SIDNEY****

SIDNEY is a beautifully constructed documentary about the life and career of the iconic black actor Sidney Poitier, directed by Reginald Hudlin, produced by Oprah Winfrey, and featuring a candid and moving interview with Poitier himself in the year before he died.

The film begins with Poitier's childhood in West Indian poverty - he describes with relish the first time he saw a car in the capital, or the first time in New York he took the subway.  We also see him come to New York and work in a diner before realising he could take acting workshops and then join a local theatre group. His career is interwoven with that of his long-time friend and sparring partner Harry Belafonte. Poitier's big Hollywood break comes from taking a part that Belafonte passed over. But once he got that break he didn't look back, transforming small parts into mesmerising performances and radically challenging Hollywood ideals of male beauty and black power. He became a bankable headline actor in a period when black men were not accorded respect or civil rights. No-one who has ever seen it will forget Poitier slapping Rod Steiger in IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT.  

In his personal life, we hear of Poitier's two marriages and many children. He seems to have taken the business of being a father and breadwinner seriously and it's moving to hear how he felt he couldn't go home until he had money, something that will resonate with a lot of migrants whose remittances are so important. 

But clearly it's Poitier as activist who is of most interest to the contemporary audience and this film benefits from interviews with his contemporaries who were also active at that time - notably Belafonte but also Streisand and Redford. It's also fascinating to see how Poitier was outcompeted by later cinematic trends, most notably Blaxploitation, and was accused of being an assimilationist Uncle Tom by naive fools who had no appreciation for the context in which he was operating.

The best thing about documentaries like these is that they make you wonder how much has really changed.  One of the key provocative questions it sparked in me was how far Poitier would've become a star had he not had his break in the era of black and white film. It does rather feel as though colourism remains rife, and standards of black beauty still tend to be centred on "white" features. Think Beyonce or Will Smith's face, hair, colour. It makes you realise just how unique and strong and talented Poitier was to make it, for decades, in this industry.

SIDNEY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 111 minutes. It played Toronto 2022 and was released on Apple TV.

COMING 2 AMERICA

COMING 2 AMERICA is the feel-good, nostalgic comfort-watch we want and need right now. Released on the first anniversary of my personal Covid lockdown, at a time when we've all been deprived of friends, families and laughter, this movie feels like a personal gift from Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall to all of their fans.  And yes, I AM a fan of the original. I can't count the number of times I watched it as a kid, and on a recent rewatch I can attest that it holds up. The original was the story of a warm-hearted Prince and his rogueish sidekick going to Queens (pre-gentrification) to find a bride that will want the Prince for himself, rather than for his title. But along the way it poked fun at jheri curls, lascivious preachers, argumentative old black men in a barber shop and terrible pastiche bands. Let us NOT forget that Sexual Chocolate INVENTED the Mic Drop! Of course, it was a film of its time too. So my husband and I were wondering whether they'd keep the more luridly sexual stuff like the palace bathers or even the very concept of Murphy dressing up in Whiteface to play an old Jewish barbershop customer. Well, I am pleased to report that Kenya Barris' superb script keeps everything we loved about the orignal and doesn't water down the humour for a more PC time. The hat-tips and easter eggs are scattered liberally and really reward the ardent fan - from recasting Garcelle Beauvais as a rose-scatterer, to a rousing finale with Sexual Chocolate, to bringing back the rapping twins we met briefly at the bar. But best of all, we keep the foul mouthed My-T-Sharp crew, and dismiss any concerns of political incorrectness with a swift and brilliant short scene that neatly delineates the boundary between comedy and offense for us. 

So what's with the story? Decades after the original, Prince Akeem is happily married with three literally kick-ass daughters. The problem is that they cannot inherit his kingdom because they aren't sons. Accordingly, Akeem's dying father says he should find the illegitimate son he fathered in Queens after a quick drug-fuelled one night stand days before he met his still loving wife Lisa. We quickly bring this kid Lavelle (a rather anonymous Jermaine Fowler) to Zamunda, along with his mum (Lesley Jones) and uncle (Tracy Morgan) and most of the humour comes from these siblings from Queens getting used to the luxury of palace life.  The dramatic tension, such as it is, comes from Lavelle feeling he doesn't want to be a king in the mold of his grandfather, or to marry General Izzi's subservient daughter, much as his father before him. 

It's kind of strange to say but neither Murphy nor Hall steal the show in this sequel except in their prosthetic heavy avatars in the barber shop.  For me, Murphy and a old Jewish guy greeting Akeem and Semi after 30-odd years as "Kunta Kinte and Ebola" was worth the price of admission alone. Much of the comedy comes from Jones and Morgan as the Queens siblings. But all of them are thoroughly upstaged by Wesley Snipes as General Izzi, a neighbouring warlord who falls somewhere between kilt-wearing Idi Amin and Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation, but with ALL the swagger. His costumes, dance moves, accent - it's all instantly iconic. And that's the key to why I found this movie successful - yes it's fanservice, and I was serviced - but there were enough fun new characters to make it feel fresh too. I couldn't have asked for more. 

COMING 2 AMERICA was released on Amazon Prime Video on March 5th. It has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated PG-13.

LONDON HAS FALLEN

LONDON HAS FALLEN is a pretty dispiriting piece of hack action with a second-rate cast, second-rate actors, second-rate direction and second-rate action sequences.  Gerard Butler reprises his role as a special services agent assigned to protect his friend, the President (Aaron Eckhart.)  They go to London on short notice to attend the funeral of the Prime Minister, but it turns out all the world leaders have been lured there so that terrorists can take them out and much of iconic London with them.  The result is a bunch of low-rent sub-24 action and anti-terrorist plotting in tube stations and abandoned houses with nasty people threatening to behead the President on the internet.  Of course, Butler's action hero is going to save the day so there's no real sense of peril.  And then he'll go home to his cute wife and baby.  

