THE DAUGHTER - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

The strange thing about my reaction to THE DAUGHTER is that while I can see that it's superbly acted and well directed I just couldn't stand it.  I spent the whole film thinking it was derivative and predictable and obvious and I absolutely despised the final scene.

But let's wind back to the beginning.  The film is the directorial debut of theatre director Simon Stone and is essentially a modern day adaptation of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, set in contemporary Australia.  Geoffrey Rush plays a rich industrialist who's just laid off all his workers in a small lumber town, putting its very existence at risk. At the same time he's celebrating his marriage to a woman half his age.  His son Christian (Paul Schneider) turns up for the wedding and is evidently resentful not just at his father's happiness but also his childhood best friend Oliver (Ewen Leslie). Oliver may be poor and unemployed but he seemingly has a loving wife (Miranda Otto) and charming clever daughter Hedvig (Odessa Young).  By contrast, Christian is an alcoholic who's wife is in the process of leaving him.

MINIONS

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

THE MINIONS, as any fule kno are the ridiculously and surprisingly popular side-kicks of Gru, the star of DESPICABLE ME. These yellow-bean-like energetic, gibberish-speaking cheeky chappies arguably already hijacked that franchise, as evidenced by the fact that they, not Gru and his daughters, were on most of the posters. So I suppose it was inevitable that we would get a spin-off.

The fantastic news is that the movie more than stands up on its own two feet.  Despite the quasi-unintelligible talk, we absolutely understand that our protagonists, Stuart, Kevin and Bob, are different personalities.  This is more than helped by an hilarious deadpan witty voice-over from Geoffrey Rush (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN) at the start of the film.

We open with a natural history of the minions - starting as little amoeba in the opening credits - haplessly following whoever is the Big Bad of the moment, until the dinosaurs become extinct and they have to find evil men to follow.  In classic minion style, their eagerness overmatches their competence and they end up stuck in an icy waste having followed Napoleon into Russia.  At this point, the story truly picks up, with three minions going on an adventure to find a new evil henchman to follow. They sail to the USA and journey to Villaincon (a wonderful satire on the insanity that is Comicon) where they fall into the service of Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock in a self-satirising villain role).  I guess the moral of the story is be careful what you wish for - and through a series of accidents Bob becomes king of England, and then has to rescue the nation from Scarlett and find their new master on the way.

Kudos to co-director Pierre Coffin who also voices ALL of the minions  - creating separate characters and also enough actual language that we can keep up with them.  The movie has wit, a warm heart and is a worthy addition to the DESPICABLE ME world.  There's nothing here not to like!

MINIONS has a running time of 91 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie was released in June in Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Armenia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Croatia, New Zealand, Slovakia, Uruguay, the UK, Ireland and Poland. It was released earlier in July in the Netherlands, Sweden, Argentina, Austria, Colombia, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Estonia, Spain, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Belgium, France, Iceland, Jamaica, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Canada, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Romania, Taiwan, the USA and Vietnam. The movie opens in Cambodia on July 14th, in Peru & Portugal on July 23rd, in Albania on July 30th, in Japan on July 31st, in Serbia on August 20th, in Italy on August 27th, in Turkey on September 4th, in Greece on September 25th, in South Korea on October 15th and in China on November 25th.

GREEN LANTERN - the fifth rule of cinema: all green superheroes suck big honky ass

The Green Lantern strikes me as a remarkably anachronistic, even parochial, name for a superhero, considering that it's meant to have been invented by a bunch of super-intelligent Nietzchean aliens, who police the world with their Green Lantern corps officers powered by the energy of Will. I mean, can we take seriously any super-hero who has a magic ring (my precious!) powered by an old-school lantern - whose special power is basically manifesting his imagination as kids toys and power-tools? A superhero so crappy that his friends see right through his mask to his real identity? A superhero whose evil nemesis is basically a mean-looking Cloud, and whose human enemy basically looks like a weedy version of The Elephant Man? Colour me unimpressed.

And what can we say about the translation from comic book to screen? Well, sadly not much. Ryan Reynolds is certainly buff, but the screenplay doesn't take advantage of his talent for comedy, or of his genuine acting chops, as last seen in BURIED. Blake Lively, so impressive in THE TOWN, is limpid as his love interest, Carole Ferris, and about as believable as a test pilot as Jessica Biel in STEALTH. Tim Robbins is a caricature, Angela Bassett is under-used, Mark Strong, as Sinestro, looks like some camp Flash Gordon throwback, and as for Peter Sarsgaard as The Elephant Man, full marks for effort, but he chews up the scenery like he's in JURASSIC PARK.

