ANT-MAN

ANT-MAN.  Gotta admit, not a massive comic book fan, never heard of him.  But, seeing how great Marvel have been in reviving properties and having loved GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY despite no prior knowledge of the characters, I had high hopes. And with Paul Rudd cast in the lead role, I was expecting a similarly fun-filled, effects heavy action movie. But no. While ANT-MAN is certainly full of special effects and enhances and extends the Marvel Universe, it's the most unmemorable entry in the franchise. This is actually quite an achievement given that it stars Michael Douglas who retains his charisma.  But the problem is that the movie just isn't funny  - and in not being funny it wastes Paul Rudd. Worse still, the movie isn't interesting. It feels like it's being played exactly by the book with nothing new, nothing subversive, no real chemistry between any of the characters.  All of this made sense when I recalled that ANT-MAN was originally meant to be written and directed by Edgar Wright - a script that Joss Whedon called the best Marvel movie ever.

jOBS

jOBS - the too cutely titled Steve Jobs biopic - is a ruthlessly efficient but frustratingly unenquiring film that is ultimately saved by the convincing central performance by Ashton Kutcher.  Kutcher goes beyond his striking similar resemblance to adopt the loping walking and speaking style of the iconic computer developer, and allied with superb production design and authentic Los Altos locations, this make the film compelling despite its stylistic problems.  These must rest with the director Joshua Michael Stern (SWING VOTE) and debut screenwriter Michael Whiteley..   To be sure, they don't sugarcoat Jobs - they show his immediate and early ripping off of fellow collaborators - his harsh rejection of his daughter - his frustrating single-mindedness - but they never investigate it.  Why - on the first deal they did together - did Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) off?  Where did he get the drive and knowledge to cut such a financially astute deal with venture capitalist Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney)?  Why did he cut out early collaborators such as Daniel Kottke (Lukas Hass) out of the lucrative Apple IPO?  Why did he deny he was his daughter's father for so long?  And why did he then recant?  This latter issue is perhaps the most frustrating.  In a movie that uses Jobs' eviction from Apple a major psychological turning point it's incredibly annoying to reunite with him a few years later where he's apparently turned into a doting father, husband and zen father. 

So if we're not getting psychological depth here, what are we getting?  A fairly straightforward corporate history of Apple. It reads as follows.  Woz is the IT genius who creates the PC but Jobs is the marketing and design guru who sells it to the financiers and then to Wall Street.  His search for perfection and naivety leads him to a position where the greedy capitalist CEO John Scully (Matthew Modine) forces him out, causes a personal crisis for Jobs and a corporate crisis for Apple. Years later he's called back, annoints his design successor Jonny Ive (Giles Matthey) and announces the design of the iPod.  The rest is final credit success and deliberately avoided death.  I'm no expert on Apple's corporate history so I can't tell you if the account is broadly accurate and fair, but it IS compelling, if a little bit TV movie of the week.  And that's how I'd advise you watch this: on the small screen.

JOBS has a running time of 128 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

JOBS played Sundance 2013 and was released earlier this year in the USA, Singapore, Canada, Turkey, France, Argentina, Kuwait, Portugal, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Australia, Israel, South Korea, Brazil, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iceland, Croatia, Serbia, Thailand, Estonia, Greece, Hong Kong, Finland, Lithuania, Spain, Taiwan, Colombia, Latvia, Mexico, Bangladesh, Macedonia, Japan, Norway, Peru, Sweden, Italy and Chile. It does not yet have a UK release date.

Ankle-frack Round-Up 2 - THIS MEANS WAR

Forced into house arrest after a particularly nasty ankle injury, I have decided to finally get around to reviewing all those releases that I didn't get round to originally. Next up, THIS MEANS WAR.....

THIS MEANS WAR is a rom-com so excrescent that my use of the word excrescent contains more intelligence than its entire run-time. It's a confection so plastic and manufactured, so alien to any actual authentic emotion, that its the cinematic equivalent of a children's brightly coloured bouncing ball. The sets and locations are perfectly manicured and designed, as are the three lead characters - all far better actors than this lame story deserves.  

