MADAME WEB**

New York, 2003. A tough cynical loner paramedic resents her dead mother for conducting dangerous experiments in South America while pregnant, so dying in childbirth. After an accident, the loner discovers she can see into the future and so prevent bad stuff happening. She also finds herself taking care of three young women who are being stalked by an evil villain in a spider suit. He's also had a vision that these wastrels are gonna kill him in the future. Meanwhile, our heroine's best friend and fellow paramedic Ben Parker's sister-in-law is about to go into labour.

The well known problem with MADAME WEB is that 15 years into the Marvel revolution nobody gives a shit. Dakota Johnson - whose low-key low-energy style suits many an indie film - definitely doesn't give a shit about a lead role she is miscast in. Tahar Rahim (NAPOLEON) and Zosia Mamet (Girls) is wasted as the baddie.  The three young women are given underwritten parts that are just a bag of tropes. Spoiled rich brat, nerdy shy girl etc. The action scenes from first-time feature director S J Clarkson are uninspired. The prologue is unnecessary. And the script is overlong with too many establishing examples of how being pre-cog works. The final shot features a now blind and paraplegic Madame Web hovering, masked, with her three proteges. It's a flash forward to a film nobody wants to see. 

MADAME WEB is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 113 minutes. It is on global release.

SOUTHPAW

SOUTHPAW is an earnest but risibly cliched and over-acted boxing drama written by Kurt Sutter (SONS OF ANARCHY) and directed by Antoine Fuqua (TRAINING DAY).  The movie starts Jake Gyllenhaal in a typically intense, hyper-realistic portrayal of a working-class kid turned successful boxing champion.  He's married to the love of his life (Rachel McAdams) and has a young daughter which is all so far so ROCKY. But pretty soon, his wife is caught up in a shooting and dies in one of those over-scored over-dramatic moments that will serve as the lynchpin for the rest of the film, in which our broken hero tries to resurrect his career and win back his daughter from the evil social services. His flashy manager (50 Cent - actually ok as an actor) having left him, our hero winds up begging a wizened old boxing manager played by Forrest Whitaker to train him.  Because as in ROCKY, the best training is low-rent, austere hard work on the worn-out mats of a back-street gym.  

Ankle-frack Round-Up 4 - REAL STEEL

REAL STEEL is set in the near-future where robot fighters have taken over from humans.  Hugh Jackman plays a washed up ex-boxer called Charlie, who's so deeply indebted and uninterested in his son Max (Dakota Goyo), that he effectively sells his right to parent to his rich sister-in-law (Hope Davis).  Paid to babysit the kid for a summer, Charlie surprisingly finds himself bonding with the kid who shares love of robots, as well as enough charisma and chutzpah to get their underdog bot a prize fight.  Newly inspired, Charlie teaches the bot to shadow box, setting the film up for a Rocky-like final bout and a schmaltzy finale in which father and son and bot have bonded with each other and the crowd.

I fully expected to hate REAL STEEL but rather enjoyed it.  It's an entirely derivative affair, to be sure, heavily borrowing from ROCKY.  And after the first twenty minutes you can predict everything that's going to happen in the film.  But for all that, there's an unmistakable chemistry between the lead actors, some wonderfully designed fighting robots, and some handsomely choreographed fight scenes - apparently courtesy of Sugar Ray Leonard.  The upshot is that while I knew exactly how the movie would play out, I was genuinely excited and moved by the final fight scene and the shamelessly populist ending. 

Digging into the credits, it's easy to see why the movie works.  The Sugar Ray Leonard credit combined with cinematography from Mauro Fiore (AVATAR) and direction from Shawn Levy (NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM) adds up to technically impressive and visually engaging vis effects.  And the original idea, based on a story by Robert Mathieson (I AM LEGEND) holds our interest.  Overall, REAL STEEL is a perfectly fine kids movie with enough fighting skills to hold an adult's interest.  I can't quite understand the rather sniffy reviews.

REAL STEEL was released in autumn 2011 and is now available to rent and own. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects but lost to HUGO.

