JUSTICE LEAGUE

After a dismally dull experience of BATMAN VS SUPERMAN and walking out of SUICIDE SQUAD after 30 minutes, it was only my recent enjoyment of WONDER WOMAN that made me vaguely interested in seeing the new DC multi-character action film, JUSTICE LEAGUE. I'm pleased to report that, given incredibly low expectations, I actually had a good time watching the film, thanks to the fact that Superman remains dead for much of it, and the charisma vacuum that is Henry Cavill, and sheer flabby uninterested of Ben Affleck are diluted by both Wonder Woman's earnest awesomeness and a trio of great new additions to the franchise. I was genuinely amused by Ezra Miller's nerdy, funny Flash, and suspect that his character benefited most from Joss Whedon taking over the reins as director once the portentous heavy-handed Zack Snyder left for personal reasons. That Miller went from playing a genuinely unnerving psycho in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN to a disarmingly hapless teen here shows great range.  I also really liked the teasing of a more earnest backstory involving his incarcerated father played by Billy Crudup - who manages to communicate pained selflessness in a few brief scenes. Perhaps most surprisingly, I loved Jason Mamoa's rock-star ragged Aquaman. This was a great shock after he failed to impress in the CONAN remake and GAME OF THRONES - but that suggests scripts and directors that cast him for his body and not his evident charisma and ability to turn a genuinely comic line.  His AQUAMAN is an ancient hero, pissed off with the world, performing small acts of kindness while blind drunk. Insofar as he has an arc, it's realising that he has to take responsibility for saving the world and be a true heir of Atlantis. Similarly, in this film, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman also has to assume the mantel of leadership and become an icon of  hope, just as Superman had been.  The final new addition is newcomer Ray Fisher's Cyborg, Victor Stone.  He has the most serious role to play, as he struggles to come to terms with his powers and the role his father played in mutilating him.  In the context of a rather silly film, it's his character that is the most moving.  Against this cast of genuinely funny and moving characters, it was easy to quickly move past Ben Affleck's continuing banality as Bruce Wayne and Henry Cavill's po-faced, charisma-less Superman.

MAGIC MIKE XXL

MAGIC MIKE XXL is a shameless cash-in: a movie ordained inevitable by the popularity of the original rather than by any narrative necessity.  Three years after Magic Mike quits stripping to set up house with The Kid's sister, his old stripper friends give him a prank call and invite him to a stripper convention for a kind of all-or-nothing retirement stripathon.  It's all a little shaky and fuzzy as motives go. To be sure, Mike's post-stripping life hasn't been a success: his business is struggling and his girl has left him.  But to go by the depiction of stripping shown in this film, why on earth would he ever have left? MAGIC MIKE XXL depicts a utopian world where strippers are ARTISTS and where by catering to women's whims they empower these "queens" and bring them a kind of sexual healing.  Accordingly, when Mike meets Zoe - an ex-stripper, maybe addict, down on her luck - he knows deep in his heart and groin that all she really needs is a cutting edge lap dance to bring her mojo back.  Better living through thongs. And so the movie unfolds as a kind of hippie dippie drug- and sex-fuelled road-trip to the convention where the kindness of strangers gets our motley crew of strippers through the night. I must admit that Gregory Jacobs and Channing Tatum's script and the men's acting does deliver an authentic feeling of male camaraderie.  But Jada Pinkett Smith is no match for the absent Matthew McConaughey as the MC, and there's no real depth to anything in the film - nothing to keep us going. And as for the routines and Troy from Community's rapping topless, awkward rather than sexy, I would say. Worst of all is the A-team style training montage where the boys put their new routines, costumes and sets together for the competition finale.  Let's hope this is the end of this particular franchise.

MAGIC MIKE XXL has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is global release.

