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.

CHARLIE COUNTRYMAN

CHARLIE COUNTRYMAN is a strange and fascinating film that feels like it has too many good ideas clashing with each other and shouldn't work and yet somehow does.  It stars Shia Labeouf, but don't let that put you off. His big-eyed naivety plays well here, as the directionless romantic sent to Romania by his dying mother (Melissa Leo).  While there he gets into all sorts of random scrapes, some of which involve taking large quantities of drugs in a youth hostel with Ron Weasley and Jay from THE INBETWEENERS. But the meat of the story is Charlie falling in love with the grieving daughter of the man Charlie sat next to on the  plane. Played with a perfect accent by Evan Rachel Wood, the character of Gabi is perfectly aware that she is a movie trope - immediately asking Charlie if he wants to fall in love with her because she is vulnerable and exotic. She also has that most cliched of movie tropes - a nasty violent ex-husband, played with mordant wit  by Mads Mikkelsen (HANNIBAL).  

It's a movie that can be schmaltzy but is aware of that, and so is undercut by incredibly dark humour. The scenes in the youth hostel are genuinely laugh  out loud funny - I mean, I've never spent time thinking of porn names for Rupert Grint, but Boris Pecker is a work of genius. And some of the exchanges between a completely deadpan Mads Mikkelsen and Shia Labeouf were fantastically funny - just wait for the scene citing Dizzy Gillespie. So kudos to screen-writer Matt Drake for penning such a self-aware, daringly random, and funny script. As for the direction from first time feature helmer Fredrik Bond, it's elegant and particularly good in its use of music. The soundtrack featuring Deadmono is superb.

Like I said, this is an odd film that defies genre descriptions but if you go with it there's more than enough pay off.  Shia is at his most likeable (low baseline I admit), the music is great, Mads Mikkelsen is truly superb and Evan Rachel Wood is heart-breaking. 

CHARLIE COUNTRYMAN aka THE NECESSARY DEATH OF CHARLIE COUNTRYMAN has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Sundance and Berlin 2013 and was released last year in Norway, the USA, Denmark and Israel. It was released earlier this year in Singapore, Belgium, France, Portugal and Hong Kong. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland.

THE EQUALIZER (2014)

THE EQUALIZER is the big screen remake of the 1980s TV show starring Edward Woodward as ex CIA agent Robert McCall who provides vigilante justice for the downtrodden. Denzel Washington stars as a buttoned up insomniac loner who befriends a hooker with a heart of gold (Chloe Grace Moretz - KICK ASS). When she gets beaten up by her Russian pimp, Robert tries to buy her out, and when this doesn't work goes on a violent revenge spree, revealing in turn that he is obviously a skilled pro killer (although not using guns, as in the show). The movie then degenerates into a classic action-packed killing spree - although more stylish and imaginative than most movies.

It's hard not to like any movie starring Denzel Washington and Chloe Grace Moretz embraces an older and gritty role. Director Antoine Fuqua certainly has a sure and compelling visual style and as his TRAINING DAY proved, he knows how to build and sustain tension.  But the movie is fatally undercut by its sub TAXI DRIVER cliche of a young imperilled sex worker and its mid-point descent into violence.  The problem is that that violence doesn't have the emotional heft, or character development of the superb TRAINING DAY. In other words, what we have here is a superior stylish version of a Tony Scott movie. I also feel that the movie could have lost a good half hour of its running time.

THE EQUALIZER has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto 2015 and is on global release. 

