across time to bring in the spirits of other musicians past and future. It's the kind of scene that could easily have come off as forced or cheesy, but the joy and power of the music carries it effortlessly. When people call this a musical, they're not joking.

There's a lot going on here before the chord change. The brothers are giving back to a community that's under siege even before the vampires turn up, the music an escape from chains both literal and social. Coogler takes full advantage of the wide open landscapes to craft some gorgeous big-screen visuals before the story shifts to the sawmill. And there's a string of sharply defined women (including Hailee Steinfeld, Wummi Mosaku and Jayme Lawson) drawn to the music and the men who're making it happen.

Then, after a single scene of horror early on to let us know what's to come, the tone changes. The shift when Remmick and his new backing band turn up looking to come in and play a few numbers isn't abrupt, but it doesn't take long for a bunch of new rules to be established.

Now we're watching a vampire movie, and Coogler shifts to playing the classics. There's a few angles he's interested in polishing up - the need to invite vampires in comes up again and again to good effect - but on the whole the vampire stuff is merely good rather than great. Coogler's like a musician who has to run through the hits, but his heart isn't quite in it: it's when he gets to spin his own riffs that he really shines.

Everything in that first 90 minutes - especially the use of music - is pushing things, taking the story beyond the usual limits. And that includes sexually; we're so used to mainstream American genre film being asexual that the easy way this has with sex - both brothers get their ends away, sex advice is casually handed out and skillfully applied, and there's no doubt whatsoever that the music we're hearing only has one thing on its mind - is more transgressive and startling than any horde of bloodsuckers that used to be people.

Coogler draws a very straight line between the music and the beyond. Charlie's guitar playing is so good, we're told, it can pierce the veil between this world and the next and open a door between them (which is why vampires aren't turning up to every juke joint down south). It's just that the music here is so much more vivid than the vampires, supernatural beings or not. We expected something awe-inspiring and terrifying, not a bunch of overly familiar rowdy drunks.

Then again, the vampires like a good tune too. The divide between Irish traditional and the blues seems a bit harsh at first, but it rapidly becomes clear that the film, if not the people in it, are on the side of music no matter who's playing it. 

That's made even more clear in the film's multiple codas (you do not want to leave when the credits start rolling), where the focus is as much on the music that survived the night as it is the people. Seems there's more than one way to live forever.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Warfare

The year is 2006, the place is Iraq, and in Ramadi a US Navy SEAL team selects and occupies a multistory home, smashing their way in and ordering the residents to stay in a single room. There they set up a post covertly observing a nearby market, though it doesn't take long for the locals to realise they're being watched. Many of the locals have guns. Things rapidly escalate.

This story (based on events experienced by co-director Ray Mendoza) isn't entirely told in real-time - the Americans were in the house for a while before things turned violent - but once the shooting starts the focus is on immersing the audience in the moment-by-moment chaos and clamour of modern war. It's loud, it's confusing, you can't see who's shooting at you and you don't know if those around you who've been shot are dead or just wounded.

Co-director Alex Garland has form with this kind of you-are-there look at street fighting (see the final act of Civil War) and this is an extremely tense experience for much of the 95 minute run time. The SEAL team are just distinct enough to be individuals without breaking the illusion of being there as it happens - nobody starts revealing their backstory - and while at times it's difficult to identify who's doing what (being covered in dirt and plaster will do that to you), the confusion is intentional.

There's a lot to unpack here if you can get past the relentless violence and stress of combat (to be fair, that's hard to do at times). The soldiers psych themselves up for combat by watching the notorious softcore porn video to Eric Prydz' 'Call On Me'; amongst themselves they're joking, on the job they're emotionless machines, and the Iraqis whose home they commandeer are an inconvenience at best. 

War itself here is both visceral and remote, the unit a well-oiled machine designed to fire thousands of rounds at distant shapes. It's the small moments that stand out against the carnage - gear needs to be retrieved, superior officers don't want to release needed resources, the shockwave from a low-flying jet is better able to suppress the enemy than any lethal weapon.

