THE BANK JOB - brilliant story; workmanlike execution

True story: in 1976 a bunch of loveable idiots tunnelled into a London bank and nicked three million quid in cash and jewels. They also nicked some tasty pornographic photographs incriminating a member of the royal family and more than a few members of the government. This, naturally, caught the attention of the British secret service, policeman both straight and corrupt, not to mention the porn king of Soho. In fairness though, the rozzers were given a bit of a head start when an amateur radio enthusiast picked up the idiot robbers chatting to each other on their walkie-talkies!

It's a great story. The resulting film, however, is worth a watch but probably not the price of a cinema ticket. It's more the kind of film you watch by chance on Freeview on a boring Tuesday night. Roger Donaldson's direction is competent but unimaginative. The cast are all fine but there are no stand-out performances. (Although I have to say that David Suchet did look eerily like Ronnie Barker.) The production design is fine, but I've seen the seventies re-created more thoroughly on screen. The biggest problem is that the heist takes too long to crank up and grind out. The viewer has more fun watching the bunglers wriggle out of the mess they've made. Frankly, we could've lost twenty minutes off the run-time and it would've been a much snappier, much more exciting film.

THE BANK JOB is on release in the UK. It opens in the USA on March 7th; in Russia on April 3rd; in Finland on July 11th; in the Netherlands on July 31st; and in Belgium on August 6th.

The best bit in ACROSS THE UNIVERSE was when the stupid hippie blew himself up

Oh dear. ACROSS THE UNIVERSE is a bit of an embarassment. Director Julie Taymor of FRIDA fame decides to make a high-concept film. She'll paint a love story against the backdrop of Vietnam and the summers of love, people it with rock stars and set it to re-worked Beatles songs. I was a bit dubious about the concept from the start, mainly because I hate the way in which West End theatres have been filled with lazy musicals. Take MAMMA MIA or WE WILL ROCK YOU or the countless imitators. All they do is stitch together the greatest hits of whoever, making trite love stories out of corny lyrics. The plot and character development are hostage to the next three-minute number. Of course, you could argue that The Beatles would respond better to such a treatment. After all, the songs are of infinitely higher quality than your average pop song and they are peopled with colourful characters. Moreover, the Beatles story is iconic precisely because it reflects back the fall of innocence of a generation and the nasty hangover that was the 70s.

So maybe it could work. Maybe. Maybe not.

Julie Taymor, Dick Clement and Ian le Frenais simply fail to fashion a convincing story that hangs together apart from the songs. Basically, what we have is a very thin love story between an american girl called Lucy and a travelling scouser called Jude. (Yes, yes, it's THAT obvious.) Lucy's elder brother gets shipped off to Vietnam and their flatmate Sadie is in a rock band with a quasi-Hendrix and a sapphic ex-cheerleader. The lovers meet, they hang out, she becomes an activist, he doesn't, he gets deported back to Blighty, and then they all get back together again because, after all, ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE.

It was pretty depressing to see this great anthem, that always struck me as hugely outward looking and political, reworked as introspective, trivial love song. But that pretty much sums up the film. The backdrop may be radical but the action is petty. There are hints early on that the film will tackle the black and gay experience of the decade but it barely scratches the surface. It's examination of the Vietnam war experience is pretty sketchy too.

So, story aside, what of them musical numbers? Most of the songs are straightforward renditions to screen and the visualisations, like the naming of the characters, is pretty ham-fisted. On occasion, the performances are also under-whelming. Joe Anderson as Lucy's brother Max simply can't match the raw energy of HEY JUDE and perhaps surprisingly Bono is pretty lacklustre in his rendition of I AM THE WALRUS. (Although he turns out to be surprisingly good as Doctor Roberts.) Having said that, the only song that I thought was really badly staged was I'VE JUST SEEN A FACE, purely because it seemed to rip on the infinitely better bowling sequences in LEBOWSKI.

There are exceptions though, that almost, but not quite, make this movie worth seeing. I thought the most honest and movingly sung number was TV Carpio's rendition of I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND, sung as a love-song of closeted homosexuality. After that, I really liked the grungy angry version of COME TOGETHER, sung by Joe Cocker. Dana Fuchs and Martin Luther clearly also rock. In terms of the visualisation of the numbers, as I said before, I was disappointed to see that most were pretty banal. But I WANT YOU stands out as a bit of fantastic cinema. It's imagined as a song sung by Army recruiters to conscripted young men and its full of great choreography and real imagination. Eddie Izzard was also fantastic as Mr Kite. It's a shame Julie Tayor didn't let rip more often.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE played Toronto 2007 and is already on release in the US and UK. It is realeased in Australia, Slovenia, Turkey, Estonia, Germany, Italy and France in November and in Belgium on December 19th. It is released in Singapore on Janary 10th and in the Netherlands on February 14th 2007.

