THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES

THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES picks up in media res, with the wicked dragon Smaug laying waste to the good fisherfolk of Laketown, having been usurped of his treasure by the dwarf-king Thorin Oakenshield and his fellowship of adventurers.   In the pre-credit sequence our erstwhile hero, Bard, famously shoots the dragon in his one vulnerable spot: a spectacular CGI battle of epic scope that we have come to almost take for granted in Peter Jackson's interpretations of Tolkien's oeuvre.  But as we enter the main body of this two hour movie, we realise that Smaug casts a long shadow, and that his "dragon sickness" has corrupted King Thorin, who sits brooding jealously over his treasure, in paranoid search for the Arkenstone.  This corruption belittles Thorin, who looks on indifferent as a great battle wages outside the walls of The Lonely Mountain.  The Laketown men, led by Bard have come for their share in the treasure, as has an Elven army led by Thranduil.  They face Thorin's kinsman, led by Dain, and all in turn must put aside their petty rivalries and unite against the armies of Orcs (goblins in the books) until a fifth army makes a late in the day appearance.  The story of the movie is thus the blow by blow story of this battle, but really it's the story of Thorin throwing off the corruption of the treasure and becoming a king worthy of the name. And in the background, as Peter Jackson broadens his scope from The Hobbit, we see the more important battle, as Galadriel banishes proto-Sauron into Mordor, and an already tricksy Saruman prevents Elrond from warning the men of Gondor or going immediately to vanquish him there.  

Bryan Singer retrospective - X2 (2003)

What comes after a massively commercially successful comic book adaptation? Why, the sequel of course! And basically all my comments regarding Singer's X-MEN go double for X-2. In general, Singer does a fine job in creating a slick, entertaining summer blockbuster movie full of spectacular set pieces. At the same time he remains faithful to the original books. Without the need to do all the character establishment heavy lifting, Singer even has room to develop characters and emotional relationships. The love triangle between Cyclops, Jean Grey and Wolverine is developed and Singer sensitively introduces the Jean Grey/Phoenix theme. Singer even gets to probe the intellectual heart of the books with a classic scene in which a teen mutant called Iceman "comes out" to his family. Best of all, the classic conflict between "good" and "bad" mutants is complicated by the insertion of a human arch-villain called William Stryker (Brian Cox) - hell-bent on mutant genocide. Cox is yet another impressive actor added to the roster, and more than makes up for the sub-par performance from Halle Berry and the fact that Cyclops is once again short-changed. The same flaws persist - too many characters, too much material - but it's hard to pin them on Singer. Indeed, despite the proliferation of characters, he does as well as one can imagine in still crafting a coherent movie.

All in all, X-2 was a stylish, entertaining, intelligent comic book movie - a more satisfying feature than the already impressive X-MEN.

X2 went on release in 2003.

Bryan Singer retrospective - X-MEN (2000)

After the brilliant USUAL SUSPECTS and the interesting but directorially rather anonymous APT PUPIL, Bryan Singer hired himself out for the first in the X-MEN franchise. The resulting movie was slick, full of spectacular special effects, and had a convincingly dark and brooding look and feel. It established a high water mark for comic book reimaginings that would only be broken by Christopher Nolan's BATMAN BEGINS. To that end, X-MEN represented a return to form, and proof that Singer could handle different types of material - carefully balancing commercial and critical requirements. That said, the movie still had its flaws - namely that the plot is smothered by the need for spectacle and the amount of time it takes to establish the back story of all the different characters. 