This movie's precursor, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, was a pretty bad movie - far worse than WHITE HOUSE DOWN, which had essentially the same plot.  OHF didn't have the humour of the latter, or indeed the charismatic lead actors.  If anything, LHF is even worse, as director Antoine Fuqua left the project to be replaced by a no-name German director.  The whole thing feels like a bad TV movie or straight-to-DVD action film.  One can only hope it does so badly at the box office that a third instalment is prevented. 

LONDON HAS FALLEN has a running time of 99 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release.

LUCY

LUCY is a very odd film. It's not exactly bad. It's not exactly good. There's a lot going on and you can't fault its ambition. It's just that it's a movie by Luc Besson which means that whenever there might be elegant moderation, there's a willingness to go too far.  And while it's all shot in a stylish and slick manner, it almost feels too stylised, as if there's nothing underneath.  The weird thing is that the movie borrows some of the themes of 2001 and seems to take them in earnest. Why does it feel absurd when our protagonist goes back in time to meet our ape ancestors and yet not absurd when Kubrick has apes fighting over a bone?  I guess there's just something too slippery about this film - too trying to be Tarantino with Kill-Bill revenge action - for us to take it seriously.

Anyways, back to the story. Scarlett Johanssen plays Lucy - a naive and carefree girl working in Taiwan. She's conned by her dope-running boyfriend into delivering a package to Choi Min-Sik's Korean gangster and in a serious of improbable but stylish scenes ends up as a drug mule with a weird MacGuffin-y embryo-fuelling enzyme in her belly.  The upshot is that she is getting really really brainy really really fast - to the point where we get giant roman numerals throughout the film telling us how far she's reached her maximum brain usage.  And when she gets to 100% she's going to die. Or turn into a massively powerful organic supercomputer that then falls in love with Joaquin Phoenix, or something.  

The first third of the film plays like a kind of abduction-revenge horror with a kind of Tarantino attitude to highly stylised action.  We then get into thriller territory as Lucy leaves Taiwan to track down the other drug mules in Europe, with the help of a credulous French cop. The final third of the movie starts out amazing, transforming into a genuinely quite profound sci-fi flick but then descends into 2001 pastiche.  

Overall, this is a film that is less than the sum of its many parts but I really did enjoy the parts I liked. I wonder just what it might have been with the same cast but a less flashy director.

LUCY has a running time of 89 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on global release.

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

Antoine Fuqua's OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is glorious trash and the true heir to the DIE HARD franchise. Instead of a tired reworking of the Bruce Willis underdog saves the day action blockbuster we get its transmutation into a hackneyed but convincingly tense thriller. The secret of its success? Like all pastiche, you have to play it with a completely straight face. And by casting actors of the calibre of Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo and Angela Bassett that's what this movie does. In addition, with its high gloss tech package, the movie looks as convincing as it feels. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the sequence in which the White House is taken by enemy agents is as convincing, gripping and terrifying as the plane malfunction sequence that opens FLIGHT.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is, however, how well Gerard "This Is Spaaaaarta!" Butler does as the action hero.  He's an actor whose personal life seems as feckless as his career choices - and this loserdom nicely carries over into perceptions of his character, Banning, a disgraced and guilt-ridden former Secret Service agent who manages to get inside the White House during the raid and leads a single-handed fight back against the North Koreans.

So what's it all about Alfie?  In the prologue, we see Secret Service agent Banning (Butler) involved in the tragic death of the First Lady (Ashley Judd), leaving her picture perfect husband, President Asher a widower and their cute little son Connor motherless.  As we move into the main body of the film, we see the White House come under aerial and ground assault from North Korean terrorists, and the President and his key staff (Leo, Freeman, Bassett etc) quickly moved into the underground bunker. Crucially, the President being a clean-cut, all-American, wonderful guy, he chooses to take the South Korean premier with him, allowing the treacherous Kang (Rick Yune - THE MAN WITH THE IRON FIST) to penetrate the bunker too.  The only good news is that Banning, since demoted, has made his way inside the White House and makes contact with his former boss (Bassett) allowing all kinds of heroic derring do and kiddie rescuing. 

You can predict how the plot's going to unfold from the trailer. There's nothing new here but the familiar story is so well-done, so enjoyable to watch, so comforting in its predictability that you can't help but have a good time.  Gerard Butler may well have resuscitated his ailing career, and director Antoine Fuqua certainly makes his most accomplished film since TRAINING DAY, even if it's far less radical in its content. 

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is on release in the USA, France, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Kuwait, Macedonia, Serbia, Canada, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Iceland and Estonia. It opens on April 4th in Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Russia, Slovenia, Lithuania and Romania. It opens on April 12th in Singapore and Mexico; on April 18th in the UK, Belgium, Italy, New Zealand and Finland; on May 3rd in Sweden; on May 10th in the Netherlands and Norway; on May 16th in Argentina and on June 8th in Japan. 

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN has a running time of 120 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

A ruminative essay on THE DARK KNIGHT RISES - Spoilers replete

I respect Christopher Nolan as a film-maker. He applies an unusual degree of intelligence to genre films and he is not unafraid of radically rethinking a franchise.   At a technical level, I admire Nolan's unabashed commitment to delivering the highest quality, most immersive images to the movie-going audience.  That means that Nolan still shoots on film rather than digitally, with a preference for IMAX.  He does not shoot 3D movies because he understands that 3D technology, as it currently stands, cannot rationalise the point of convergence and the point of focus, and that this subconsciously brings us out of the movie.  Nolan is thus a man of integrity when it comes to his technical approach to film-making and is to be applauded.