GOAL! 2 LIVING THE DREAM - losing the naive charm

A couple of years ago we were subjected to GOAL! - a heart-on-its-sleeve, rags-to-riches story about a poor, illegal immigrant Mexican football player getting scouted for Newcastle United. The movie had manifest flaws. It left no sports-flick cliche unexploited and had a painfully wooden cameo from David Beckham. Still, it did what is set out to do with a certain naive innocence and had a certain charm for all that.

Every aspect of GOAL! that I gave the benefit of the doubt comes in at half the pace and quality in GOAL! 2: LIVING THE DREAM. Instead of Danny Cannon (CSI) as director we get Jaume Collet-Serra of HOUSE OF WAX fame. As a result, the movie has zero visual flair and the football scenes in particular are edited to within an inch of their life. Whereas GOAL! had been script-doctored by British comedy greats, Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, GOAL! 2 lacks their more authentic and interesting dialogue. Poor Anna Friel, who plays Santiago's Geordie girlfriend, fares the worst from this ommission. She spends the entire film exclaiming, "Oh wow, this is so big!" or "Oh no! I really need a wee!".

The plot is pretty lame. Real Madrid has swapped Michael Owen for Santiago. He becomes their super-sub, scoring at will, while his ageing friend Gavin (Alessandro Nivola) is in a goal drought. As any fule kno, in a sports movie, when the hero makes it big, he starts to piss-off his old loyal friends and girlfriend, attracts hot chicks with evil designs, suffers as a result, before being redeemed. The only marginal difference here is that Santi discovers he has a poor half-brother with soccer skills in Spain.

It's rather a shame that GOAL! 2 has lost its charm and what little visual flair GOAL! had. I am also shocked that so many pro-footballers are willing to put in face-time. After all, the figure of Gavin is clearly taking the piss out of ignorant, cash-rich premiership footballers. Doesn't Beckham see they are mocking him?

GOAL! 2: LIVING THE DREAM is on release in the UK. It opens in Spain on March 16th, in Hong Kong on March 22nd, in France on April 4th and in Germany on May 31st.

FLUSHED AWAY - a very British comedy

For some strange reason, FLUSHED AWAY did terrible business in the US - at least relative to the huge budget. I say strange because Swedish Philip and I went to see it today and it was absolutely hysterical. I mean, laugh out loud funny throughout. I haven't had such a good time watching a comedy in ages, and it beats alleged adult fare like TENACIOUS D, and TALLADEGA NIGHTS hands down. That the movie is seriously funny comes as no surprise when you realise that, despite being CGI animated, it comes from the people who brought you WALLACE AND GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT. So you get the characteristic physical comedy, classic movie references and proper old-fashioned plotting and characterisation. The visual comedy is so rich that I suspect you’d have to watch FLUSHED AWAY a number of times before you’d even begun to recognise it all.

However, it has to be said that the movie has a peculiarly English feel, which may explain its comparative failure in the US. (The root cause of the English-ness is easy to identify - the movie was co-written by Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais – veteran script-writers for classic British TV comedies, The Likely Lads and Porridge.) The iconography of Zone One London is used to full effect – it’s all Piccadilly Circus & London Bridge. The fish-out-of-water plot plays off Cor Blimey Guv’nor sewer rats with a pampered pet mouse from The Royal Borough of Kensington. The movie features the regulation Knight of the Realm (Sir Ian McKellan) camping it up luvvie-stylee. A good dollop of the jokes are made at the expense of the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French; vulgar American tourists; grannies who throw their knickers at Tom Jones and the English football team.

In short, if you think football is a game played with twenty-two men and a round ball in which England lose on penalties to Germany in the final, I can almost guarantee you’ll have a good time watching FLUSHED AWAY. What's more this movie has everything that a certain Bond film lacked: exhilerating chases; a smooth hero in a dinner jacket; wicked gadgets; cheesy pick-up lines; an evil megalomaniac threatening humanity; and a ticking clock counting down to devestation before the hero saves the day!

FLUSHED AWAY has already opened in Israel, Singapore, the US, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. It opens in Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Spain, Sweden and the UK next weekend. It opens in Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia and Norway on December 8th, in Brazil, Mexico and Turkey on the 15th, in Australia, Slovenia, Italy and Latvia on the 22nd. It opens in Argentina in January and in Japan in March.