Beyond the impressive film-making on display, Warfare stands out for the way it takes the "focus on one day and you'll reveal the subject's entire life" biopic approach to the Iraqi war. The story here is the conflict in miniature: a group of Americans invade a family home for reasons that seem arbitrary, trash the place, get into a massive battle with heavily casualties and loss of equipment, then withdraw having achieved nothing. 

At one point one of the two local troops on patrol with the US forces say the Americans are going to use them as human shields: they are not shown happily waving flags during the end credits.

- Anthony Morris

 

 

Review: Drop

 

Drop is one of those thrillers it's become slightly surprising to see in cinemas. Small cast, largely confined to one location, well-written and twisty script; it doesn't have a whole lot going for it but it definitely makes the most of what there is. It'd be nice to think there's still room for this kind of film in between the blockbusters and horror franchises. After all, cinemas still claim to have something for everyone.

Violet (Meghann Fahey) is going on her first date in years - her gun-waving husband is dead, she's now giving guidance to abused women, these dots don't need much connecting - leaving her young son in the care of her sassy sister (Violett Beane). It's a dinner date at a fancy restaurant high above the city, and while she's waiting for photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar) to show she has a number of brief but memorable encounters with fellow diners and staff which you should definitely pay close attention to.

That's because not long after the hopefully happy couple sits down she starts getting text messages from a anonymous file-sharing service called Digidrop (hence the title) that rapidly get personal and aggressive. Turns out there's a man with a gun at her home and there's a few things the mystery messenger wants her to do before the night is out.

Most of the middle act is Violet trying to get help only to find the texter is one step ahead, while the mystery of who it might be (turns out they have to be close by for the app to work) is handled with plenty of misleads but not too many obvious cheats. There's a few surprising moments, but this is a fairly grounded entry in the genre - it's not exactly realistic, but it takes place in a somewhat realistic world.

Fortunately writers Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, along with director Christopher Landon (responsible for the very enjoyable Happy Death Day series) keep things moving fast while juggling enough subplots (will the sleazy piano player really play 'Baby Shark'? Will their server ever make it in the world of improv?) to ensure things never get bogged down.

There's also the whole first date angle, which is handled deftly thanks in large part to the authentic chemistry between Fahey and Sklenar, but with a nice boost via a conversation which ties Violet's abusive past with what she's going through here. It's nothing ground-shaking, but like everything else here it's just that little bit better than it needs to be.

At a tight 90 minutes, and with an all-action climax that goes big compared to the tightly-wound film leading up to it, this understands the brief and fulfills it efficiently. Centered on an excellent performance from Fahey, who has to get a lot of the drama across while playing a character trying not to let anything show, Drop is 2025's best worst first date.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

The Looney Tunes characters aren't quite as moribund as (ducks aside) Disney's stable of animated stars, but they definitely have the vibe of big name stars waiting for a big project that's never going to come. Which The Day The Earth Blew Up seems very much aware of: it's just an old fashioned movie, not an event (*cough Space Jam 2 cough*) and is all the better for it.

Focusing firmly on the Porky Pig - Daffy Duck relationship - though it's a slightly earlier version of the double act than you might remember, with Porky in the lead and Daffy just that little bit too daffy to be trusted - our loveable duo are forced to deal with a bubble gum related alien invasion when all they want to do is fix up their family farm.

This isn't quite as manic as you might expect. A feature length film needs a very different tempo than an eight minute short (though one segment of the duo's adventures is basically presented as such), so for every frantic battle with body-horror alien goo there's a slightly more sedate scene to let everyone catch their breath.

Unfortunately the material isn't always strong enough to ride out the quiet patches, creating a few moments where kids (and adults) might start fidgeting. They're brief - this does a surprisingly good job of piling on the twists and turns, with the plot still throwing up surprises right to the end - but it does mean this doesn't quite hit the high energy high notes associated with the Looney Tunes brand.