To quote my review of LAST STAND: the basic idea "is that there are a bunch of people in the world who are mutants, with special psychic or physical abilities. The world of "normal" people is understandably nervous at having such powerful people in its midst. The mutants react to this fear in one of two ways. The "good guys" try to control their powers and use them only in ethical ways. They are led by Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). But another group, led by Magneto, take a more Werner Herzog view of the world. They believe that the natural order of human-mutant relations is aggression and cruelty. The conflict between these two camps forms the back-bone of every X-MEN movie, usually triggered by some half-assed action on the part of bigoted "normal" humans." In this film, the half-assed bigoted action is requiring all mutants to register with the state - a move that spooks Magneto (Ian McKellan) - who lost his family in the Holocaust. In turn, Magneto decides to abduct Rogue (Anna Paquin)- a teen mutant who can leach other's powers - and use her in a bid to turn all the world's leaders mutant, thus rendering their discriminatory policies unthinkable.

Bryan Singer was brave to take on this movie. X-MEN books are some of the biggest selling of all time, which means that there's a vocal and rabid fan-base just waiting for you to trip up. BUT you have to balance the fan-base's desire for accurate details with the demands of the non-fans who still need to understand and engage with "another" summer blockbuster with spectacular action set-pieces. A second challenge - and certainly a bigger challenge than re-imagining BATMAN or SUPERMAN, is that X-MEN has an unwieldy cast of characters, each with their own particular back story that needs to be fleshed out, underneath the wider umbrella mythos. And a third challenge is that X-MEN is intellectually richer than most comics - explicitly discussing bigotry, political accountability and - and that doesn't always sit well with the special effects set-pieces and compressed run-time of your typical summer blockbuster.

Given these triple challenges how did Bryan Singer fare? Well, on the first call, the movie garnered both critical acclaim and commercial success. He pleased fans by remaining loyal to the original books - characters made it to the screen largely in tact and the screen-writers mined the rich history of the books for plot lines. The movie went on to spawn two sequels and rumours of an X-4 and WOLVERINE spin-off. To that extent, Singer established the franchise against all odds. The second challenge was to fill in the back story of the book and make all the characters intelligible to the non-fans looking for summer thrills. Here, I'd say that Singer only half succeeded. He successfully established the basic idea of the X-MEN but establishing the back stories to all the significant X-MEN takes forever and they are more or less short-changed by a cramped script. Only Wolverine comes out with anything like the appropriate screen time. As to the third challenge, the intellectual substance of the book has little room to play out given the pressures of establishing character and still fitting in a spectacular end-sequence. Nonetheless, it's clear that we are dealing with issues of prejudice and McCarthyism and than Magneto and Xavier present two reactions to that - broadly speaking an activist/passive stance that some have likened to the difference between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Singer wasn't fully successful on this count either but had at least succeeded in setting up an interesting debate between both sides of the argument.

X-MEN was released in 2000.

Bryan Singer retrospective - APT PUPIL (1998)

After the award ceremonies and the commercial success of THE USUAL SUSPECTS everyone was waiting to see what director Bryan Singer would do next. The weight of expectation bore down heavily on his 1998 flick APT PUPIL, which is a tremendous shame, because while it's no pantheon movie, it looks weaker than it objectively is in comparison to THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

The movie is based on a novella by Stephen King in which an intelligent teenager called Todd (Brad Renfro) realises that an old man called Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellan) in his neighbourhood is actually a Nazi war criminal in hiding. Rather than shop the old man to the cops, Todd decides to exploit the him, trading silence in exchange for lurid stories of concentration camps. Todd thinks he's the dominant partner in this twisted relationship, trying to humiliate Kurt by making him wear an SS uniform while he drills him. But as Todd's fetish grows, Kurt becomes the dominant partner, as he can choose to feed the addiction or not. Moreover, Kurt is now posing as Todd's grandfather, covering for Todd at school as his grades are now suffering. The power game is reversed.

All of this makes for an intelligent and frightening psychological thriller. The problem comes in the final reels when the two-handed character study is shoe-horned into a lurid and somewhat unnecessary ending. It's as if the film-makers thought that the movie needed some action - some sort of genre conformist ending. The only other thing I would say about APT PUPIL is that what makes it still worth viewing are the two central performances and the original conceit by Stephen King. I was disappointed then and now by the fact that Bryan Singer hadn't given the material a particular visual style or indeed any other kind of directorial thumb-print. APT PUPIL struck me as a movie made by a director-for-hire rather than an auteur.