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

Antoine Fuqua's OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is glorious trash and the true heir to the DIE HARD franchise. Instead of a tired reworking of the Bruce Willis underdog saves the day action blockbuster we get its transmutation into a hackneyed but convincingly tense thriller. The secret of its success? Like all pastiche, you have to play it with a completely straight face. And by casting actors of the calibre of Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo and Angela Bassett that's what this movie does. In addition, with its high gloss tech package, the movie looks as convincing as it feels. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the sequence in which the White House is taken by enemy agents is as convincing, gripping and terrifying as the plane malfunction sequence that opens FLIGHT.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is, however, how well Gerard "This Is Spaaaaarta!" Butler does as the action hero.  He's an actor whose personal life seems as feckless as his career choices - and this loserdom nicely carries over into perceptions of his character, Banning, a disgraced and guilt-ridden former Secret Service agent who manages to get inside the White House during the raid and leads a single-handed fight back against the North Koreans.

So what's it all about Alfie?  In the prologue, we see Secret Service agent Banning (Butler) involved in the tragic death of the First Lady (Ashley Judd), leaving her picture perfect husband, President Asher a widower and their cute little son Connor motherless.  As we move into the main body of the film, we see the White House come under aerial and ground assault from North Korean terrorists, and the President and his key staff (Leo, Freeman, Bassett etc) quickly moved into the underground bunker. Crucially, the President being a clean-cut, all-American, wonderful guy, he chooses to take the South Korean premier with him, allowing the treacherous Kang (Rick Yune - THE MAN WITH THE IRON FIST) to penetrate the bunker too.  The only good news is that Banning, since demoted, has made his way inside the White House and makes contact with his former boss (Bassett) allowing all kinds of heroic derring do and kiddie rescuing. 

You can predict how the plot's going to unfold from the trailer. There's nothing new here but the familiar story is so well-done, so enjoyable to watch, so comforting in its predictability that you can't help but have a good time.  Gerard Butler may well have resuscitated his ailing career, and director Antoine Fuqua certainly makes his most accomplished film since TRAINING DAY, even if it's far less radical in its content. 

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is on release in the USA, France, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Kuwait, Macedonia, Serbia, Canada, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Iceland and Estonia. It opens on April 4th in Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Russia, Slovenia, Lithuania and Romania. It opens on April 12th in Singapore and Mexico; on April 18th in the UK, Belgium, Italy, New Zealand and Finland; on May 3rd in Sweden; on May 10th in the Netherlands and Norway; on May 16th in Argentina and on June 8th in Japan. 

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN has a running time of 120 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

THE FIGHTER - Bale is outstanding, the rest is cliché and caricature

THE FIGHTER is a good old-fashioned boxing under-dog movie, with all the clichés and genre-conventions that go with the territory. 1. You get a boxer. He's scrabbling around getting beaten up for half the film. He gets a title fight chance - there's a training montage - he wins against all odds. 2. The boxer has a trainer who is self-destructive and threatens to derail the boxer's career. But the boxer really does need him and so they reconcile before the title fight. 3. The boxer has a girlfriend. She really believes in him and protects his interests against all the liggers and users who try to derail him. It's been the same story ever since ROCKY.

In this version, The Boxer is real-life Boston fighter, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg). He's the stereotypical good guy, but hen-pecked by a manipulative, over-bearing mother (Melissa Leo) and his seven sisters. The Self-Destructive Trainer is Micky's step-brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). Dicky used to be a fighter too, and is living off the memory of the time he supposedly knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard. Like many addicts, he's developed a charming, witty, winning personality out of survival instinct - as a crack-addict he's constantly having to charm his way back into his family's affections. Together, Micky's family put him in shitty fights, needing the money, and emotionally blackmail him from getting outside help. The Girlfriend is Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams), a feisty waitress who sits in Micky's corner, but essentially, rather than liberating him from his family, she just provides another set of commands. Coupled with its straightforward genre-convetions, THE FIGHTER has a straightforward, linear plot. We meet Micky as a third-rate journeyman boxer - see Charlene force a split with the family - only to unite before the climactic title fight. Nothing new there.