GREEN LANTERN fails on every level. The plot is simplistic and predictable; the acting wooden; the special effects goofy (despite alleged millions spent on the CGI green suit); the action set-pieces unengaging. I didn't give a crap about any of it. And the tragedy is that we KNOW all these actors can act, and we KNOW, having watched X-MEN:FIRST CLASS, that origins movies that grapple with big ethical questions about the use and abuse of superpowers can be genuinely profound. I blame Martin Campbell, sometime BOND director. He looks like he was overwhelmed by his first big CGI action block-buster, and never really had the balls to bring some subtlety to the script. And the depiction of both the aliens and their perfect planet also looks like a lo-rent throwback - production design so goofy and unimpressive that kids were laughing at the alien Guardians in the screening I attended.

GREEN LANTERN is on release in the UK, US, New Zealand, Belarus, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, Canada, India, Ireland, Poland and Qatar. It opens on June 23rd in Armenia, on June 30th in Argentina, on July 17th in Azerbaijan, on July 22nd in Japan and on July 29th in Belgium. Germany, Estonia, Spain and Sweden. It opens on August 5th in Australia, the Netherlands, Finland and Norway. It opens on August 10th in France, on August 11th in Hungary, on August 19th in Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay and Portugal. It opens on August 26th in Turkey and on August 31st in Italy.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES - A movie so dull I walked out after 90 minutes

About fifteen minutes into the latest PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie, Dame Judi Dench -  her ear be-slobbered by Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow -  asks "Is that all?"  I felt very much the same way as I waded through this over-stuffed and yet ultimately vacuous blockbuster.  For let us be clear: this is an absolutely terrible movie. Derivative, muddled and, sin of all sins, dull.  I walked out after 90 minutes, leaving a good 45 minutes of the movie left to run.  Still, not to worry.  No doubt the shameless hacks chez Bruckheimer are penning episodes 5 asnd 6 of this lucrative franchise as we speak.

So, what it all about, Alfie? Three ships are sailing to South America to find the Fountain of Youth (TM).  One ship contains Spaniards, trying to capture the elixir for their king. (We don't hear much more about them.)  The second ship contains Captain Barbosa (Geoffrey Rush), who has swapped piracy for privateering - the only credible bit of character development in the film - and an interesting analogy for the way in which this franchise has sold-out from camp farce to clunking establishment milk-cow. The final ship contains Captain Blackbeard (Ian McShane, presumably cast because he is the only working actor more wrinkled than Keith Richards), Blackbeard's daughter Angelica (Penelope Cruz) and Captain Jack Sparrow himself.  The movie sees these crews assembled, reach land in South America, do battle with some cannibalistic mermaids, and then set off over land to find the fountain.  That's the point at which I left.

I left because it had become painfully clear that ON STRANGER TIDES was suffering from two structural problems that were not going to be resolved by simply hanging about for another forty five minutes. First up, the movie commits the cardinal sin of subverting the very formula that made it successful!  In the first flick, which I rather liked, the prevailing atmosphere was "camp family fun"! We had pretty young lovers to root for,  a little bit of spookiness, and every now and then a bit of naughtiness in the form of Captain Jack Sparrow - a pirate so effete and ineffectual he was a walking spoof of the pirate movie genre.  By contrast, in ON STRANGER TIDES, Sparrow is front and centre throughout, rather than being used as comic relief. His presence tires -  he has become the establishment - in fact, he's rather good at getting out of scrapes even if all the set-piece fight scenes are lifted straight out of Indiana Jones or earlier PIRATES films. Worst of all, the camp Jack Sparrow has to sustain the main love story, with a smouldering Angelica, utterly at odds with his camp style. All of this leaves Geoffrey Rush's Barbosa as by far the most interesting, and certainly the only entertaining, figure on screen.