APT PUPIL played Venice and Toronto 1997 and was released in 1998 and 1999.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS aka The Gutless Cop-Out

What does it say about the times we live in that writer-director Chris Weitz has no qualms in having Jason Biggs masturbate on-screen with a warm apple-pie, but doesn't have the balls to depict an atheist's response to Paradise Lost? I don't know what saddens me more: the anti-liberal tyrannical response of my own Church to this movie, or the self-censorship of a studio too timid to respect Philip Pullman's profound artistic achievement. The upshot is that THE GOLDEN COMPASS is a rather feeble film. It looks pretty enough but it lacks the intellectual bravery of the source material. As a result, the viewer has to jump through the hoops of the complicated narrative without the concommitant emotional pay-off. In fact, the bizarre decision to cut short this adaptation before we have reached the final harrowing scenes of the book makes this film a deeply unsatisfying, unengaging experience indeed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In 1995, Philip Pullman published the first novel in a trilogy called His Dark Materials. It is that book - called Northern Lights in the UK and The Golden Compass in the US - that we now see brought to the screen. Pullman's trilogy is nominally a set of books for children, filled with fantasy adventure elements and set in a world that shares many characteristics with our own. A plucky young girl called Lyra Belaqua sets off for the North Pole to rescue her friend Roger from the mysterious Gobblers with the help of a truth-telling golden compass that once belonged to her guardian, an Oxford don called Lord Asriel. On the way, she escapes the clutches of the devestatingly charming Mrs Coulter and benefits from the help of a Gyptian king, a beautiful witch called Serafina Pekkala, an aeronaut called Lee Scoresby and an armoured bear called Iorek Byrnison.

The book works well as an adventure story. The "baddies" are suitably sinister, the good guys are wonderfully drawn, and we really believe in the strenth of the friendship between Lyra and Roger. But there is so much more to the story than that. In Pullman's version of the world, a tyrannical ideological Authority is stamping out free will and free thought. It is true that in the novel this Authority is explicitly religious and adopts some of the terminology of the Catholic Church. However I firmly believe that the Authority can be read as a symbol of all intellectual repression and anti-liberalism rather than any particular set of beliefs. Lyra and her guardian are thus battling for freedom and against tyranny - for truth against self- and imposed censorship.

It is, then, ironic, as well as tragic, to find this film refusing to speak plainly and to defend the intellectual freedom that Lord Asriel seeks to defend. Furthermore, having shorn the movie of its intellectual substance, Chris Weitz might at least have left us the searing emotional climax of the novel. But even here he chickens out - and leaves us with just another wishy-washy luke-warm Hollywood ending.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS is on release in the UK, Belgium, Finland, France, Israel, Norway, the Philippines and Spain. It opens tomorrow in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia and Singapore. It opens on Friday 7th December in Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the US. It opens the following weekend in Serbia, Argentina, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Italy. THE GOLDEN COMPASS opens in Italy, South Korea, Greece, Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia later in December and in Egypt on January 16th 2008. It opens in Japan on March 1st.

STARDUST - as charming as THE PRINCESS BRIDE

High praise indeed for a film based on a novel that I didn't particularly like. I've always found Neil Gaiman astoundingly good at creating new worlds with magic rules but less good at creating gripping plots. But this film somehow gives the novel, STARDUST, the sense of excitement and pace that I had found lacking in the book.

Gaiman's conceit is to make a grown-up fairy-tale in which a Victorian villager called Dunstan crosses the Wall into a magical kingdom called Stormhold and has proper sex with an enchanted Princess. Nine months later, a son, Tristan turns up. Years later, Tristan (Charlie Cox) promises to fetch a fallen star from the other side of the Wall to impress the village coquette, Victoria (Sienna Miller). Little does he expect to find that the fallen star is in fact a beautiful independent girl called Yvaine (Claire Danes.) Tristan vows to take Yvaine to Victoria before helping Yvaine return to the sky. But an evil witch and a heartless prince have other plans. The witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) wants to eat Yvaine's heart and so regain her youthful beauty. The prince (Mark Strong) wants Yvaine's necklace in order to regain his crown.