AVATAR - you can have too much of a good thing

AVATAR is the much hyped new film from writer-director and special effects obsessive James Cameron - the man who brought us TITANIC, ALIENS and TERMINATOR. Let us say that James Cameron has consistently pushed forward the technology of film, and has produced consistently thoughtful sci-flicks. Indeed, I would argue that he deserves more kudos than Spielberg - creating fewer but more consistently entertaining and polished blockbusters. But let us also admit that Cameron is the master of hyping himself, and has saddled us both with Celine Dion and with a 130 minute movie of arse-numbing proportions.

First, the praise. AVATAR is a technical marvel. Not because it does anything new - rather, it pulls together all of the advances of the last five years and pushes them further and does them better than anyone else. The 3-D is immersive rather than trying to shock us. The CGI is photo realistic. The characters and animals have weight and heft. The natural science detailing on the plants and animals is breathtaking. Fantastic creatures seem real. It is easy to mock a director who goes to the lengths of actually inventing a new language for his fictional race, the Na'vi. But it works. Much like LORD OF THE RINGS, AVATAR works because it makes us believe in an alternate world, and through believing, we care about its future.

AVATAR is also tightly structured and directed so well that it maintains momentum throughout its runtime (which is not to say it couldn't have done with being a good forty minutes shorter). Cameron may be a master of CGI but he never forgets that story comes before technical wizardry. The movie plays a three-act drama. We are in a dystopian future where humans live on a dieing world, and have colonised a planet called Pandora, in order to mine a precious metal, whose main deposits lie underneath the "hometree" of the indigenous Na'vi people. In Act One, the audience invests its sympathy with the hero and heroine. A disabled jarhead pilots an avatar Na'vi body in order to infiltrate the tribe and negotiate a relocation by any means necessary. Problem is, he becomes fascinated by their respect for nature and falls for a Na'vi chick. In Act Two, the stakes are established. The army, impatient for profits, decimates the hometree, scattering the Na'vi people, and destroying their trust in the Jarhead. The science team establish that the whole ecosystem of the planet is connected and a powerful source of energy. In Act Three, we have the dramatic climax and resolution. The Na'vi regroup and with their human allies take on the colonials.

The strength of the AVATAR story is that James Cameron knows who to weave successful aspects of genre fiction into his more modern allegory of environmental degradation and ruthless military exploitation. We have a good old-fashioned romance between the jarhead and the Na'vi chick. We have a coming of age story, as the jarhead learns the rules of the new world. We have a buddy movie as the jarhead bonds with the science officer. And finally, we have a spiritual story of redemption. I love the fact that Cameron is willing to tackle both issues of science, politics and religion in the same film - to that end, it reminded me a lot of the better aspects of Ronald D Moore's BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

Given all these positives, it isn't a surprise that I had a good time watching this flick, even though it did seem just too long to spend in a cinema for what should just be a bit of entertainment, albeit intelligent entertainment.

But there are negatives. AVATAR features some of the most hokey dialogue and two-dimensional characterisation seen on film since STAR WARS. And maybe that's no coincidence. Maybe when a writer-director is having to balance different genres, a large cast, action, technology and romance, it's just too much to ask to have good dialogue and nuanced characterisation too? But then again, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did, by and large, pull that off. One of the strengths of that series was its ability to present conflicted characters who changed, evolved, and felt three-dimensional. By contrast, in AVATAR, you're either a righteous hippie earth-child or a cigar-chomping, profiteering rat-bastard. And characters say the stupidest things. Towit, jarhead to Na'vi chick: "why didn't you kill me?" Na'vi chick to jarhead: "Because you have a big heart." I mean, no-one, not enough imaginary aliens, speaks like this! There's also something slightly hypocritical in a movie that thinks nasty evil people who blow shit up are bad, but nevertheless wants us to be excited by a final act which is basically about people blowing shit up in more and more noisy ways.

Ultimately, AVATAR is such a feat of imagination that, like STAR WARS IV: A NEW HOPE, it survives the hammy dialogue and weak characterisation. It's nice to spend time in this world. It would've been even nicer to have been all done in two hours.

AVATAR is on global release.