All of which is pre-amble to the fact that despite going into this film with high hopes (though not over-hyped), I left disappointed.  It's by no means a bad movie - I loved the thematic material.  But as entertainment goes, the set piece action sequences were impressive technically but didn't set my pulse racing.  There were too many characters and story arcs - too many plot developments that felt unearned.  Ultimately I just didn't care.  

THEMATIC MATERIAL

To begin with the thematic material - which I found to be insightful and thought-provoking - the first major discussion was about the MORAL AMBIGUITY OF BENEVOLENT INTERVENTION.

The Gotham of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is a peaceful, almost banal place, in which the peace has been bought with a lie and repression.  Batman has taken the fall for Harvey Dent's death, allowing Commissioner Gordon to create support for the repressive Dent Act.  Running through the film is an intelligent discussion about how far with-holding choice from ordinary people can ever be a good thing.  Even if born of benevolence, were Batman and Gordon right to assume that they had to manufacture a "White Knight" to corral public opinion toward crime-fighting?  Shouldn't they have had faith in the public? And even if that faith were misplaced, what right did they have to distort the truth?  They certainly pay a harsh price for their machinations.  In the first hour of the movie we see that Gordon has driven away his family, is about to be sacked, and is lying severely wounded in hospital.  Batman's body has also failed him - his joints wrecked by ill-use and  prior injury.  Their bodies are symbols of moral decay - the literal manifestation of the corrosive impact of living a lie. Ultimately, their lie will be exposed by Bane, but it is welcomed as a liberation.  In a sense, Bane, Gordon and Batman are in agreement.  Founding a repressive peace on a lie was patronising and condescending.  The people deserved more respect.  Gordon and Wayne, agents of a standard patrician comic book world in which an elite makes interventions for the "ordinaries" do not have sufficient radical courage to say it out loud. But once the truth is out, they are all the more liberated for it. 

The theme of questioning the morality of benevolent intervention is further echoed in the use of weaponry in the film.  Wayne/Lucius Fox have developed an array of high spec machines to protect Gotham, as well as buying up inventions that could be harmful, such as the Clean Slate programme that Selina Kyle covets.  They've even mothballed a potential clean energy source because it could be used for military purposes at great cost to their company, and to the horror of do-gooding entrepreneur/militant terrorist Miranda Tate.  But it's those very machines that are used by Bane/Talia to wreak havoc on Gotham, with a particularly superb scene in which Bane literally blasts through into Lucius Fox's so-called secret R&D warehouse from his own under-ground lair.  

A radical question raised by this is whether Batman is himself the true antihero of this movie.  If Wayne/Batman hadn't developed/amassed these tools, would Gotham have been put in such danger?  In other words, just as its better for Wayne to leave his Batman identity behind (whether through death or through a daring autopilot assisted escape to Tuscany), is it also better for Gotham that Batman has left? To paraphrase Monty Python, what have superheroes ever done for us?  This, of course, brings us back to the plot arc that sees Batman ultimately confront the new head of The League of Shadows, Talia al Ghul. The League is basically an elite force of warriors who assume that their elite status gives them the right to direct history so as to "restore balance".  We do well to remember that Wayne was also a member of the League, and while he rejected it, he has kept many of their assumptions about the strong intervening in the lives of the ordinary to put them back on the right track.  The only difference is that he is benevolent rather than malevolent.  The discussion reminds me a bit of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  Maybe it's just bad to intervene whether with good or bad intentions.  Maybe freedom from crime - whether organised in the case of Gotham and the Dent Act - or individual in the case of Alex - is only legitimate if it is engineered by legitimate democratic means. 

The second major theme in the movie is ECONOMIC INEQUALITY. That theme is refracted in different ways by each of the three purported villians.  The trio of villains begins with Daggett - a caricature greedy capitalist bastard who wants to take over Wayne Enterprises.  He is utterly conventional in his view of society and inequality.  He takes it for granted that capitalism distributes material wealth unequally and will play whatever game is necessary to make sure he comes out on top.He never questions the ultimately sustainability of the social order in Gotham, even as he disrupts the social order in minor African nations. Daggett hires the catburgler, Selina Kyle, to steal Bruce Wayne's fingerprints so that he can place fictitious trades that bankrupt Wayne and force him from the board.  He also hires Bane - a super-strong mercenary associated with African coups and mythical stories of having escaped a hellish prison - to make the trades in at attack on the stock market. Of course, as history proves, capitalists who think they can control political zealots always lose control to them, and Bane quickly dispatches Daggett as casually as Daggett might initiate a mass lay-off.  

But Daggett's most significant hire, as far as I'm concerned, is his sidekick Stryver, played by the marvelous Burn Gorman (just watch him as Guppy in the BBC's recent Bleak House).  Stryver is to me the most authentic character in the whole movie - symbolic of most City workers I know, who do their jobs well, fulfil their briefs, never once questioning the morality of the entire system they are part of. They're the aggressively upwardly mobile investment banking analysts who perform their tasks with absolute efficiency and dexterity in bonus maximisation - meanwhile the economy is crashing down around their ears.  Stryver, clumsily named, symbolises that faith in the capitalist system, where if we all work that bit harder, get a better degree, kiss-ass for promotion, we too can ascend to the elite. 

Selina Kyle is a more conflicted villain. She portrays herself as a kind of Robin Hood, only robbing the rich to feed herself - never taking from people who can't afford it.  She is seen to have the most insight into the corrosive nature of extreme material inequality and is also, on a tangent, insightful about the impossibility of getting a clean slate in a digital world. There's a lot to like about her character, not least that the Nolan's have not written her as a typical quasi-comedic fetishistic sex-kitten.  She has clear purpose, no self-delusion, and provides the only "zingers" in the film.  And in a three-hour film that often feels ponderous, ill-paced, and ill-plotted, Selina's wit is a valuable commodity indeed. 