As the voice of both Daffy and Porky, Eric Bauza does a first class job of capturing the personalities of both, which goes a long way towards making this feel like a real movie complete with character development and emotional ups and downs. Also there's evil bubblegum, so it all evens out.

For a relatively low budget effort this looks great; a solid gag early on has Daffy and Porky's adoptive dad only ever appearing as a painted background (trust me, you'll know the difference when you see it), and there's plenty of life and movement in every scene. It may not be right up there with the classics, but what is?

This isn't an updating of the characters (it's a 1950s style alien invasion at best), and it's not the kind of film that'll have you leaving the cinema shouting "the Looney Tunes are back!". It's decent kids entertainment with plenty of charm and wit, the kind of thing that Warners should be punching out at least once a year and making a tidy return both financially while boosting the visibility of these still viable characters.

 Oh wait, they just took all the Looney Tunes shorts off streaming. Guess that's all, folks.

- Anthony Morris

 

 

Review: A Working Man

It's not strictly true that the fashion is the most interesting thing about A Working Man. But it is noticeable that while Jason Statham's Levon Cade and his friends all consistently wear solid workman gear, all his enemies both personal and professional are constantly putting on outlandish and flamboyant outfits when they're not just straight-up hosting costume parties where everyone is dressed like it's pre-revolutionary France.

This kind of blatant signalling - seems bad guys are rich and decadent, who knew - is something this film could have done with a lot more of. It's not like Statham is any stranger to going over the top: his best films and most memorable roles have usually backed right up to being silly, if not gleefully danced on top of it.

Sadly this particular film seems to have taken all the wrong lessons from Statham's recent surprise hit The Beekeeper, an often deeply strange film that audiences gleefully took to because for once the righteous vengeance these action films deal in was focused on a real world villain (online scammers preying on the vulnerable). Turned out people really enjoyed seeing specific dirtbags being punished rather than the usual vague arms dealers and human traffickers and Russian mobsters.

Surprise! Here Cade is tracking down human traffickers, though at least they're home grown and not the evil foreigners from Taken. Though they are weirdly incompetent: their scheme seems to involve kidnapping young women to order and then just keeping them in a basement for a week or so to give Cade time to get on their trail. 

A slightly more thought-out movie would have had someone - possibly Cade's police friend, who gets one scene to contribute almost nothing to the plot - say something like "these guys fly a plane full of girls to Dubai once a week, you've got five days" and hey presto, ticking clock.

Instead, this film (based on a novel by former Punisher comic book writer Chuck Dixon, with a script co-written by Sylvester Stallone) uses the traditional and somewhat plodding structure where Cade, once set on the trail of his bosses' missing daughter, murders his way up the food chain until he runs out of people to kill. Only here, because the kidnappers are actually minor thugs, Cade ends up wiping out half the Russian mob because the movie has almost two hours to fill.

The problems with this structure - which is basically a detective story, only the detective can't go back to re-question anyone because he's killed them and there's no mystery to solve - is that you either get a string of forgettable goons or you get a decent bad guy but he only gets two scenes before he's killed and oh look, there's Jason Flemyng as a Russian mobster turning up far too early in the story to stick around for long.

Despite the obvious flaws, director David Ayers knows what he's doing and everything here is solidly competent in a way that, say, some of the more recent Liam Neeson films can't quite manage. The action is decent, the story doesn't dawdle, and there's just enough colour in Cade's numerous antagonists to make them noticeable (highlights include a Russian goon seemingly toting around an anti-aircraft gun and a couple of corrupt cops who are constantly apologising for handing people over to murderous thugs).

The result feels at times like an attempt to tap into the Jack Reacher audience, which might make sense if you've never actually watched Statham act. Statham's big strength as an actor is his sense of humor; the more a film tries to make him into a bland generic thug pummeling bad guys, the less impressive the result. In his best films he brings a touch of levity to taking out the trash, whether it's through implausible action, some decent quips, or just being in a film that doesn't take itself too seriously. 