SYRUP

SYRUP is a tonally uneven, unfunny but provocative satirical romance starring Amber Heard (THE RUM DIARIES) and Shiloh Fernandez (EVIL DEAD) as two media obsessed  advertising execs who fall for each other despite their inability to lead authentic lives.  Fernandez plays Scat - a slacker who has one good idea - to great an energy drink called Fukk. It doesn't care what it tastes like. The taste is not the point. And of course it's a runaway success. In the midst of all this he falls for the marketing exec Six, oh yes, complete with ludicrous back story of how she came up with that name. Because Amber Heard, dressing way above her age and clearly angling for the remake of BASIC INSTINCT, is so wrapped up in creating the perfect image of herself, she doesn't actually know how to express her own name and back story.  Corporate shenanigans ensue.  In the cut-throat capitalist world every great marketing scheme runs the risk of a social media backfire and when both characters hit the buffers real feelings start to be revealed, insofar as they can be.

As rom-coms go the movie has few laughs and the characters aren't that engaging. The irritatingly smug straight to camera exposition is, well, irritating, in the same manner as Don Cheadle in the TV show House of Cards. But somewhere amidst the rather soupy and predictable romance there's a telling satire on marketing and mass hype which piqued my interest. It may not have satisfied it, but elevated this film from being utterly unmemorable.

SYRUP has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is available on streaming services.

DRIVE ANGRY 3D

DRIVE ANGRY 3D is a brilliantly crass grind-house movie.  If you want to see a hot chick beat the crap out of a naked chick who's just been caught fucking the first chick's fiancé, then this is the movie for you. Or if you want to see a bad-ass smoking a cigar, fully clothed, fucking a naked woman in a motel room, while simultaneously shooting six assholes dead, then this is your flick!  The plot is ridiculous - obviously. Nic Cage plays a dude called John Milton (Paradise Lost, people!) who escapes Hell to chase down a cult-leader called Jonah (Billy Burke) and save his baby grand-daughter from having her head ripped off. Of course! He is helped by a smokin' hot waitress played by Amber Heard, and is in turn chased down by a mean guy called The Accountant dressed in a Men In Black style suit and played by William Fichtner. 

I'm not sure if it makes any sense to seriously review a movie who's every component justifies an exclamation mark, other than to say that director Patrick Lussier and writer Todd Farmer (MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D) have succeeded in making a movie as ridonkulous and vulgar as CRANK.  It's great as far as it goes and I really loved it for the first hour, but after that, the relentless car chases wore me down. Still, in this age of post-modern detached cynicism, you've got to love any movie that tries so hard to have a balls-out good time.  And, from a technical stand-point, in an era of retro-fitted piss-poor 3D, you've got to embrace DP Brian Pearson's wallowing in the schlock-entertainment factor of the medium.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE is on release in the UK, US, Bosnia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Canada, Estonia, Lithuania, Malaysia, the Philippines and Poland. It opens next week in Argentina, Egypt, the Czech Republic, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria, India and Armenia. It opens on March 25th in Uruguay, Belgium, France and Turkey. It opens in April in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Panama, Venezuela and Singapore. It opens on May 13th in Iceland, on May 26th in Portugal and on August 6th in Japan.

James Franco is a revelation in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

Much to our surprise, Chairman Phil and I laughed our asses off throughout PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. We'd both liked THE FORTY-YEAR OLD VIRGIN but more recent Apatow creations had been subject to the law of diminishing returns, culminating in the fatefully titled SUPERBAD. Added to that, the programme notes were full of pretentious wank from Apatow et al about what the movie was trying to do. Our hearts sank. I was unsure that any stoner movie could live up to the brilliance of LEBOWSKI or whether Seth Rogen would be able to exist on screen without annoying the frack out of me. Well, sometimes in cinema, it's wonderful to be wrong!