The second big problem is the direction. Rob Marshall is, simply put, a terrible director. And here, I am looking to his previous films too - CHICAGO, NINE and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA.  Marshall seems to direct by throwing everything at the kitchen wall - more characters, more plot, over-loaded production design, more angles, more cuts, more orchestration (Hans Zimmer particularly irritating here). The editing style is the biggest culprit here, especially in the set-pieces.  Marshall doesn't seem to be able to trust the action itself - the choreography (ironic given his background) to be interesting enough to hold our attention. So he cuts, cuts, cuts, all the time holding the camera so close to the action that I wanted to pull back for breath.  Take for example an early scene where Sparrow is dancing on top of the King's dinner table and then swings from chandeliers. Why not just let the camera sit back and see his quick, deft, steps across the table?  The whole thing smacked of complete lack of confidence in the material.

Of course, added to these two big structural problems, there are many minor irritations. The cavalier hijacking of the Indiana Jones format. The way in which the hero and heroine conveniently happen upon trap-doors. The fact that the producers evidently thought - "you know, those vampire movies are making a bunch of money - let's get some hot teenage girls and give them vampire teeth!".  Worst of all, the screenwriters actually gave us a love story between a priest and a mermaid. I have seen anything as crass since the notorious soap opera Sunset Beach had the Father Fit storyline.  Weak.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES is on global release.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE

I really rather liked LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE. It is a beautifully animated, brilliantly voiced, old-fashioned story in the manner of WATERSHIP DOWN.  Moreover, it is blissfully absent of the sort of post-modern wit that propels the SHREK franchise. What's even more astonishing is that it was directed by Zack Snyder - purveyor of visually lush but morally vacuous, if not morally objectionable, fare like 300 and SUCKER PUNCH. The protagonists were sympathetic and endearing and their adventure story more compelling than any plot description would suggest. 

The story is based on the Guardians of Ga'Hoole books by Kathryn Lansky books, and this film focuses on two young owls, Soren and Kludd, who are kidnapped by some nasty racial purist owls. Luckily Soren is taken under the wing of a fellow inmate and taught how to outwit his captors and to eventually seek out the Jedi like Guardians who can teach him how to use his Gizzard and "save the world". If this sounds very STAR-WARS then it succeeds for the same reasons that Star Wars succeeds - it's a classic Saturday Morning Adventure Serial with good triumphing over evil, framed as a coming-of-age story. 

LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE went on global release in autumn 2010. It is now available to rent and own.

THE KING'S SPEECH - wonderful pantomime

In the mid-1930s, Britain was still a proud Empire that ranged from the Caribbean territories in the West, via East Africa, to India, Australia and Hong Kong. But the home country was still reeling from the Great Depression and fearful of the second Great War in living memory. The Empire needed leadership, both from its politicians who had the real political power, and from its monarchy, whose job was to inspire loyalty and imperial unity in the face of adversity. But the politicians fell grip to appeasement, and bar Winston Churchill, utterly failed to anticipate Hitler's aggression. As for the monarchy King George V was dying; and his son, David. the short-lived King Edward VIII, abdicated so that he could marry the scandal-ridden divorcee Wallis Simpson. Thus, David's younger brother, Bertie, the Duke of York (father of the current Queen Elizabeth) was thrust onto the throne as King George VI, with the task of leading his country and his Empire into World War Two. Pity then, the man, courageous and dutiful, but hampered by a debilitating stammer induced, the movie argues, by a shockingly loveless and brutal childhood.

THE KING'S SPEECH is, then, the story of how Bertie (Colin Firth) persevered through humiliation and fear to become technically more accomplished at public speaking and emotionally able to take on the burden of monarchy. He did this, the film posits, through sheer courage; the love of a good woman (Helena Bonham-Carter); and through the advice and friendship of the radically informal, Antipodean speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). 

So here's the thing. THE KING'S SPEECH is basically a really well made and emotionally involving film. It comes to our screens dripping with critical praise and smothered with awards. Director Tom Hooper eschews the typical lavish costume drama production design and shooting style, instead trapping his King in fog-bound streets and narrow corridors. The cast give fine performances. The script is beautifully written. I was deeply caught up in the drama. But, as I write this review some days later, I am less impressed by the film. Because, essentially, I was in the realms of pantomime cinema.

