CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE is a disappointingly piss-poor action-comedy from the director of the infinitely more amusing and heart-warming WE'RE THE MILLERS, Rawson Marshall Thurber. It stars Dwayne Johnson as a formerly fat bullied schoolkid turned muscle-bound CIA agent accused of killing his partner (Aaron Johnson) and stealing secret files.  He turns up at the house of a former high school jock (Kevin Hart) now living a banal suburban life as an accountant.  At first, his friend appears to be naive and lovable, but then morphs into something seemingly scary and unhinged, before Hart's character realises that he's actually being framed.  High-jinks ensue.  The problem with this film is that a cameo from Jason Bateman apart, it's not really that funny, and there's no convincing relationship between the two male leads as there was with, say, 21 JUMP STREET.  The result is a film that plods along in a fairly banal way, culminating in a high school reunion that's meant to be cathartic for the former fat kid. But even this wannabe emotional and uplifting moment falls flat. One to avoid. 

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film is on global release.

EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS

Listen to a ten-minute podcast review of the film here:

EXODUS: GOD AND KINGS isn't a good or a bad film but rather a collection of films that may or may not hang together as a sweeping biblical epic of the Charlton Heston kind.  It's long, uneven in pace, and takes too few chances to be really memorable. 

In its first act the movie feels like GLADIATOR.  The dying king is transposed from a Roman emperor to a Pharaoh played with surprising majesty by John Turturro. His jealous, power-hungry and paranoid son is transposed from Joaquin Phoenix to a shaven-headed and bejewelled Joel Edgerton.  And the rival for power who will lead a down-trodden people to freedom is transposed from Russell Crowe to Christian Bale.   This section is the most satisfying of the film - literally awesome in its lavish costumes, Egyptian cityscapes, jewels and vistas.  It feels like an old-fashioned big-budget epic of imperial power-politics, pitting two alpha males against each other.  Ben Mendelsohn is superb as the effete toady who reveals Moses' Jewish origin to both Moses and Ramses and I love the genuine conflict as Moses struggles to come to terms with his true identity. The only sadness was seeing Sigourney Weaver as Ramses mother use an anachronistic broad American accent and then become sidelined for the rest of the film.

Random DVD Round-Up - NEED FOR SPEED

NEED FOR SPEED is so much macho bullshit it makes the FAST & FURIOUS franchise look like the Ingmar Bergman of car-racing flicks.  We're in the sort of clumsy, asinine movie-making that epitomises THE EXPENDABLES except without the self-knowing irony. Some lazy reviewers have argued that you shouldn't expect better from a movie based on a video-game, but that's to do video games a disservice. The simple fact is that ex-stunt driver and director Scott Waugh only knows how to direct by pasting together action set-pieces  and scriptwriters John and George Gatins (REAL STEEL) have either no interest in or no talent for depicting real human emotion.