STARDUST has everything you want from a fairy-tale. True love, though not in the most expected place, sword-fights, evil princes, tricky witches and derring-do. It's wonderfully designed, beautifully imagined and a lot of fun. As cynical as I am, it's great to believe in a hero like Tristan who is just a decent ordinary sort of chap. And both Charlie Cox and Claire Danes are the sort of actors with whom its a pleasure to spend time. They are so amiable! Other good things include a wonderful role for Robert de Niro as a closeted pirate and Ricky Gervais as, well, David Brent in a silly hat. If I had to find a complaint it would be that Michelle Pfeiffer cannot sustain a credible English accent, in contrast to the flawless Danes. More fundamentally, the studio loses the rumpy-pumpy that made this a different kind of fairy-tale in the first place. I guess the sex didn't fit with the target demographic......

STARDUST has already been released in Russia, Canada, the US, Egypt, South Korea, the UAE, Kuwait, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Hong Kong, Israel, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Thailand, Colombia, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Turkey, the Philippines, Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Japan, Germany, Estonia and the UK. It opens in Belgium, France, Greece, Spain and Japan later in October and in Singapore and Taiwan in November.

FLUSHED AWAY - a very British comedy

For some strange reason, FLUSHED AWAY did terrible business in the US - at least relative to the huge budget. I say strange because Swedish Philip and I went to see it today and it was absolutely hysterical. I mean, laugh out loud funny throughout. I haven't had such a good time watching a comedy in ages, and it beats alleged adult fare like TENACIOUS D, and TALLADEGA NIGHTS hands down. That the movie is seriously funny comes as no surprise when you realise that, despite being CGI animated, it comes from the people who brought you WALLACE AND GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT. So you get the characteristic physical comedy, classic movie references and proper old-fashioned plotting and characterisation. The visual comedy is so rich that I suspect you’d have to watch FLUSHED AWAY a number of times before you’d even begun to recognise it all.

However, it has to be said that the movie has a peculiarly English feel, which may explain its comparative failure in the US. (The root cause of the English-ness is easy to identify - the movie was co-written by Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais – veteran script-writers for classic British TV comedies, The Likely Lads and Porridge.) The iconography of Zone One London is used to full effect – it’s all Piccadilly Circus & London Bridge. The fish-out-of-water plot plays off Cor Blimey Guv’nor sewer rats with a pampered pet mouse from The Royal Borough of Kensington. The movie features the regulation Knight of the Realm (Sir Ian McKellan) camping it up luvvie-stylee. A good dollop of the jokes are made at the expense of the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French; vulgar American tourists; grannies who throw their knickers at Tom Jones and the English football team.

In short, if you think football is a game played with twenty-two men and a round ball in which England lose on penalties to Germany in the final, I can almost guarantee you’ll have a good time watching FLUSHED AWAY. What's more this movie has everything that a certain Bond film lacked: exhilerating chases; a smooth hero in a dinner jacket; wicked gadgets; cheesy pick-up lines; an evil megalomaniac threatening humanity; and a ticking clock counting down to devestation before the hero saves the day!

FLUSHED AWAY has already opened in Israel, Singapore, the US, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. It opens in Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Spain, Sweden and the UK next weekend. It opens in Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia and Norway on December 8th, in Brazil, Mexico and Turkey on the 15th, in Australia, Slovenia, Italy and Latvia on the 22nd. It opens in Argentina in January and in Japan in March.