Which brings us back to the fashion. The Beekeeper hit big by having real-world bad guys; this turns the dial the other way and works hard to make Cade, a down-home construction worker and vet trying to hold his family together, a blue collar hero for today. And yet, the one scene where Statham really stands out is the one where he has to go to a business meeting in a suit. Turns out looking good works for him.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: The Alto Knights

Nominally based on the true story of New York gangsters Frank Costello (Robert De Niro) and Vito Genovese (Robert De Niro again) as they waged war for control of the mob in the 1950s, what The Alto Knights mostly resembles is some kind of half-remembered dream. 

Things happen, then they didn't happen or didn't happen the way they were meant to happen and the whole thing is named after a club that plays no real role in the story anyway; best to sit back and enjoy the old familiar cliches washing over you.

Opening with the brutal murder of Costello by a gunman working for Genovese, only to have it revealed that Costello didn't actually die as the bullet bounced off his skull, the story then bounces around in similar fashion filling in the backstory in piecemeal fashion, at times narrated by an older Costello years after the fact. 

The pair grew up as friends despite their markedly different worldviews - Costello was a dealmaker who flourished during Prohibition, while Genovese was a thug who was only interested in collecting, not investing - so when Genovese fled the country to avoid a murder rap he left Costello in charge as the boss of bosses. 

Bad move: WWII broke out, Genovese was stuck in Italy for the duration, and by the time he came back there'd been fifteen good years under Costello's rule and a lot of the mob didn't want Genovese back in the top job. Costello tried to fob him off with a piece of the pie, Genovese wasn't happy with that, then when his whirlwind marriage went sour Vito's wife (Katherine Narducci) named names in a divorce court and suddenly a big fat spotlight was on Costello. 

If there's a theme here it's that sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the more the media and government focuses on the mob the tougher things get for them. You're damned if you plead the fifth, you're damned if you don't.

Running parallel to that is Costello's constant efforts to placate the volatile Genovese even after he tried to kill him, making this feel like a gangster movie where one of the leads thinks and acts like he's in a different kind of film entirely. Rational thinking? From a mobster? Forgettaboutit.

The result is a story that (probably rightly) assumes we know all the gangster cliches and tropes so well there's no real need to tie things together when we all know what we really came to see: a double dose of De Niro playing mobsters who are constantly having circular conversations around topics whether they be deadly serious or wondering if the Mormons were stupid enough to only dig up one gold bible before moving directly to Utah.

De Niro himself does a good job of differentiating his two roles (helped by some relatively subdued prosthetics - Costello has the nose, Genovese has the top lip), but he's not given a lot to work with aside from Costello rarely being angry while Genovese almost always is. His characters only get a couple of scenes together; as an acting partner, De Niro makes sure to never overshadow himself.

But look, you don't care about any of this. You're here to see De Niro play gangsters one more time, and it's just as much fun now as it ever was. Sure, it'd be nice if it was in a film that added up to something, but his performance is worth the ticket price on its own - and during the final act, when this finally finds its feet and gives us both a solid barber shop wacking and a big scene where mobsters flail about like clowns, it even manages to become a solid mob film in its own right.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Black Bag

In Black Bag a personally restrained, glasses-wearing British spy named George whose private life is a matter of public conjecture is secretly tasked with the job of uncovering a high-level mole in his organization; hang on a second, John Le Carre's lawyers are on line two. 

Here Steven Soderberg (in only his second film so far this year) is both riffing on and borrowing from Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, in a way that updates the otherwise familiar material (spy satellites!) while answering a question hardly anyone's been asking: what if this particular George had a wife who was also a spy?

To get the obvious out of the way, Soderbergh's many, many skills as a director are perfectly suited to a spy thriller, and this is one of the most polished installments of the time-worn genre in years. Working from a script by David Koepp, the result provides all of the expected thrills with just enough of a fresh spin to make the whole thing worthwhile.

