iPad Round-Up 1 - CONAN THE BARBARIAN

The original Arnold Schwarzenegger CONAN movies, based on Robert E Howard's pulp fiction, were given a kind of grandiose Nietzchean purity of purpose and bleakness of vision by director John Milius. This meant that however ridiculous Schwarzenegger's physique, no matter how absurd the dialogue, they were hard to laugh at, and have become as cult-ish and praised as the source novels.  By contrast, Marcus Nispel's (FRIDAY THE 13th) risible remake is a critical and commercial failure - a movie that is superficial and mindless and hammy.  Most of all, it shows us how much charisma Schwarzenegger had - that while we may have seen him as ridiculous, he never did.  He could stand there, covered in furs with a ridiculous helmet on, and just own the space of Conan. Jason Mamoa, in this new Conan, has the muscles, but not the self-belief. Shorn of Howard's philosophy and Arnie's charisma, the resulting movie becomes a stupid, flaccid piece of sword and sorcery buffoonery - not well thought out enough to be accuses of misogyny - mindless to the point of coma.

The story is simple enough (no excuse, however, for making a mindless film).  Young Conan (Leo Howard) lives with his wise father (Ron Perlman) in a kind of magic-induced pre-medieval Europe of rampaging hordes and fierce warlords.  His family is butchered by Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), an evil warlord trying to gather the pieces of the Mask of Acheron in order to resurrect his wife, a powerful witch, and rule Hyborea.   Years later, an adult Conan (Momoa) journeys through Hyborea with his friend Artus (Nonso Anozie) and finds himself helping a beautiful princess called Tamara (Rachel Nichols) whose blood is needed for the ritual that will activate the mask.  Thus setting up a final conflict between Conan and Zym, his weird-ass daughter Marique (Rose McGowan). 

This film was in development purgatory for nearly a decade, and it shows. It's the unloved ginger stepkid, with directors like the Wachoskis, Robert Rodriguez and Brett Ratner attached. You can see the sliding quality as the film was passed round, and eventually the movie ended up with a relatively unknown horror director and a former music video DP (Thomas Kloss).  Is it any wonder then that the resulting film feels so cheap, so superficial, so ridiculous?  Producers might think that you don't need a great director for pulp material. But I would argue that the more pulpy the material, the harder the director needs to work, the better he needs to be, to prevent the film descending into nonsense.  One can only wonder what voice-over artist, Morgan Freeman, felt when the finished movie was released.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN was released in summer 2011 and is now available to rent and own.

SHOOT ON SIGHT - poorly made, crude, political drama

SHOOT ON SIGHT is a poorly made, earnest but superficial film about the British police response to the post 9-11 terrorist threat. It's made by the team that brought us PROVOKED - another movie based in the British Asian community. It shares that film's ropey production values as well as its caricature about race issues in the UK.

The movie takes its inspiration from the de Menezes shooting, in which an innocent South American man was mistaken by British police to be a suicide bomber and was shot in a tube station just after the 7/7 bombings. However, in its ham-fisted way, instead of making the victim a South American clean-shaven man, they make him a caricature Orthodox muslim complete with kurta pajama and cap. The nervous police, as represented by Brian Cox, bring in a muslim cop (Naseerudin Shah) to investigate the case. Shah is a very fine actor, but his accent is all over the shop - from Cockney to Scouse - and this is extremely distracting. This being a simplistic, neat drama, obviously the copper's childhood friend just happens to be a fanatical mullah. And of course, wouldn't you just know that he's sponsored his nice young radical nephew to come and live in his loft-conversion?

Apart from Gulshan Grover and Om Puri (representing moderate and radical Islam), the performances are all weak. Crucially, there is no attempt to understand how the suicide bomber became a radical. Behind the camera, we have a shooting style reminiscent of cheap British soap operas and a score that is as subtle as a Bollywood melodrama.

If you want to see a movie about the pyschology and politics behind suicide bombing and the police response to it, you would do far better to watch the recent Indian art movie, BLACK AND WHITE. BLACK AND WHITE strives hard to prove that the issues are never really so binary, whereas SHOOT ON SIGHT never bothers with such nuances.

SHOOT ON SIGHT is on release in the UK.