MEG 2: THE TRENCH*

MEG 2: THE TRENCH is a piss-poor dull AF action movie sequel that delivers zero wow-action moments and zero humour. I was hoping for some silly mindless "Jason Statham beats up a giant shark" nonsense. I love The Stath. Instead I was trapped for over an hour in a pitch-black sea scape as our group of shark-haters tried to get back to the surface. It gave me Titan Submersible heebie-jeebies. Too Soon! They squabble and quibble and half of them don't make it but we don't care. And to literally nobody's surprise it turns out that the massive corporation funding the research is EEEEVILLL. Hence Sienna Guillory doing a Parker Posey impression with a side-order of Cruella DeVill.  But I still had hope. Once we got to the ocean's surface I was all ready for the giant shark to eat dumb fat tourists and some White Lotus style social satire. But no. The writers aren't witty enough for the social satire and yes some people get eaten but way not enough.  It's so weird thinking that director Ben Wheatley used to make weird low budget black and white historical horrors like A FIELD IN ENGLAND. For my money he has produced progressively worse films the larger the budget he has been given.  Let it end.

MEG 2: THE TRENCH has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated PG-13. It opened in early August.

HIGH-RISE - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

Yeah so, I love J G Ballard and High Rise is one of my favourite novels, and I really love Ben Wheatley's gonzo horror craziness, having done retrospective podcasts on his earlier films.  Tom Hiddleston is obviously not just a great actor but a nice guy.  So I was super excited about this new film.  The problem may have been high expectations. The problem may be that High Rise is a high concept novel and these can sometimes come across as flat on screen. But whatever the reason, HIGH-RISE was utterly underwhelming.

The movie, and indeed the novel on which it is pretty faithfully based, are set in 1970s England - another time of deep social inequality and financial disruption.  The high concept is that an architect has built a high-rise apartment block complete with all amenities - swimming pool, school, gym, supermarket - so that one need never leave.  And in classic English fashion, the social hierarchy is perfectly preserved inside - lower orders in floors 1 to 10, middle classes to floor 35 and upper classes above, with the architect as God in the penthouse.

THE GOOB - LFF14 - Day Eight

Writer-director Guy Myhill's debut feature, THE GOOB, is a beautifully shot, authentic coming-of-age movie set in the British countryside. It features a typically superb and sinister performance from Sean Harris as the jealous bully Womack - a man so insecure that he even goes after the feckless Goob when Goob manages to pull one of the many girls that Womack likes.  The Goob is in fact a 16 year goofy kid called Taylor played by Liam Springs.  Scenes with him and his brother and best mate are full of exuberant mischief and perfectly capture that mildly anarchic spirit of our childhood summers.  As they caper about the English countryside we can't help but back the underdogs against Womack's control.  Indeed, one of the best parts of the movie is an extended pre-credits set-piece where the two brothers nick Womack's precious car keys and go on a joyride. Of course it goes epically wrong when Womack finds out, and this sets us up for the spiralling confrontation that caps the film.  In between we have one of the best uses of music in a film, and the wonderful energy of the teenage actors, not least Oliver Kennedy who steals the show with his cameo role as Elliott.  One of the joys of the film is seeing how, in a way, vulnerable Womack is.  The kids are just so cheeky that even he can't dent their fun.

Overall, THE GOOB has pace, energy, authenticity, real laughs and a lot of insight into how domineering personalities operate.  It's a tremendously assured 

THE GOOB has a running time of 86 minutes.  The movie played London 2014. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

INKHEART - disappointingly dull

Bookish Mortimer Folchart (Brendan Fraser) and his teenage daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett) have a rare gift. They are "Silvertongues". When they read a book aloud the characters come to life. Indeed, they can be "read out" into the real world. The only catch is that someone from the real world has to be "read in" to take their place. Ten years ago, Mortimer discovered this gift when he read a rare book called Inkheart. By mistake, he read out a thug called Capricorn (Andy Serkis) and read in his wife (Sienna Guillory). Now a confrontation beckons. Capricorn wants Mortimer to read out The Shadow - an evil power who will help Capricorn dominate the world: meanwhile Mortimer wants to read out his wife......

Thus we have the perfect set-up for a children's adventure story full of magic, wonder, peril, daring escapes and true love. But INKHEART feels heavy and lacks momentum. Instead of Matthew Vaughn's dazzling colour, wit and pace in STARDUST, Iain Softley's direction is as turgid as his grey brown colour palette. Moreover, the narrative structure has too much scampering about Italy after things or people that could easily have been condensed. But clunky direction aside, the fundamental problem is that the narrative is far more concerned with ideas than action - and action is subordinated to making a point. Author Cornelia Funke asks us whether, to quote Thomas Hardy, "character is fate"? If an author has written a character as a self-interested, callow man, can he triumph over this? 

So, in this film, a relatively straightforward rescue narrative becomes a rather back-and-forth affair. We get to Capricorn's castle early on and are set for a big show-down. But a fascinating character called Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) throws the movie off track with a petty, self-interested and all too human evasion. Dustfinger wants to be read back into the book, and he desperately wants to prove to the author of Inkheart (Jim Broadbent) that he can be better than his written character. Bettany's performance is heart-breaking and stands in sharp contrast to the leaden performances from Fraser (whom I normally love) and the camp performances from Serkis, Mirren and Broadbent.The problem is that this very cerebral, very philosophical sub-plot leeches energy from the main storyline and distracts attention. Worse still, it raises expectations that it cannot satisfy given the constraints of the genre.

I am rather disappointed in this movie. Softley has directed movies with real panache and intellectual bite - notably THE WINGS OF THE DOVE. I very much enjoyed THE THIEF LORD - another Cornelia Funke adaptation. And I also very much like Brendan Fraser in his family adventure movies. But Fraser is done a disservice by material that is fundamentally not about adventure at all, but about self-reflection.

INKHEART is on release in Germany and the UK. It opens in Brazil on Christmas Day. It opens in Italy on January 9th and in Taiwan, Turkey and the US on January 23rd and in France on January 28th It opens in Argentina on February 5th, in the Netherlands on February 12th, in Russia on March 19th and in Finland on April 3rd.