George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) works for an unnamed branch of British Intelligence, where his job largely seems to consist of making sure everyone around him in their fancy office stays in line. His wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett), seems closer to the core businesses of doing what it is they do - she's the friendly face, he's lurking in the shadows.

Yes, the mole: after being tipped off that nobody's to be trusted - including his wife - George starts sniffing around. The rest of the staff are rapidly revealed to be flawed in one way or another after a Woodhouse-hosted dinner party in which he's secretly dosed everyone with an inhibition-lowering chemical that makes them increasingly unhinged. Relationships break up and make up, though not the ones you might expect. 

The usual mystery pleasures are once again on offer, as everyone turns out to be a plausible suspect. Salt-of-the-earth Freddie (Tom Burke) is a bit frayed around the edges, while his (much younger) partner Clarissa (Marisa Abela) seems to like pushing things. Colonel Stokes (Rege-Jean Page) acts like he's on the ball, but his relationship with the more emotionally open team shrink Dr Vaughn (Naomie Harris) seems like a weak link. And what about Kathryn?

The element that promises to blow this collection of genre cliches wide open is the leads' commitment to each other. George's love for Kathryn (and hers for him) is so strong - we're told more than once - that it overrides everything, even loyalty to their country. The reason why George is running this investigation so hard is because he needs to know if his wife has gone rogue so he can protect her; much of the tension here comes from the threat that at any moment this could turn into a far more unpredictable film.

Suffice to say that whether your expectations are met or shattered, you'll enjoy the ride. This is a solidly satisfying spy thriller that ticks all the boxes with panache, anchored by a range of memorable supporting performances - including, in yet another slice of meta-fun, Pierce Brosnan as the unit's cranky chief.

Fassbender is the main course here, perfectly playing a man who's all icy restraint on the surface and seething passion underneath as he - and to a lesser extent, his wife - prove to be more interesting characters than the story they find themselves in. Usually that'd be a call for sequels; in this case, those wanting the further adventures of a slightly uptight and buttoned-down spy-catcher named George don't have far to look.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Mickey 17

Mickey (Robert Patterson) has the kind of problem that sounds like it'd be a good one to have: he can't be killed. Well, to be accurate, he can be killed - and often is - but he's then promptly restored from backup into a freshly printed new body. You'd think this form of immortality would be restricted to the elite of society; in Mickey 17, it's reserved only for the dregs.

On the run from gleefully murderous loan sharks on a pretty crappy future Earth, Mickey signed onto a colony mission as an "expendable" - someone who could be sent to do extremely dangerous jobs "safe" in the knowledge that after he died a new copy would be printed out. Most of these jobs involve being a lab rat of some kind; the death that opens the film has him alive but at the bottom of a frozen crevice where retrieving him falls into the category of "eh, why bother".

Shock twist: that version of Mickey survives, and makes it back to the colony - which is now firmly established on a frozen planet - only to find another version's been printed out. Good news for his security officer girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) who's into the idea of two lovers, bad news for the Mickeys as the existence of two copies makes him a "multiple" who will have all copies (and his backup) destroyed on sight.

There's a lot more going on, in, and around the fairly straightforward plot; at times it feels like this might have worked better as an episodic series. There's Mickey's grim existence on the journey to the planet, the Trump-esque hucksterism of the colony's dictatorial leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his sauce-obsessed wife (Toni Collette), a possible love triangle between Mickey, Nasha, and Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), a dinner party that involves a lot of vomiting and a possible mercy killing, the loan sharks haven't given up on collecting (they'll take a bespoke snuff movie over cash) and there's an alien life form out there the colonists have dubbed "creepers" which may or may not be a threat to every human on the planet. 

Writer-director Bong Joon-ho (working from the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Aston) is not taking any of this seriously: mostly it's a romp, though the comedy can get a little dark at times. It's following in the tradition of any number of frantic, over-the-top science fiction tales, and like most of them it's a bit hit and miss. 