X MEN: THE LAST STAND - weak

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND is the third installment in the wildly popular comic-book franchise. For anyone who doesn't know, the basic idea is that there are a bunch of people in the world who are mutants, with special psychic or physical abilities. These vary from the rubbish - Wolverine can extend knives from his knuckles - to the aweseome - Jean Grey/The Pheonix can atomise people. The world of "normal" people is understandably nervous at having such powerful people in its midst. The mutants react to this fear in one of two ways. The "good guys" try to control their powers and use them only in ethical ways. They are led by Professor Charles Xavier. But another group, led by Magneto, take a more Werner Herzog view of the world. They believe that the natural order of human-mutant relations is aggression and cruelty. The conflict between these two camps forms the back-bone of every X-MEN movie, usually triggered by some half-assed action on the part of well-meaning but feckless "normal" humans. In this case, the humans have isolated a child who carries a natural antibody to the X-gene. (Whatever. I have not read the comics - the "science" is a blur.) Close contact with the kid cures the mutation and the cure is free for all on a voluntary basis. The feckless part is where the government handily soups up some plastic guns with anti-body darts that disable mutants on impact. Nice.

As with any X-MEN movie, THE LAST STAND is full of high quality action sequences. The final set-piece, where Magneto rips up the Golden Gate Bridge to form a path to the cure-centre on Alcatraz, is inspired. (Clearly, it would have just been easier to take a boat.) We also got some really fine acting from Sir Ian McKellan as Magneto, Anna Paquin as Rogue and Kelsey "Frasier" Grammer as Dr. Hank McCoy a.k.a. The Beast. He's a sort of bright blue Chewbacca character who can kick butt while quoting Churchill. This may sound ridiculous but it is fantastic casting. When Grammer plays McCoy, who is a Secretary of State, he has real gravitas. I also want to mention the inspired casting of Cameron Bright as the anti-body kid, for want of a better phrase. That kid has these amazing eyes and a way of holding his gaze on a person that is unnerving. He is perfect for the role, just as he was petrifying in the Nicole Kidman supernatural thriller, BIRTH.

However, despite the great set pieces and some fine acting, I found THE LAST STAND to be a deeply irritating viewing experience. Why? First, Halle Berry, who plays Storm, is so wooden as to make my coffee table look postively animated. When a close friend dies, her tears are less convincing that a contestant in Big Brother. Second, the script is really trite. Take for example two senior clinicians at the cure-lab on Alcatraz who watch Magneto's army rip up the frickin' Golden Gate Bridge and launch a volley of assaults on their lab. About ten minutes in, one turns to the other and says, "they're coming after us." No shit. Similarly, when Magento unleashes a great evil on to the defenders of the lab, he utters the words "what have I done?" in an entirely unconvincing and out-of-character volte face. More generally, while the script raises some interesting issues about who we class as "normal" and the implications of scientific cures for the "abnormal" - it does so in a really ham-fisted manner. Dear lord, to have Rebecca Romjin sit there dressed up as the mutant Mystique, telling her interrogater that she refuses to answer to her "slave name" Raven Darkholme.....

Third, feminists will no doubt be fuming at the final scene featuring Wolverine and Jean Grey. I cannot tell you why this makes me mad without giving away the plot, but suffice to say that those of you familiar with the etymology of the word hysteria, and the phrase la petite mort (thanks to Katya for correction on spelling), will know why this scene undercuts the PC-ness of having Halle Berry as the chief X-MAN. Finally, the last scenes are completely opaque in their meaning. So the anti-body kid is now a student at Xavier's academy? Has he lost his power to de-X the X-men? We're never told. And as for the very last shot of Magneto, what the heck is that meant to mean?

All in all, the plot inconsistencies, bad acting*, suspect social politics and sheer silliness of the script made this the worst episode of the franchise for me. One wonders if it is coincidence that this is the only one of the three to have been helmed by Brett Ratner (the guy behind those Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan Rush Hour movies). Now here's the weird thing. Ratner took over X MEN 3 after the director of the first two movies, Bryan Singer, dropped out to work on the "troubled" Superman movie. Weird thing is, Singer was taking over from....Brett Ratner. So, if Ratner managed to de-X the X-MEN movies, does that mean that the Bryan Singer SUPERMAN RETURNS is gonna kick ass? Stay tuned to find out....

