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.

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH is a risibly poor attempt at a Michael-Mann style cop thriller from British writer-director Eran Creevy.  Abandoning the social-realist style that gave his first film, SHIFTY, such authenticity and weight, Creevy creates a film that he believes is a hommage, but which reads as cheap pastiche - all slick surfaces, piss-poor Norf London accents, cliche-ridden dialogue and surreal unintentional humour.  The slightly built James McAvoy is woefully miscast as gifted but cynical cop, Max Lewinsky, still suffering from a gunshot wound inflicted by criminal mastermind Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong).  Years later, Lewinsky is paired with an admiring and ambitious cop called Sarah (Andrea Riseborough) and is once again brought into conflict with Sternwood when his teenage son is shot, and he comes back from hiding in Iceland.  The plot, such as it is, plays as a conspiracy thriller in which politicians and senior policeman are implicated.  The only problem is that for the cine-literate, as soon as you introduce a wily campaign manager (Natasha Little) and any senior character played by David Morrissey, we can figure out the entire plot from minute 15 of the film.  This  kills any potential suspense or engagement with the characters. The fact that they speak in pat dialogue in predictable tab A into slot B scenes doesn't help either.  Still, the slick look and feel of the movie is kind of interesting, and you can just about keep entertained until the movie totally jumps the shark in its final act. There's a scene involving gunmen and  grandmother that had the audience laughing out loud at the surreal combination - laughing at rather than with. No movie can survive that. 

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH will be released in the UK and Ireland on March 15th; in the USA on March 27th; in Portugal on April 4th; in the Netherlands and Russia on April 18th; in Japan on May 8th and in Australia and Belgium on May 9th. 

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - SHIFTY

SHIFTY is the impressive debut feature from British writer-director, Eran Creevey. It portrays 24 hours in the life of a second generation Pakistani boy nick-named Shifty (Riz Ahmed, THE ROAD TO GUANTANEMO), who has evolved from being a good schoolkid selling a bit of weed on the side into a hard core crack dealer. Shifty is on the edge of a knife - his elder brother Rez (Nitin Ganatra, EASTENDERS) and his best mate Chris (Daniel Mays, ATONEMENT), recently returned from Manchester, are trying to pull Shifty back from a life of crime. But Shifty is being set-up by his dealer Glen (Jason Flemyng).

The movie was shot for under £100,000 in just 18 days and captures the grim reality of suburban drug use in sludge colours and lower middle-class homes. This isn't London as Compton wannabe KIDULTHOOD style. Rather, you see drug use messing with real families. The movie is emotionally tense and builds suspense toward a dramatic conclusion. It feels authentic and while it makes some perceptive points about the cultural ironies of a being a second-gen Muslim immigrant, it wears its social critique lightly. SHIFTY is just superb guerilla film-making.

SHIFTY played London 2008 and opened in the UK in April 2009. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.