Reese Witherspoon plays one of those bouncy vapid heroines that she so brilliantly satirized in LEGALLY BLONDE.  In the ultimate risible movie set-up, she starts dating two hot guys - Chris Pine (STAR TREK) and Tom Hardy (THE DARK KNIGHT RISES) who just happen to be both best friends and spies.  Cue lots of magical dates (who goes to a circus for Christ's sake?!); awkward Hollywood dancing around the fact that Little Miss Perfect might be banging two guys; and stupidass skits revolving around spy-cams and gadgetry. It is neither edifying nor entertaining - a transparently shameless cash-in.  I discard this film - even for McG, this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. 

THIS MEANS WAR was released in February 2012 and is available to rent and own.

THE UGLY TRUTH - joyless

Despite re-teaming the director and writers of LEGALLY BLONDE, this new Katherine Heigl vehicle/rom-com is utterly mirthless. Heigl plays a character all too familiar from recent rom-coms- the frosty career-bitch who just needs to get laid by a Real Man (Gerard Butler). It's the same basic set-up as THE ACCIDENTAL HUSBAND, THE PROPOSAL et al. She's a TV producer on a dismal morning show - he's the misogynistic guest-host brought in to boost ratings. He bets that if she can follow his advice, she'll get her dream man - if he loses, he'll quit the show. What then follows is an entirely predictable, entirely mirthless affair. Heigl simply does not have the physical comedy skills to pull of a scene where she's wearing vibrating pants in a restaurant. To see it done better check out Jenna Elfman in KEEPING THE FAITH. As for Gerard Butler, he really needs to work on his American accent because at present it's stuck in Scotland. Grim, grim, grim.

THE UGLY TRUTH is on release in the US, UK and Australia. It is released in Portugal on August 20th and in France, Argentina and New Zealand on August 27th. It is released on September 4th in Denmark, Mexico, Norway and Romania. It is released on September 11th in Spain and Sweden. It is released on September 17th in the Czech Republic, Greece, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, Brazil, Finland and Iceland. It is released on September 23rd in Belgium, Egypt and Bulgaria. It is released on October 1st in Germany and the Netherlands and on October 9th in Estonia and South Africa. It is released in Italy on November 27th.

21 - far less interesting than you might have hoped

21 is a movie about a bunch of MIT math geeks who go to Vegas, count cards, make a pile of money, but then incur the ire of their svengali-like professor and a Vegas security guard. And no, I'm not spoiling the plot. The trailer does that already, and even if it didn't, you'd figure out all the plot twists well before they occured. The movie evidently wants to dazzle us with a story of an improbable rise to wealth and equally precipitous fall; it wants us to enjoy the vicarious ride from geek to cool. Let's all buy in to that Ocean's Eleven glamour! Sadly, it doesn't live up to its billing. Like I said before, this is mainly because the story - as bizarre as it is - simply isn't interesting enough to hold our attention for two hours. How many times can we really get interested in a geek becoming popular, being mean to his childhood friends, losing everything and learning what "really matters"? The narrative arc contains no elements of surprise and the supporting characters are insufficiently drawn. Added to this, beyond Jim Sturgess in the title role, the rest of the cast was pretty unimpressive, not least Kevin Spacey in one of his trademark over-bearing, hammy performances.

21 is already on release in the US, Israel, Brazil and Germany and opens this weekend in the UK, Greece, Iceland, Spain and Sweden. It opens on the 17th in Belgium, Argentina, Russia, Estonia and Italy. It opens on April 25th in Turkey. It opens in May in Portugal, Australia, Finland and Japan. It opens in June n France, Singapore, Mexico, Norway and the Netherlands.

AWAKE - a one trick pony

Debutant writer-director Joby Harold constructs a thriller with a fairly obvious plot, even if you haven't seen the trailer. If you have seen the trailer, there's really no point seeing the movie, because the entire plot is given away: fain will you look for further plot twists. If you haven't, I guess you could check this out on DVD: it's probably not worth a trip to the cinema.

The premise is that a man is given a general anaesthetic, but while he looks numb he's actually still awake. As a result, he can hear that the surgeons giving him a heart transplant are actually plotting to kill him. How do you alert the authorities when you're apparently out cold?

Hayden Christensen, Terrence Howard and Jessica Alba do a decent enough job as the victim, his surgeon and his love interest respectively, but the only stand-out performance is from Lena Olin as the victim's mother. It's a pleasure to see her back on the screen.

AWAKE was released in the USA last year and was released in Russia, Portugal, Israel, Turkey, South Korea, Thailand and Spain earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and Brazil and opens later in Paril in Singapore and Iceland. It opens in Argentina in May and in Belgium and the Netherlands in September.