In the middle section of the film it is Bane who emerges as the true match for Batman and Wayne - with his militant anti-capitalist forced "liberation" of the masses inside their new prison-Gotham.  Wayne becomes financially, as well as physically crippled: Batman is intellectually and physically broken by Bane - the broken mask and broken back.  In that sense, Bane is (in this middle section at least) the complete inverse of The Joker.  The Joker was petrifying because had no back story, no motivation, no logic. How was one to negotiate with such a man? How was one to out-think him, when his every action was seemingly anarchic, random, impossible to predict?  By contrast, Bane is a rather conventional, if particularly well-armed left-wing militant, complete with almost anarchic redistribution of wealth and kangaroo courts trying the former elite.  A lot of the footage reminded me of documentaries and history books about the Russia after the 1917, with luxurious houses occupied by multiple families, arbitrary judgments - the revenge of the oppressed. Only Selina voices the fact that these are people too - these apartments used to belong to people.* 

The only thing that doesn't make since, given Bane's stated anti-capitalist popular protest, is the fact that he arms a device that will explode in five months no matter what.  There is a contradiction in his liberating the people only to destroy them which is unsatisfactorily resolved when we realise that he is really a stooge for Talia's nihilistic destruction. To that end, I felt that Bane's project, character and force as a super-villain had been blunted by turning him into, essentially, a pussy-whipped patsy.  All of which brings us nicely to what I perceive to be the major problems with the films narrative arcs, character development, plot twists and pacing.

NARRATIVE PROBLEMS

So here's my problem with THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: I didn't care. And I didn't care because there were too many characters doing too much stuff that was either illogical or unearned.  Let's start with Bruce Wayne.  Wayne starts as a broken man, mourning for the future he could have had with Rachel Dawes.  He meets earnest entrepreneur Miranda Tate at a charity ball, then she comes to his house, and within about three lines of dialogue he tumbles into bed with her, despite the whole Rachel-brooding-thing.  I didn't buy it.  And then Selina Kyle is suddenly magically in love with Bruce, just because he "believes in her", kissing him passionately before he flies off with a bomb.  We're meant to be massively moved by this but come on - when did this love triangle have time to be established?  When did we, as an audience, get time to buy into this? And when did Selina  and Bruce fall sufficiently in love to end up together in Tuscany?!  

I came to the end of the film with the strong impression that this would've been a far better movie if Miranda/Talia simply hadn't been a character. This would've prevented the inclusion of a forced rom-com cheesy, unearned love triangle. It would also not have undermined the logical purity of Bane's mission as well as cutting of his metaphorical balls. It just didn't sit right with me that this hulking intellect - the first real match for Wayne/Batman - would basically be a love-sick pup, although I acknowledge that his tears at the end could've been because his pain meds were cut off as the mask was ripped, rather than an emotional response to Talia/Miranda rehearsing her back story.

Next problem - why are we introduced to so many small characters who have no bearing on the plot, distract attention and bloat the run-time?  Do we really need to see Stryver pushed out onto the ice? Do we really need to see the Scarecrow sitting in judgment?  Do we really need to see Matthew Modine's incompetent cop turn coward?  Do we really need the little orphan Robin story - and what a completely obvious and facile plot twist THAT was -  for any reason other than as franchise-fodder for Warner Brothers? All of these digressions took time away from Gordon and Fox. I wanted to see more of Gordon suffering for his part in the Dent lie. I wanted to see more establishment of the Love Triangle storyline if that was indeed the direction they were going in.

Final problem, so many micro choices didn't make sense.  If you invent a massively powerful energy source you have to be an idiot not to realise that any power source can be used for good and evil.  Why act all surprised when some scientist creates the trigger?  And if you have all this stuff that's dangerous why not just destroy it. Why keep it hanging around just in case you might at some unspecified future date be able to use it safely.  How come Bruce Wayne can strap on a super knee brace and suddenly run around like everything's all okay? (As I'm recovering from a fractured ankle right now - that really rubbed me up the wrong way).  How come Bruce can reach peak physical fitness in one training montage and then hop, skip and jump back from Jodhpur to North America and penetrate a locked down island, all the while secretly plotting to fake his own death (and falling in love with Selina)?  You get my drift....

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

Perhaps the best thing about THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is that it is technically accomplished.  Wally Pfister's IMAX photography is superb.  But there are still two problems. I hated Hans Zimmer's over-bearing score.  And I found Bane's mask problematic.  His speech was too indistinct and it unfairly turned Tom Hardy into a Vader parody.  Poor chap.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is on global release.

*Of course, many commentators have drawn the obvious contemporary analogy between Bane's radical condemnation of capitalism and the Occupy Movement.  All I can say to that is that I respect the logic of Bane's argument, but I've  never seen anything like such a cogent programme from Occupy. 

iPad Round-Up 1 - CONAN THE BARBARIAN

The original Arnold Schwarzenegger CONAN movies, based on Robert E Howard's pulp fiction, were given a kind of grandiose Nietzchean purity of purpose and bleakness of vision by director John Milius. This meant that however ridiculous Schwarzenegger's physique, no matter how absurd the dialogue, they were hard to laugh at, and have become as cult-ish and praised as the source novels.  By contrast, Marcus Nispel's (FRIDAY THE 13th) risible remake is a critical and commercial failure - a movie that is superficial and mindless and hammy.  Most of all, it shows us how much charisma Schwarzenegger had - that while we may have seen him as ridiculous, he never did.  He could stand there, covered in furs with a ridiculous helmet on, and just own the space of Conan. Jason Mamoa, in this new Conan, has the muscles, but not the self-belief. Shorn of Howard's philosophy and Arnie's charisma, the resulting movie becomes a stupid, flaccid piece of sword and sorcery buffoonery - not well thought out enough to be accuses of misogyny - mindless to the point of coma.