Colin Firth is, after all, playing an essentially Good Man.  Firth's Bertie is understandably angry; occasionally very funny; a warm, loving father and a dutiful king. He is an under-dog hero without faults, played by an actor at the top of his game.His wife is also without fault in this film - determined to help her husband, utterly sympathetic to him, charming to commoners, but conscious of maintaining her regal authority. And even Lionel Logue is a man without fault and dripping with charm! He is wonderfully brash, believes in Bertie's essentially goodness, and constantly helps him, even when Bertie sounds off at him. Even the minor characters are basically charming and lovely.  Logue's wife (Jennifer Ehle) in a few short scenes is a picture of calm concern and wise advice.  The horribly politically wrong Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin (a marvelous cameo from Anthony Andrews) is noble and humble in his failure.  And even Chrurchill (Timothy Spall), the towering personality who seemed to win the War single-handedly through sheer bloody-mindedness and brilliance, is humanised by the admission of a youthful speech impediment. 

And what of the villains of the piece? They too are essentially mono-dimensional. David (Guy Pierce with a pitch-perfect voice impersonation) is basically a bullying, selfish cad, utterly beguiled by the domineering Wallis. The late King George V (Michael Gambon) and his wife are distant, uncaring, bullying parents. And Derek Jacobi's Archbishop of Canterbury is an obsequious passive-aggressive arse.

So there you have it:  THE KING'S SPEECH is the ne plus ultra of feel-good movies, with the added bonus of being about glamorous royals. It comes complete with palaces and princesses - evil villains, unimpeachable heroes, the love that conquers all, the buddy movie, the under-dog story. And the biggest signal that we are in the realms of blatant emotional manipulation? The lazy use of the adagio from Beethoven's 7th symphony and the adagio from Beethoven's 5th piano sonata as we hear the King give his final, triumphant speech and wave to his adoring public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

THE KING'S SPEECH played Telluride, Toronto, London and the AFI 2010. It was released last year in the USA, Canada, Greece, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. It is released on January 7th in the UK, on January 21st in Estonia and Finland, and on January 28th in Slovenia, Iceland and Italy. It will be released in France on February 2nd, in Hungary on February 3rd and in Brazil and Sweden on February 4th. It will be released in Portugal on February 10th and in Germany and the Netherlands on February 17th. It will be released in Russia on March 17th.

At the British Independent Film Awards, THE KING'S SPEECH won Best Film, Screenplay, Actor (Colin Firth), Supporting Actor (Geoffrey Rush), Actress (Helena Bonham Carter). It was nominated for Best Director, Supporting Actor (Guy Pierce) and Production Design (Eve Stewart). It has also been nominated for seven Golden Globes and four SAG awards.

ELIZABETH - THE GOLDEN AGE - absurdly anachronistic

Shekhar Kapur's ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE is an unworthy successor to his original depiction of Elizabeth I.

It depicts the era in Elizabeth's reign (the late 1580s) where she ordered the execution of Mary Stuart for treason and faced off the Spanish Armada. But it plays fast and loose with history and has none of the narrative drive of its predecessor. The production design is handsome, of course, but almost everything else is off-key. The score is manipulative and repetitive - endless high-pitched violins. The photography consists of endless slow pans and tableaux. The high-class actors walk through their roles looking, for the most part, bored. This is especially true of Tom Hollander and Clive Owen. The following actors are uncertain in their accents: Samantha Morton as the Scottish Mary Stuart, Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh (bizarrely, as he's playing an Englishman), and Abbie Cornish as Elizabeth Throckmorton. And other great British actors are wasted in small parts of no consequence, notably David Threlfal as the court astrologer, Rhys Ifans as a Jesuit conspirator and the interesting young Eddie Redmayne as an assassin.

Cate Blanchett is fine as Elizabeth but her talent is wasted on a meandering script with anachronist dialogue. For the first hour of the film she indulges in a faintly homo-erotic, voyeuristic relationship with Walter Raleigh and her lady-in-waiting. She says absurdly modern and whiny things like, "I would love not to be in control all the time." To which Walter Raleigh improbably replies, "You eat and drink control!" There's also a ham-fisted attempt at modern political relevance. The Catholics are depicted as dangerous religious fundamentalists. English politics is seen as a trade-off between the rule of law and safety. Very Global War on Terror.

