VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN

Director Paul McGuigan (TV's Sherlock & Luke Cage) and screenwriter Max Landis (AMERICAN ULTRA) have attempted to do for the Frankenstein story what Guy Ritchie did for SHERLOCK HOLMES.  The resulting film is a partial success.  A grimy/glamorous Victorian London is beautifully recreated and photogaphed by DP Fabian Wagner (JUSTICE LEAGUE) and the acting from the two leads - James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe - gives the rather hokey story some emotional heft.  But the story is obviously hokey and whether you ultimately enjoy the film depends on how far you're willing to be be swept away by the production design and acting and ignore the rather weak attempts to broaden out the backstory of the Frankenstein legend and the fact that neither the script nor the delivery have the crackling wit that enlivened the SHERLOCK HOLMES reboot and winked at its more ludicrous excesses. In Max Landis' take, Frankenstein (McAvoy) is trying to recreate life because of his guilt in causing the death of his brother and to win back the respect of his father (Charles Dance.)  Radcliffe  plays his sidekick Igor. In this version, Igor is a circus clown rescued by Frankenstein - his back drained of pus in one of the movie's more absurd scenes - and given a Victorian extreme makeover.  The relationship is put under strain by Igor's greater moral qualms about resurrecting life and his love affair with Downton Abbey's Jessica Brown Findlay.  All of which has the makings of a proper tragic drama, in the manner of Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein film, but both director and writer want to make something more kinetic and funny, which mixed success.  

VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie is on global release.

AMERICAN ULTRA

AMERICAN ULTRA is a really fantastic film with a unique premise, a great score and visual style and the ability to both capture a darkly comedic tone but also be a genuinely tense action thriller.  It stars Jesse Eisenberg as a stoner called Mike who's actually the last man standing of a weird US spy programme designed to create and mind-control super-spies.  When the ruthless CIA careerist played by Topher Grace decides to kill Mike, his handler Lasseter (Connie Britton) decides to activate him in order to save his life.  We then get a series of really insane action scenes, as well some genuinely moving emotional scenes in which Mike wonders who he really is and how his relationship with girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is really operating. But what really impressed me was the feeling that the director an DP had a clear idea about how they wanted to tell the story. It's using cinema and all it has to offer to create powerful and complex and memorable storytelling.  There's a superb scene near the end where our bruised and bloodied couple are hobbling out of a destroyed building to the sound of a Chemical Brothers attack, framed in smoke from the fireworks they've let off and covered in the green laser sight-tags of machine guns.  The director, Nima Nourizadeh, decides to show the couple's interactions in silence with just the track playing.  That's some memorable shit right there.  My only slight gripe is the way that Max Landis chooses to end the film. Didn't feel right to me, and maybe a cheesy set up for a sequel.

AMERICAN ULTRA has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release.