The resulting film gives us no surprises. You can predict how it's going to work, and who's going to do what. Most of the characters are caricatures. Silent, frustrated Micky. The evil manipulative mother - a far less subtle portrayal than Livia Soprano, and practically on a level with the animated Mother Gothel in Disney's TANGLED. The Feisty Girlfriend. And the performances are pretty mono-dimensional too. I think Wahlberg has been unfairly blamed for being "absent" - that's what his role calls for. But I really don't get all the praise for Melissa Leo and Amy Adams. Their characters are just crude portrayals of one-note harpies. Maybe I should blame the writing, but honestly, there's nothing demanding or insightful here. Only Christian Bale as Dicky Eklund is given a character with real depth, contradiction and development. He's a man trapped inside a delusion - a fictional character called "the pride of Lowell" that he performs for his fellow townsfolk, crack addicts and inmates. Sure he plays up to the cameras, when the HBO documentarians come to town, but he's playing up to reality too. As the movie unfolds, we see him confronted with his delusion and move towards some kind of self-knowledge. It's a superb piece of writing, and a bravura performance from Bale - as broad as the Joker in the "Pride of Lowell" character, yet also reflective and quiet as the reforming Dicky. Dicky is the real Fighter in this film - and the real emotional centre of the movie. When we see the final frame static capture of the brothers celebrating Micky's triumph, it's Dicky's face we look to. It's his triumph to have reformed, to have been let back into Micky's corner, and to have become a big enough man to allow his brother his success, and to be proud of him. Bale should be getting all the awards this season - but for Best Actor, rather than Supporting Actor.

I guess I've already hinted at what I perceive to be the weaknesses in the script - the broad characterisations and resistance to pushing the envelope. I think there are also real weaknesses with David O Russell's (THREE KINGS, I HEAR HUCKABEES) directorial choices. Essentially, I feel that Russell is living in the shadow of Darren Aronofsky in this picture. After the success of THE WRESTLER, Aronofsky was down to direct THE FIGHTER and lives on as its executive producer. A lot of the way in which Russell approaches the material seems to be "Aronofsky-lite" - a sort of pastiche of the filming style used in THE WRESTLER. It's all hand-held cameras, faux-documentary intimacy and visible grain. Which is ironic because as much as this film tries hard to capture the clothes, accents, and gritty reality of 1980s Lowell, with a script trading to high in cliché, it really could've been set anywhere. Worst of all, David O Russell bottles out of doing anything interesting with the boxing scenes, with the convenient excuse of using the HBO crews to re-create the pay-per-view look.

THE FIGHTER opened in 2010 in the US, the Philippines and Canada. It is currently on release in Singapore, Greece, Australia and Iceland. It opens this weekend in the UK and Brazil. It opens on February 11th in Portugal, Russia, Poland and Turkey. It opens on February 25th in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Norway. It opens in March in Malaysia, Lithuania, Sweden and the Netherlands. It opens on April 7th in Germany.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 3 - CONVICTION

Another film fest and another disappointing, soupy Oscar-bait flick starring Hilary Swank. She plays Betty Anne Waters, a middle-aged mother who put herself through her GED, college and then law school in order to represent her brother and over-turn his murder conviction. It's a two hour film that reads like a police/court procedural, where plucky little Betty Ann digs out evidence and outs corruption with her can-do, no-nonsense attitude. She has a best-friend with a heart of gold (Minnie Driver) and understanding teenage kids with hearts of gold, and a New York injustice-fighter (Peter Gallacher) with a heart of gold. It's all so bloody banal and twee and Hallmark TV afternoon movie I wondered what the frack it was doing in a Film Festival. Neither Tony Goldwyn's direction nor Pamela Gray's script ever move beyond hammy cliche. The only, only things elevating this movie beyond utter mediocrity are a small cameo from Juliette Lewis, as usual, typecast as a skank, and a scene-stealing role for Sam Rockwell as the charismatic incarcerated brother. Avoid at all costs.

CONVICTION played Toronto 2010 and is on release in the US. It opens in Belgium on December 1st, in Germany on February 24th 2011 and in the Netherlands on March 24th.