The story is simple enough (no excuse, however, for making a mindless film).  Young Conan (Leo Howard) lives with his wise father (Ron Perlman) in a kind of magic-induced pre-medieval Europe of rampaging hordes and fierce warlords.  His family is butchered by Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), an evil warlord trying to gather the pieces of the Mask of Acheron in order to resurrect his wife, a powerful witch, and rule Hyborea.   Years later, an adult Conan (Momoa) journeys through Hyborea with his friend Artus (Nonso Anozie) and finds himself helping a beautiful princess called Tamara (Rachel Nichols) whose blood is needed for the ritual that will activate the mask.  Thus setting up a final conflict between Conan and Zym, his weird-ass daughter Marique (Rose McGowan). 

This film was in development purgatory for nearly a decade, and it shows. It's the unloved ginger stepkid, with directors like the Wachoskis, Robert Rodriguez and Brett Ratner attached. You can see the sliding quality as the film was passed round, and eventually the movie ended up with a relatively unknown horror director and a former music video DP (Thomas Kloss).  Is it any wonder then that the resulting film feels so cheap, so superficial, so ridiculous?  Producers might think that you don't need a great director for pulp material. But I would argue that the more pulpy the material, the harder the director needs to work, the better he needs to be, to prevent the film descending into nonsense.  One can only wonder what voice-over artist, Morgan Freeman, felt when the finished movie was released.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN was released in summer 2011 and is now available to rent and own.

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month - THICK AS THIEVES aka THE CODE

Predictable, derivative straight-to-DVD heist flick, directed by Mimi Leder (PAY IT FORWARD DEEP IMPACT) and starring a pay-check motivated Morgan Freeman and a mis-cast Antonio Banderas. Freeman plays an elderly thief "Ripley" (winks to Highsmith), who recruits the younger, inexperienced, Banderas (youth signalled by wearing a hoodie.) Meanwhile, Banderas' character is having an affair with a Russian chick (Radha Mitchell). No double-cross or double-identity is left unturned, and the ending is ludicrously schmaltzy. Ted Humphrey's script is poorly conceptualised and the dialogue is hammy. Bulgaria makes a poor stand-in for New York. Mimi Leder's shooting style is over-stylised. And the cast is uniformly too old and ill-motivated. Avoid.

THICK AS THIEVES went straight to DVD in the UK and the US earlier this year.

THE DARK KNIGHT - The Emperor's New Clothes

This review is replete with spoilers.

THE DARK KNIGHT opens with a suitably moody image of the Batman icon but soon cuts to a very modern, bright picture of the top of a skyscraper in a contemporary US city. It's as though Nolan wants to separate himself completely from Burton's urban gothic. Or maybe he just wants to show that a year after BATMAN BEGINS, Gotham has been cleaned up. So instead of the beautifully designed grunge, overland metros and grafitti of BEGINS, THE DARK KNIGHT looks like a sleek thriller. Indeed, the opening bank heist reminded me of INSIDE MAN more than BEGINS or the Burton movies. It was all very anonymous and rather disappointing.

Half an hour into the movie we get our first scene of The Joker having fun with emasculated Gotham mafiosi. Heath Ledger is captivating: a scene with a pencil is shockingly funny. Finally, I feel like I'm being entertained. I even overlook all his precious lip-smacking.

We then wander around for another twenty minutes. The familiar characters are introduced. Michael Caine and Lucius Fox are wise-cracking and wise respectively as Alfred and Lucius Fox. There's a lot of time-wasting in Hong Kong and some really rather nasty off-hand comments about buying American rather than Chinese. I really don't like the inference. Batman forcefully extradites a mafiosi money-launderer from Hong Kong and dumps him at the gate of Lieutenant Gordon. Gary Oldman - now there's a subtle performance! If anyone deserves praise it's Oldman. Just look at the flicker of a cheeky smile as he appraises Batman's gift. Later, look at him plead for the lives of his loved ones. Now there's real emotion. Contrast it with Maggie Gyllenhaal (an actress I have much respect for.) She never convinces as a lawyer or as a woman torn between two men. She has no chemistry with Aaron Eckhart's clean-cut crusading DA, Harvey Dent. She's even less convincing in her scenes with Bruce Wayne. Watch her tell him she'll be there for him. Could she be more non-chalant? She plays it like she's trying to remember where she put her keys.

Fifty minutes in and The Joker's back on the scene with a truly frightening window scene. We're back to the excitement. He's an anarchist and he wants us to play his game. He even teases us with shifting versions of his origins story. (A little rich from a director who just spent a whole film giving us Batman's!) Note that in my humble opinion you could have cut into this film at minute forty-five and not have missed a thing.

Then we're on again with all the crime-thriller shenanigans. Gordon and the Batman want to bring down the mafia via its money launderer so they take their eyes off The Joker. Bruce Wayne goes all CSI. Blah blah blah. The director attempts to pull the rug from underneath the audience a couple of times. We all figure out what's going on immediately. Like they'd let Gordon die. Of course, once we know he didn't die we know Rachel really has died. They couldn't pull it off twice. Let's stop dancing round each other and get to the action!

One hour and thirty minutes into this film we finally get a proper showdown with the only truly spectacular action sequence involving a truck flipping over.

One hour and forty five minutes into this film and we reach a natural end. It's truly brilliant. Dark, unresolved, nihilistic, The Joker's head out of the car window, laughing at us all. This is like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK only meaner.