The second half of the film picks up. Elizabeth frets about whether or not she should order Mary Stuart's execution. Mary steals the show with a melodramatic execution scene. And then we are on to the Spanish Armada, where Philip of Spain attempts a naval invasion of England in order to put a Catholic on the throne. Shekhar Kapur clearly cannot direct action sequences for toffee, which is especially sad in an era when CGI and directorial vision can combine to give us great naval sequences. See, for example, the MASTER AND COMMANDER film. By contrast, Kapur never quite captures the majesty and excitment of a naval battle and doesn't even succeed in getting across the basics of what actually happened when the Spanish attempted to invade. You get the fireships and you get the Tilbury speech but you never understand the importance of the weather; Sir Francis Drake's superior tactics despite the fact the he commanded the inferior fleet; or the importance of the Spanish cutting their anchor lines. The whole Irish coast disaster is also ommitted. Absurdly, it is Sir Walter Raleigh who is depicted as the hero rather than Drake. And most incredibly, Elizabeth is depicted as giving her famous Tilbury speech astride a horse in full armour!

Ah well, what can we say. Hollywood is not under obligation to give us historical truths. But the fantasy it substitutes for truth should at least be compelling. Instead, in ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE, we have a mish-mash of fact and idiocy that is neither intellectually satisfying nor emotionally engaging.

ELIZABETH - THE GOLDEN AGE played Toronto 2007 and is on release in the US. It opens in Portugal, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the UK on November 2nd and in Finland and Spain on November 9th. It opens in Australia, New Zealand, Russia and Denmark on November 15th and in Egypt, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Turkey on November 23rd. It opens in Bulgaria on November 30th and in Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands in December 2007. It opnes in Singapore and Brazil in January 2008 and in Argentina and Mexico in February.

You can tell they started filming PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END without a finished script

Unlike director Gore Verbinski, I am going to keep my review of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END short, structured and to the point.

Positive aspects:
1. Handsome production values;
2. Plentiful funny sight gags;
3. Occasional witty dialogue;
4. Admirably restrained handling of the Keith Richards cameo;
5. Acc. to Nik, an ending that "twisted and turned so much, and was so laughably stupid", it was rather fun.

Negative aspects:
1. A labyrinthine plot that is near impossible to follow and therefore to care about;
2. A plot so full of random shit and plot lines that the film-makers don't have time to take each strand to fruition;
3. Johnny Depp slipping into self-parody;
4. All other actors wooden or on auto-pilot;
5. Chow Yun-Fat's incomprehensible English;
6. Misplaced political allegory in opening scenes and in Keira Knightley's absurd "I have a dream" speech near the end;
7. A bloated, indulgent run-time;
8. Markedly less light-hearted and funny than the original movie;
9. Absurdity of Jerry Bruckheimer peddling a movie wherein the audience has to sympathise with renegade freedom-loving pirates (who are bound by an iron-clad Pirate Code, by the way) as opposed to the capitalistic, "big business" Hollywood studio, I mean, East India Company!

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END is on global release.

APPENDIX: An email exchange.

Bina007: You're remarkably positive about your experience given how shite it was.

Nikolai: Well, you see, somehow the film retained a charm. Probably because it was so unpolished. It was like being at a dress rehearsal. You don't expect the play to be good, and you feel for the actors personally when they get their lines wrong and shit. You think, awww, Johnny Depp, you're making it up as you go along aren't you? And then at the end of the film, and I mean the last 5 - 10 minutes, they'd almost recaptured what made the first one great! And it's like - fuck - why couldn't the last 2.4 hours have been like this? And what happened in dead man's chest? Why did they have to embellish a simple formula that worked with all this dumb-assed CGI and stupid baddies and unbelievably intricate plots sub-plots double-plots and wank. So yeah, I had some sympathy for the film - in the same way as I have sympathy for a lame beggar trying to walk down the street to get to a better begging station. Capiche?

CANDY - sex, drugs, uneven tone

Another day, another distinctly underwhelming movie at the London Film Festival. Today's offering is a low-budget independent Australian flick starring Heath Ledger as a junkie poet married to a young painter turned junkie-hooker played by Abbie Cornish. The first third of the movie - entitled Heaven - shows them getting high and getting laid - lots of delirious graphically-shot sex. The second third of the movie drifts from loved-up drug use to bored married drug use. It's almost as though the writer has transposed the bickering of Men Behaving Badly to Australia, except that Caroline Quentin's responsible nurse is now a junkie-hooker who puts the meals on the table and Heath Ledger is the layabout boyfriend. Despite dealing with horrific subject-matter, this middle section of CANDY is - bizarrely - *funny* in tone. Ledger and Cornish are aided in this by the casting of Geoffrey Rush as a Chemistry Professor and part-time cook. It's very odd.