Of course, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS isn't as good as LEBOWSKI. Then again, it's not really what I would call a stoner movie. Okay, the two lead characters are a pot dealer and his client; they're on the lam after witnessing a drug-gang murder; and they're life problems stem from being wasted; and a lot of the humour rests on taking hits and driving while under the influence......But seriously, even after all that, this movie is really a spoof of cop-buddy-movies like LETHAL WEAPON and 48 HOURS. To that end, writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg send up the inherent homo-eroticism in all buddy movies by making most of the characters ludicrously camp and having the kind of "aw, gee, gosh, I really love ya, buddy" conversations that never actually happen in real life!

The script is absolutely spot on - superbly funny at every turn. And in terms of the movie's technical aspects, you have to love the synth heavy pastiche 70s soundtrack. But what really lifts the film are the performances. This starts with a hysterical cameo by Bill Hader as a soldier in the 50s testing weed for the US government. Seth Rogen does his usual thing as a semi-functional dope smoker, but the scene-stealers are Danny McBride as the camp, drug-dealer Red, and James Franco as the drug-dealer Saul. James Franco is an absolute revelation in this role, and I can't help but feeling that his pin-up good looks have somewhat derailed his career into banal romantic roles, when in reality he should be a comedy star.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS isn't a perfect comedy. The final shoot-out at the warehouse goes on way too long, and let's face it, despite the real attempt by the film-makers to show genuine stakes, we never really doubt how the movie's going to work out. But in the final scene in a diner, where the protagonists relive their experiences and joke about their scrapes, you realise just what a great time you've had.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS is on release in the US and Australia. It opens in the UK on September 12th; in Iceland and Turkey on September 19th; in Estonia on October 3rd; in Finland on October 10th; in the Netherlands, Singapore and Venezuela on October 17th; in Germay, Russia and Sweden on October 24th; in Denmark on October 31st; in France on November 12th; in Egypt and Spain on November 19th; in Belgium, Argetina and Italy on November 26th.

NEVER BACK DOWN - macho bullshit

NEVER BACK DOWN is a piss-poor movie in which Tom Cruise' mini-me and Volchok from The O.C beat the crap out of each other while Mandy Lane looks on adoringly. The movie tries to cast a veneer of Grecian morality over its fascist enjoyment of oiled up, buff blokes pounding each other senseless, and briefly hints at girl on girl fights, so that's okay with women's lib, right?! Wrong. I'm not sure what's more stupid: the ludicrous premise of this film; the fact that I fell for the free tickets and sacrificed 2 hours of my time watching it; or the people who actually take a vicarious thrill from watching what is essentially glammed-up happy-slapping on YouTube.

NEVER BACK DOWN is on release in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. It is released in Russia, France and Spain later in April and opens in Germany and Iceland in May.

ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE - misanthrope

Teen horror is fairly objectionable stuff. Leery, misogynistic, and apart from my political objections, usually lazy and formulaic. So I spent most of ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE mildly pissed off. It was the usual crap. Teen girls prance around in various states of undress. Blokes ogle them. Unsurprisingly, three girls and three guys end up going to a farm-house in the middle of Bumblefuck where there's no phone reception and a brooding ranch-hand for company. Following the rules of the genre, the slapper gets chopped by the mysterious psycho first. The means of her death is particularly misogynistic although, I have to say, not hugely gory. Indeed, in general, this is not a particularly scary film. We then continue to eliminate teens in reverse slut order. The only thing maintaining our interest is some rather fine photography and editing and the sexual tension between Mandy (Amber Heard) and the brooding farm-hand (Anson Mount.)

Fans of the film point to a cunning plot twist to defend the movie as "smart" and "original". This is nonsense. The plot twist can be easily guessed at. What's more, it's not particularly convincing. Indeed, the only reason behind it is that the film-makers are not simply misogynistic but entirely misanthropic. But I don't want to waste ninety minutes hearing how all men are patsies, and all women are dumb, manipulative whores.

ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE played Toronto 2006 but has only just been released in the UK. It opens in the Netherlands in April 3rd and in the US on April 25th.