Then we get another interminable forty-five minutes in which we basically get the origin story of Twoface, and a terribly rushed unwinding of his story. By this point, I'm fidgeting in my seat. I'm frustrated because Two-face's story should be more interesting than The Joker or BATMAN. After all, THE JOKER is an anarchist. There's no character development. Batman starts off conflicted and ends conflicted. He gets precious little screen time and he's just not that interesting here. But Harvey Dent could've been played like the fall of Michael Corleone. Except, Nolan shoe-horns his character arc into an unwanted epilogue rather than making it the strong start to the next movie. I esepcially disliked Two-face's make-up. The whole point about Batman is that the characters are normal people who are mentally disturbed. So Batman is just a man in a suit. The Joker is just a man with freakish scars and make-up. But Two-face looks so deformed he breaks through my willing suspension of disbelief. Less would've been more.

And, finally, what's with the crude attempt to get into the politics of The Patriot Act and the Ethics 101 practical philosophy class? The conversation between Batman and Lucius Fox about the ethics of wire-tapping to catch a terrorist is ham-fisted. It's as though Nolan is desperately trying to be political and of his time. But these sorts of political allegories are important and require a more profound treatment than a tacked on five minute scene.

Similarly, the philosophical dilemma with the two boats struck me as ridiculous. One boat is full of convicts: the other is full of ordinary citizens. Each boat has five minutes to blow the other one up or they both blow up. Nolan decides to have both the criminals and the citizens act with superlative integrity, despite a bit of whining from some of the people. How unrealistic is that? More to the point, it's completely out of keeping with the dark, subversive tone that he's trying to go for with the rest of the film. In fact, it's pure sentimental schmaltz. The Joker comes to spread anarchy and fear. But we good citizens won't play dice because, at heart, we love our fellow man. Please. The whole point of this film is that "with a few sticks of dynamite" The Joker can turn the most moral man in Gotham, Harvey Dent, into a pychopathic killer. Come on Nolan: make up your mind.

THE DARK KNIGHT isn't a terrible film but it is flawed. I didn't enjoy it except in brief flashes. It's overlong, and yet feels rushed. It has a brilliant cast, and yet feels poorly-acted. It's a comic book film but it films like a cliched movie thriller. Yes, Ledger is one of the highlights, but I've seen better performances this year. Indeed, I've seen arguably better performances in this film, not least that of Gary Oldman.

So, in the immortal words of PUBLIC ENEMY, Don't Believe The Hype.

THE DARK KNIGHT opened in Iceland, Argentina, Australia, Greece, Taiwan, Brazil, the US and Venezuela on the weekend of July 18th. It opens in Egypt, Italy, Nroway, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Turkey and the UK the weekend of July 25th. It opens in August in Belgiu,, Japan, France, Spain and Germany and opens in Russia on September 11th.

WANTED - offensive, derivative, stupid

WANTED is the kind of unintelligent macho bullshit that appeals to the lowest common denominator. In particular, it'll appeal to every pathetic geek who dreamed of being swept into a more exciting life by a hot chick. In this case the geek is the newly buff James McAvoy, who despite the body-building remains far more convincing as the nervous schmuck than as the hard-as-nails assassin. The hot chick is Angelina Jolie, who does nothing more than look cool. Why does a woman of such obvious intelligence and acting ability persist in such roles? Morgan Freeman plays the arrogant prick directing the group of assassins in picking off seemingly innocent people. Apparently it's all okay because the Loom of Fate says so. I was pretty disturbed that this movie took an hour to even ask the question of whether murder is ever justified and by how quickly it brushed it off.

Maybe I'm taking all this too seriously? Let's consign our brains and ethical sense to the boot of the car, and go on pure adrenaline. How does WANTED fare qua action flick? As with all of Timur Bekmambetov's movies, the visual style is MATRIX-lite. It's all bullet-speed photography. The sole innovation is to have the bullets curve. A-HA!!! I'm sorry but that does not fill a 2 hour movie. What you don't get with WANTED is a fully fleshed alternate world that contextualises all the violence. WANTED is about beating the crap out of people. Period. NIGHT and DAY WATCH have higher stakes, and more respect for old-fashioned stuff like proper plotting and dialogue and emotional pay-offs. By contrast, the supposedly emotional plot-twist in WANTED just looks like a cheap rip-off of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

Basically, this is a big budget blockbuster aimed at mindless adrenaline junkies. It's got a big cast and a big marketing budget. But don't let that fool you. It's no less puerile and fascist than the widely derided NEVER BACK DOWN.

Don't believe the hype.

WANTED is on release in the UK, Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, Singapore, Slovalia, Slovenia, South Korea, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Lithuania, Panama, Poland, Turkey and the USA. It opens next weekend in Italy and Venezuela. It opens on July 16th in Indonesia, Belgium, Egypt and France. It opens on July 31st in Romania and Australia. WANTED opens in August in Mexico, Braziln and Denmark, and in September in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Japan.

GONE BABY GONE - stunning as a mood piece, less convincing as a thriller

GONE BABY GONE is a thriller about a little girl who is abducted from her home in working class Boston. Her mother is a junkie who is evidently an irresponsible mother, but her aunt and uncle are apparently good people who call in the press, the police and private detectives Patrick and Angie. The resulting investigation fails as a thriller. One can only blame Dennis Lehane's source novel and screen-writers Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard's unwillingness to re-work the implausible denouement and character motivations. Sadly, the unconvincing resolution of the case mars the final forty minutes of an otherwise brilliant film.