The final third of the movie contains harsh subject matter and the shift in tone is hard to get a handle on. I found it impossible to take these characters seriously in their pain when I had sat laughing with them on a sofa while they injected heroin into their arms a couple of scenes beforehand. And this uneven-ness of tone is what skewers the film in the end. It is no REQUIEM OF A DREAM - it does not make great technical leaps or have an interesting visual style or challenge us with its narrative and performances. And it is no TRAINSPOTTING - it does not successfully blend black humour and the grim reality of drug use. It's just a couple of decent performances in search of a more coherent script and more ambitious direction.

CANDY played Berlin, Toronto and London 2006. It has already been on cinematic release in Greece, Australia, Russia, Portugal and Italy. It opens in the UK on November 3rd and in the US on November 17th. It opens in the Netherlands in January 2007.

MUNICH - Stick to Dinosaurs, Spielberg

This review is posted by guest reviewer, Nik ...

Steven Spielberg has proven once and for all that being Jewish is insufficient qualification for making a movie about middle-eastern politics. Apparently, MUNICH - based on the events following the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics - is supposed to be controversial. On the one hand it supposedly humanises terrorists and undermines security measures by the Israeli state, and on the other it allegedly panders to the International Zionist Conspiracy(TM). In reality - it does neither - but bores the viewer with pseudo-intellectual pap occasionally punctuated by loud explosions and gun-play. The only significant contraversies are that the cinema took £6.50 from me to watch it, and that the pick-and-mix cost 99p per 100 grams. Damn that Cineworld.

Okay, so some particularly naive Americans might be shocked that Israeli foreign policy isn't all fun, games and torture - the same people for whom the revelation in THREE KINGS that US foreign policy was based on oil prices and increased hegemony in the middle east came out of left-field. The Christian and Jewish right won't much like the idea that there is some sort of ideology and genuine feeling of grievance behind the activities of Palestinian terrorists. Similarly, the leadership of Hamas may feel unhappy that the film portrays heinous acts of terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians in a negative light. But for the rest of us - the ones who've had the intellectual capacity and time to think through the balance of national security and morality in the work of our intelligence services - and who know basic facts about international affairs - this film will be dour and patronising.

The content isn't challenging, the facts it reveals arn't shocking - unless you're easily shocked or deeply ignorant. The film neither captures the poignancy of the internal moral struggle within the lead protagonist - nor the thrill and excitement of spying. It both manages to fall between these two stools AND fail horribly at executing either. And to top it off, the score and camerawork is condescending - trying to impose a paint-by-numbers depth for the hollywood popcorn-munching audiences - who may be unable to cope without such strong editorialisation. In many ways, SCHINDLER'S LIST did the same - but frankly it was a film that had to be made - and whose content had to be respected because of its intrinsic gravity. Munich didn't, doesn't, and won't be.

By the end of the film, I had no sympathy for any of the characters in front of me - no interest in their lives or their teen-angst emotional struggles - and hoped with every passing scene for the film to end, to stop wasting more of my precious time. The gun-play, graphic violence and sex that had kept me carnally interested in the film, at least in passing, had left the building - and with it any semblance of hope for future enjoyment. The final scene of the film was suitably awful, and I walked out wishing I'd been watching gay cowboys making out. Or anything else, really.

I can only imagine the most facile and ignorant of people enjoying this flick - so if you fit that description, save up your pennies. Otherwise, even if you have an interest in the middle east, save your money and buy a good book on the subject, after a few hours of reading you'll have learnt more, thought more, and enjoyed more than your unfortunate counterparts who opted for the big screen instead. And Steven, stick with dinosaurs, extra-terrestrials, and ruggedly handsome all-action archeologists - it's what you do well - very well - it's what we enjoy. And there was me thinking you'd learned your lesson with AI...

MUNICH is on general release in the US and the UK, not that you ought to care. I don't know when or if it'll be released in France or Germany or anywhere else - I can only hope for them that they can read English and visit this blog often enough to be warned.

Bina007 notes that instead of watching MUNICH, which she also found politically obvious and cinematically hackneyed, you could go rent Kevin MacDonald's ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER instead. It is a brilliant and Oscar-winning documentary which covers much the same ground as MUNICH. ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER is released on Region 2 DVD today.