Seemingly promising directions are skimmed over or ignored, supporting characters vanish (then later reappear, or don't), long stretches are given over to sidebars that don't really pay off, occasionally it's time to dip into some pretty blunt satire (Marshall hosts his own tonight show) and the general texture is of one long shaggy dog story where the point never quite comes into focus. Don't go in expecting to love everything you see.

That said, the performances are largely kept in check. Even Patterson strikes the right note of goofy charm, while Ruffalo - who does get to go very big - is at least playing the kind of grandiose buffoon that history manages to serve up on a semi-regular basis. The events are larger-than-life, but the characters mostly stay human, which is probably the right note to strike.

Mickey 17 is a film that spends a hefty chunk of its run time exploring the horrors of being a clone that can't die, and then loses interest in all of that once there's two identical (or are they?) people running around arguing with each other. Maybe a bit more soul would have made it something more than just an unevenly entertaining SF comedy - but then, after 17 times through the printer anyone's soul would be a bit tattered.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Bird

It's been a few years since Andrea Arnold made a fiction film, but documentary's loss is pretty much everyone else's gain. Bird is both a return to social realism and an embrace of the magical - two things that really should go together a lot more often than they do. We all contain both (and more) inside us: any realistic film that ignores that is falling down when it should be soaring.

Twelve year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is having a bit of a rough go of it. Living in a squat in a housing estate in Kent, her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) is barely an adult himself, running around with the kind of wild get-rich-quick schemes a teenager would come up with (becoming a father as a teen seems to have arrested his development).

Her mother, who lives across town, isn't much help either. Peyton (Jasmine Jobson) has a violent partner and three kids, living in the kind of knife-edge situation where anything can happen and whatever it is, it's going to be bad. Bug's crazy plan to sell toad juice to finance his wedding to a woman he met three months ago doesn't seem so bad by comparison.

So Bailey is largely left to her own devices. Sometimes she's spending time with her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and the gang he's put together to "protect" the neighbourhood. Other times she's on her own, which is when she meets the mysterious Bird (Franz Rogowski).

At first she's wary of this stranger who seems lost and searching for something. It doesn't take long for a bond to develop, but this is the kind of coming-of-age film where tragedy is just as likely as anything else - or at least, it is until a big shift in what kind of film we're actually watching makes itself known towards the end.

The result is something that isn't going to click with everyone. Consistency in entertainment is generally a virtue; any major gear changes are required to exist within the borders of plot and character, not by adding entirely new elements previously unsuspected. So this is a big swerve, but if you can go with adding "magical" to "realism", the pay off is worth it.

And even if you feel the ending does derail things, there's a lot to enjoy. The performances, often from newcomers, are frequently astonishing and consistently enthralling, while Arnold has lost none of her skill when it comes to steeping her audience in a world where struggle and deprivation don't automatically mean a bleak existence.

It's a swirling film, full of joy and grinding poverty, despair and the beauty of nature pushing through ruins. Whether it's fully successful or not we need more films like this, heartfelt and striving.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

Long running fictional characters can grow old, or not. Presumably Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt is getting older, it just has absolutely no relevance to his life. Bridget Jones has taken the opposite path, awkwardly passing numerous milestones since she hit the big screen in 2001. Back then she was a quirky take on a young woman living in a world where being under 35 was a complex and nuanced mix of challenges and opportunities. Now in her world young people either look after your kids or shag you.

Aging with your fanbase locks them in: it also locks you into tackling certain issues that inevitably come up, which is to say this is the Bridget Jones movie about death. This mortality, somewhat surprisingly, works to the film's advantage, providing useful contrast to the numerous entertaining moments where Jones (Renee Zellweger) does something awkward then awkwardly realises someone she would like to impress just saw her.

The big death, of course, is Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), who it is revealed in the first few minutes died four years ago, being exploded as part of his work as a human rights lawyer. It is time, all her friends agree, for her to move on. But how? And where? And will the big pants be required?