The brilliance lies in Ben Affleck's ability to render a working class community without being patronising or superficial. The movie feels authentic in its sights and sounds even as the plot gets increasingly hard to swallow. Younger brother Casey delivers a deeply affecting performance as a detective trying to do the right thing; Ed Harris is charismatic as the jaded older cop; and Amy Ryan pulls of her role as the junkie mother well, though I doubt it was really one of the five best female performances of 2007. In smaller roles, Amy Madigan is superb as the pious aunt "Bea". Is all this enough to compensate for the weak plot? Yes, but it's a disappointment all the same.

GONE BABY GONE was released in the US, Canada, Spain, Panama, Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Germany, the Philippines, Colombia, Denmark, Belgium and France in 2007. It was released earlier in 2008 in Israel, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Estonia, South Africa, Sweden, Venezuela, Greece, Singapore, Romania, Turkey, Portugal, Poland, Italy, Australia, and Iceland. GONE BABY GONE was meant to play London 2007 and to be released last year but was pulled because of sensitivities surrounding the abduction of Madeleine McCann. It is now on release in the UK but is also available on DVD.

THE BUCKET LIST - shameless schmaltz

THE BUCKET LIST is a horrible, lazy, manipulative movie and all the high-octane talent on the poster should be ashamed of having taken the pay check. Jack Nicholson plays a cantankerous old bastard just waiting to have his heart melted by Morgan Freeman's smug old wise man. It's like the script-writer simply spliced every other movie Nicholson and Freeman had starred in over the past decade. The two old men meet-cute in a cancer ward and indulge themselves in a few month's of global travel in their dying days. Apparently, being terminally ill with cancer is no bar to hiking in the Himalayas. Naturally, Nicholson learns the evils of his capitalist bastard ways and delivers one of those final act speeches that has us tearing up. That is, if you are able to supress your gag reflex.

THE BUCKET LIST is already on release in the US, Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Israel, Colombia, Spain, Turkey, Venezuela, the Philippines, Argentina, Slovakia and the UK. It opens next week in Australia, Hong Kong, Portugal and Brazil. It opens the following week in France. THE BUCKET LIST opens in March in Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, the Netherlands and Singapore. It opens in April in Finland, Norway and Sweden and opens in Russia on June 5th.

FEAST OF LOVE - surprisingly moving

I can see why some critics have labelled FEAST OF LOVE contrived and saccharine, but all the same I warmed to the lead characters and was genuinely moved by it. I think it's because the lead actors have such warmth and charm and play it so straight that this trumps the somewhat obvious script.

The movie is a slice of life from a small university town in America. Morgan Freeman plays a happily married man called Harry Stevenson who's grieving for his son. He's friends with an open-hearted coffee house owner called Bradley played by Greg Kinnear. Bradley will be deserted by a sapphic first wife (Selma Blair) and a calculating adulterous second (Radha Mitchell). It's not that he's blameless, but he does end up battered by love. Bradley also employs a young kid called Oscar (Toby Hemingway) who finds love at first sight with a girl called Chloe (Alexa Davelos). Greg Kinnear and Alex Davelos in particular are great in their roles. We really believe in them and want them to be happy. And I totally bought Harry's quasi-paternal relationship with Chloe.

Now I realise that these sort of inter-linking can narratives can be a bit too cute and neat. And I think that if you're going to see FEAST OF LOVE you have to make a decision to go with that. But there is some grit and grime. I love that the writers don't shy away from the sexual component to love, and it's nice to see a movie celeberate loving sex as opposed to just lust. It's also nice to see a mature relationship. I also like the fact that we do see the highs and lows of love. Altogether, this is a strangely realistic and yet sweet movie!

FEAST OF LOVE is on release in the US and opens in the UK on October 5th. It opens in Portugal on October 18th, in Israel on October 25th, in Spain on October 31st, in Germany on January 24th and in Norway in February 2008.

EVAN ALMIGHTY - a mis-marketed film

EVAN ALMIGHTY isn't so much a bad film as a bad comedy. It's just been mis-marketed. The adverts make it look like a Robin Williams-style family comedy. The title makes you think it's going to be an adult romantic-comedy with a goofy every-man magicking his girlfriend's tits bigger. As it turns out there's barely a laugh in the whole ninety minutes. What humour there is consists in birds pooping on people and a few sharp comments from Wanda Sykes. Even the Daily Show sucks in this alternate universe.

So I didn't laugh. But I did rather enjoy the film as a rather hackneyed but nonetheless heart-warming story of personal growth. Steve Carrell plays Evan Baxter, a narcissistic Congressman who's neglecting his wife and three sons and lives in a gated community that was built over a beautiful valley. He's also about to support an evil politician (John Goodman) in his bid to turn protected forests into prime real estate. Then God (Morgan Freeman) asks Evan to build an Ark for the coming flood and Evan discovers the joys of hard work, family bonding and doing the right thing. That's it. It's pretty simple despite the notoriously expensive CGI whistles and bells. But heart-warming and charming all the same.

EVAN ALMIGHTY is available to rent and own.

Movies I won't be watching this weekend

Over this side of the pond, we have this little thing called the World Cup which means that my attentions have been diverted to supporting England and trouncing all-comers in the Metro Fantasy Football League. However, here are a few movies that I would NOT watch this weekend even if I were at liberty to do so. I know it is unethical to review movies you haven’t seen but seriously, it’s a racing certainty that the following will suck ass:

AN UNFINISHED LIFE: Helmer Lasse Hallstrom specialises in these saccharine sub-Ron Howard weepies. In this case we have J-Lo showing her range as a single mother who runs away from an abusive boyfriend. She seeks refuge with her father-in-law, played by Robert Redford. The Redford character blames the J-Lo character for his son’s death and has isolated himself from the world. However, he does have his trusty side-kick – Morgan Freeman – who once again trots out his tired act as the sage, wizened best friend. You know how this plot is going to unwind even before you step into the cinema. The young grand-daughter is going to revive Redford’s passion for life. He will come to form a relationship with his daughter-in-law. All things will be well. I have no doubt that this flick will be well-acted, well-shot and suitably lyrical. But seriously, what is the point of another movie that rolls off the head and heart like glycerine?