X MEN 3 is open global release. *Amazingly, I am NOT referring to Vinnie Jones here. Vinnie is actually remarkably good in his role as the Juggernaut. Indeed, he has some of the funniest lines in the film. Which means that not only have I praised Vinnie Jones' comic timing in this review, but I have also, implicitly, claimed that so far this summer, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III is the block-buster viewing choice of the man of taste. Blimey.

THE DA VINCI CODE - a game of two halves

I was all ready to love this film. Skulduggery, treasure hunts, pretty pictures of London....I had anticipated writing a spirited defence of the film as "glorious trash". It all started very well. Beautifully photographed, menacingly lit shots of the Louvre. The Curator, who also happens to be the Grand Master of a secret society, running for his life, observed by the mournful eyes of renaissance figures. The movie looked expensive, by which I mean well-made and lush. The old-fashioned orchestral score added to the tension, even though I had read the book and knew the plot. I loved the fact that periodically the current action would dissolve into a lavish recreation of ancient Rome or medieval London. As the film unravelled it got better and better. We had our dashing Symbologist (Tom Hanks) and the pretty French cryptologist (Audrey Tautou) in car chases through the French countryside, following a series of clues leading to the Holy Grail. Admittedly they were being chased by an Albino monk - a murdering member of a secretive Catholic prelature - but Paul Bettany somehow managed to portray this character as conflicted and threatening rather than ridiculous and camp. The high point was the introduction of the hero and heroine's helper, Sir Leigh Teabing, an expert on the Grail legend living in a conveniently close chateau. Teabing, as played by the ever-brilliant Sir Ian McKellan, is the life of the party. Despite this character having to impart a considerable amount of pseudo-religio-history to the Audrey Tautou character, Teabing hooks the audience with his child-like excitement at having a real keeper of the Grail in his midst. His enthusiasm for continuing to uncover the clues is contagious.

Now as far as I am concerned the movie, which is faithful in most respects to the novel, took a decided turn for the worse just over half way through, when a number of key characters were faded out. Tom Hanks was left to carry the film and, frankly, his bland looks and bland emotional response to what should have been Church-shattering events killed any enjoyment I might have experienced as the final meaning and location of the Grail was uncovered. Indeed, in the penultimate scene, when Hanks intones the true secret to Tautou, the audience at the screening I attended started to giggle. Which must rank as a bit of a failure on the part of the film-makers. The problem is that, in a world where everyone has either read the book or scene a TV documentary debunking its claims, The Big Bad Secret seems a bit of an anti-climax. In addition, there is zero sexual tension between Hanks and Tautou. Overall, I suppose I would sum up my reaction to THE DA VINCI CODE as "ho and indeed hum". It starts off like a rattling summer blockbuster and ends up as a damp squib.

P.S. For those concerned that the film may offend their Catholic sensibilities, I would argue that it is harmless hokum that would shake only the flimsiest of belief. Moreover, the script is at utter pains to distance itself from the radicalism of the novel. The murdering monk and nasty Bishop are described continuously as fringe elements acting without the authority of the Church. The Tom Hanks character is far more sceptical about the existence of the secret society and Grail, and then about its ability to destroy the Church, than in the book. Indeed, the whole film merely hints at prior crimes of the Church at large rather than damning the whole outfit as a misgynistic con. And the final conclusion is far less, well, destructive, in it airy-fairy conclusions. I feel that the director Ron Howard may have scored a bit of an own goal with this decision to shy away from the the radical anti-Catholic content. He still won't have appeased the kind of religious who hate any kind of criticism of their faith, whether real or imagined. And as for the die-hard fans who seriously believe all this hog-wash, the film may well feel like a soft-soaped compromise....

THE DA VINCI CODE is on global release.