Pretty much everyone you remember from the previous films makes a return here - the dead characters are either wordless ghosts or get a final scene in flashback - but the script makes the onslaught of familiar characters seem natural, as Jones first checks in with pretty much everyone before her first love interest, the youthful aspiring garbologist Roxster (Leo Woodall) pulls her down out of a tree. Awkward!

Meanwhile, the local school her children attend has a new science teacher, the whistle-blowing Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Will he get much of a look in around the jokes about having to bring snacks for school functions and dealing with other snobby "perfect" mums?  Wait and see.

Jones also returns to work as a TV producer, bringing in a few new characters (Jones gets a nanny!) and some old ones - and of course, more opportunity for embarrassment. In the whirlwind of friends that makes up her life (and having such a packed social life despite being a single mum to two kids is just one of the more fantastical elements here) only unrepentant sleaze Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) gets anything like a character arc. And deservedly so, as he remains a delight.

The jokes are uneven but enough land to make it work. It's also a bit sad in parts, though at this stage of life anything less would be a let-down. Having Jones back looking for love is just enough of a spine to keep this from being a pointless greatest hits tour; having the grim specter of death lingering over a number of the scenes (the kids haven't yet moved on) is just enough weight to keep this from drifting away.

Put another way, the film has a high mortality rate (there's more than one scene where a much-loved character comes face to face with their mortality in a hospital), while Jones does pretty well when it comes to sexy and/or romantic clinches. Maybe they should have titled this one Bridget Jones: Body Count.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Presence

Does a ghost story have to be scary? On one level, probably not: it's not hard to think of numerous supernatural stories that (intentionally or not) failed to deliver spine-related chills. But the basic premise of a ghost story - conclusive proof that there is a form of existence beyond the physical world - does tend towards the unsettling. So a heads-up: Presence may be about a haunted house, but it's the living residents who'll give you the creeps.

Director Steven Soderberg's gimmick here is that the camera is the ghost's POV - we see what the ghost sees, and (as we later learn) the ghost doesn't know why they're haunting this particular suburban house. So they tend to just wander around watching the new residents, the Payne family.

It doesn't take long to see the family haven't exactly created a happy home. Father Chris (Chris Sullivan) is fiercely protective of daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who is on edge after having recently lost a friend to a drug overdose. Older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) is cruelly dismissive, focused more on his sporting and social success. Overly controlling mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu) is firmly on Tyler's side, though she's distracted by shady goings-on at work - the kind of things that have Chris thinking of bailing on the marriage.

All this unfolds in a series of long takes filmed in ghost-o-vision as the "presence" observes the family. Gradually Chloe starts to sense something supernatural; the presence can and does move small objects around, sometimes in a seemingly helpful manner, other times more destructively. A psychic (Natalie Woolams-Torres) is brought in, with mixed results. Tyler's new friend Ryan (West Mullholland) starts hitting on Chloe. The family is freaking out, but what can they do?

With big scares off the table, what's left is an interesting up-close look at a family under stress, with a low-key mystery wrapped around it. What exactly does the presence want? It's the kind of story that in other hands would cry out for a second viewing, but Soderberg plays fair with the audience and the ending is more of a "oh, that's why that happened" than a "wait, I need to go over this again".

The family's fault lines are fairly bluntly laid out; the point is to see which ways things are going to fracture. Everyone here turns out to be capable of a surprise or two, though most of the big moves are in character. Reliable types step up, people on edge make risky choices. The performances are all good, though it's Liang who ends up holding the film together. 

So it's a satisfying watch, if operating largely in a minor key. Possibly the most interesting thing going on is the way the demands of the story require one central character to be both a jerk and heroic. It makes sense - these are members of a family after all - but it's rare to see a character contain multitudes in recent cinema. Most ghost stories require the living to be one thing, then nothing; it's this character's out-of-character choice that will haunt their family.

- Anthony Morris