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT. Believe me when I say that I am all about beautiful people driving around in fast cars. However, there is something a little bit hokey in the producers restaging the same move for the third time but in Japan just to cash in on the supposed cool-ness of the youth scene there. Indeed, I suspect that this flick is the cinematic equivalent of Gwen Stefani. Moreover, I also suspect that this flick falls into the same category as DOOM. Blowing shit up is fun, but I’d much rather do it myself. So, instead of wasting 100 minutes on TOKYO DRIFT, I faithfully promise all my readers to devote 100 minutes to playing Gran Turismo. Nice.

IMAGINE ME AND YOU: If I see another lame attempt to rip-off the success of FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL I may have to kill myself. People seem to think that any British romantic-comedy featuring well-heeled Londoners in morning dress will be a guaranteed hit: never mind bothering to do anything so obvious as to write an actual joke. The latest spin on the formula is to make the love interest Sapphic and I certainly applaud the fact that we can now have homosexual storylines as the central plot-line in main-stream comedies. However, I suspect that novelty aside, this movie will turn out to be another unfunny, unexciting damp squib.

Anyways, what do I know? Literally nothing as I have not seen these three films. If you’ve seen them and would recommend them, let me know.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN - slick, funny, gun-totin' awesomeness

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is not a pantheon movie but it has an awful lot going for it. Those looking for above-average Friday night pop-corn entertainment would do better to see this than the god-awful alleged satire, DATE MOVIE.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN has a fairly convoluted plot, but it is by no means as opaque or incredible as some reviewers would have you believe. Slevin Kalevra is the oddly-named hero of the piece. He comes into New York to stay with his friend Nick Fisher, but finds an empty apartment and a kooky neighbour in the form of Lucy Liu. It turns out that Nick was in hock to two warring underworld chiefs: The Boss and The Rabbi. Each brings him in and asks for a “favour”. These favours are not of the borrowing-a-cup-of-sugar variety: they are of the Don-Corleone variety. The movie then follows Slevin paying off “his” gambling debts with the police and a hitman on his tail.

The first good thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that it has a genuinely funny script, with the kind of word-play and love of a quick one-liner that you find in Tarantino movies pre-Kill Bill. As an added bonus, cine-literate viewers will love all the movie and TV references – which flip from Hitchcock to Columbo by way of the Schmoo. The movie is full of the kind of conversation you have with your mates in the pub. First time screenwriter Jason Slimovic is clearly one to watch.

The second really good thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that despite being really very funny, especially in the first half hour, it does then flip into darker territory. It is not afraid to show the good-looking hero do bad things, and despite the re-shot ending, has a more noir-ish feel than the standard Hollywood guns’n’ass fare.

The third super-cool thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that it looks awesome. This is not simply because Josh Hartnet spends the first forty minutes in a towel, although I am not complaining about that either. It is because the production designer has taken the heavily patterned wallpaper and kitsch chandeliers from Soho House New York and painted the town with it beyond all sense and taste. If I ruled the world, this is what it would like. Like a seedy seventies nightclub the morning after too much scotch.

The fourth wicked thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that it is really well acted and for the most part by people playing against type. Josh Hartnett partially redeems himself from the travesty that was PEARL HARBOUR as Slevin. Lucy Liu, hard-assed lawyer in Ally McBeal and gang-land warrior in Kill Bill, plays the charming, ditzy GIRL NEXT DOOR. I loved her in THREE NEEDLES and I this, and wonder she isn’t getting/taking on more work. Morgan Freeman, all-round cool, good guy in countless flicks, plays a vengeful mob boss. And best of all we have SIR Ben Kingsley as opposing mobster, Schlomo. Kingsley morphs together his role as Jewish thief, Fagin, in Polanski’s OLIVER TWIST and Cockney psycho Don Logan in SEXY BEAST. The performance is restrained and absolutely convincing. In one especially devastating scene, where he hears some terrible news, just look at his face. It’s an acting master-class all if its own.

The final awesome thing is that the director, Paul McGuigan, of GANGSTER No. 1 fame, really knows how to make a visual impact. The way in which he uses the camera brings so much style and energy to the screen. Guy Ritchie wishes he were this cool.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is currently on release in the UK and opens in the US on March 31st. There are no scheduled release dates for Continental Europe.

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS - not a patch on Attenborough

There is not a whole lot I want to say about this documentary. It shows a bunch of Emperor penguins making the annual migration to Antartica where they mate. That's it. The penguins look cute. The scenery looks majestic. The cinematography is worth a look alone. However, you do have to contend with a ridiculous narration from Morgan Freeman which ascribes all sorts of human emotions to the penguins. This will jar to British audiences raised on a diet of scrupulously scientific natural history programmes by Sir David Attenborough. So on that level, while it succeeds as a visual spectacle, THE MARCH OF THE PENGUINS fails as a documentary.

As a side issue, THE MARCH OF THE PENGUINS has become the second-highest grossing documentary in US history after FAHRENHEIT 9-11. This is largely because a bunch of American Christian critics thinks that the movie underlines the divine hand in creation and the need to get back to fundamentally Christian values like monogamy and raising your kids. I have no problem with people reading messages onto movies, but I would just like to point out that being a responsible parent is not a uniquely Christian, or even religious, virtue. Moreover, penguins can also be gay.

THE MARCH OF THE PENGUINS is on general worldwide release.