WONDER WOMAN

Beating an admittedly low bar, WONDER WOMAN is unquestionably the best movie in the DC franchise. It has some of the darkness of BATMAN VS SUPERMAN but never feels pretentious or portentous; and in the place of SUICIDE SQUADS' maddeningly shifting tone and offensive objectification of Harley Quinn we have a movie with a straightforward compelling story and a courageous and often subtle take on modern sexual and racial politics.  The result is a film that's both highly enjoyable and yet deeply meaningful  - a long overdue strong heroine in a universe full of macho posturers. 

The movie opens in contemporary France with Batman reaching out to Diana/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), but it's essentially a long flashback and origins story, told in live action and with beautifully designed animation and the most seamless use of CGI.  We see the young child growing up on an island of Amazonian woman - fierce warriors created by Zeus to protect humanity from the corrupting influence of his son Aries, the god of war.  Diana herself is moulded from clay by her mother Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen - GLADIATOR), and made live by Zeus himself. Accordingly, she is herself a god, sister to Aries, although this fact seems to escape her logical notice.  The Amazons have been holed up on a magical island while World War One is raging around them, until US spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine - STAR TREK reboot) crash lands in their midst.  A brave Diana then returns with him to wartime Europe, supposedly to bring an end to war by killing Aries, whom she believes is German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston.)

HACKSAW RIDGE

HACKSAW RIDGE is Mel Gibson's re-telling of the true story of Desmond Doss, a deeply religious US soldier who fought in the Pacific against the Japanese and won his country's highest military honour despite being a conscientious objector.  Doss refused to hold or fire a weapon but went into battle as a combat medic. And when his company was forced to retreat in ignominious circumstances, he stayed on top of Hacksaw Ridge and single-handedly rescued over seventy men.  He attributed his success and his survival to his faith, and overturned the prejudices of the men who thought him a coward.

It's easy to see why such material would appeal to Mel Gibson, a man whose faith is a quite extreme version of Catholicism, and whose films are obsessed with a close-up and cloying depiction of violence.   What Gibson isn't interested in are female characters or emotional nuance.  The result is a film, with a script by Robert Schenkkan (THE PACIFIC) and Andrew Knight (THE WATER DIVINER) that is heavy-handed, emotionally manipulative, and full of cliches and cheesy dialogue, and yet despite all this contains moments of great power and tragedy.

The first half of the film is a kind of PRIVATE BENJAMIN slash FORREST GUMP remake but with Andrew Garfield (THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN) cast as a kind of goofy simpleton.  He just wants to marry his gorgeous nurse sweetheart and protect his fellow soldiers in war despite his objections to holding a gun. We learn in flashback that this stems partly from a backyard scrap with his brother that nearly killed him, but also the example of seeing his father, traumatised by his experience of World War One, turn into a violent alcoholic.  In this section, Vince Vaughn gets to do his usual comedy schtick as the fast-talking mean Sergeant who wants to bully Doss out of the army.  Poor Teresa Palmer gets nothing to do as Doss' girlfriend except to look pretty and angelic and to be utterly supportive.  Indeed the only moment of real cinematic value is Hugo Weaving, who with his portrayal of the tortured ex soldier Papa Doss seems to be acting in another film entirely.

BLENDED

BLENDED is the latest in the series of harmless rom-coms starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore as Jim and Lauren. In this iteration they play a widower and a divorcee respectively who go on a horrible blind date where he takes her to a Hooters and pays her no attention.  Naturally they are opposites. She's a professional closet organiser and so is portrayed as uptight and overly controlling, with her two boys dressed in smart suits. He's a sports-nut with there girls dressed in athletic wear.  Neither parent is coping particularly well with their kids going through puberty. 

The plot kicks off when Lauren's best friend ends her relationship with Jim's boss freeing up a luxury holiday that the boss had booked. They both get to go with their kids, and while they start of hating each other and protesting that they aren't dating - well, you can guess what happens. 

The humour is very very low key indeed. It's not really a laugh-out-loud movie. But I did, in spite of my in-built cynicism, feel that trademark Sandler-Barrymore warm cuddly feeling and I genuinely liked these people and wanted things to work out. There are no surprises, and I knew I was being manipulated by a script that repeated a tried and trusted formula. But I just couldn't help it.  And you know when I knew this movie was really working?  Terry Crews.  When I first saw his cameo as a South African singer I thought, my god, is this borderline racist?  By the end, I just went with it, and even found it funny. So yes, there's nothing original or pioneering here.  But it works.  It really does.

BLENDED is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 117 minutes. BLENDED is on release in the USA, UK, Ireland, Germany, Puerto Rico, Austria and Canada. It opens on May 30th in Thailand, Bulgaria, India and Vietnam.  It opens in June in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Singapore, Uruguay, Colombia, Cyprus, Pakistan, Belgium, Iceland, Kuwait, the Philippines, the UAE, Australia, Lebanon, Peru, Indonesia, Panama, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Greece, Romania, Taiwan, Mexico, Spain, Finland and Sweden. It opens in July in Italy, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Macedonia, Portugal, Serbia, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, Venezuela, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Brazil and the Netherlands. It opens on August 6th in Egypt, and in Japan on March 11th 2015.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - GROWN-UPS

GROWN-UPS is an alleged warm-hearted comedy that utterly fails to entertain on any level. 

The conceit is that four school-friends, now grown-up, come together at the funeral of their beloved school sports coach, and spend the weekend together in a vacation home. Their lives have taken them in different directions. Adam Sandler's character has turned into a big name Hollywood name, and is married to a glamorous fashion designer (Salma Hayek). Meanwhile Kevin James' character has ended up a small-time employee, much to his own shame. The movie is meant to be about how these friends rediscover their friendship and what really matters in life. It's meant to be about how our kids have become spoiled by Tivo and video games and need to just run around in the mud sometimes. All laudable aims. 

But in terms of execution, the fact that this flick was directed by Dennis Dugan (YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, BIG DADDY, HAPPY GILMORE) and co-written with Fred Wolf (THE HOUSE BUNNY, LITTLE NICKY) tells you all you need to know about the crass humour and crude narrative arcs that the characters are sent on. I didn't invest in any of the characters, and so didn't care about their enlightenment. I didn't buy into the fashion designer ditching her Milan show - her heart melting with surprising ease. Even worse, I hated the so-called attempts at comedy. What happened to Maria Bello's career that she takes a part where her only job is to provide a "gag" about her toddler still drinking breast milk? Am I really meant to laugh at a grown man falling into mud? And what dirt do SNL has-beens David Spade and Rob Schneider have on Adam Sandler that he keep casting them in his films? 

 Still, it's far more watchable than COUPLE'S RETREAT. 

 GROWN UPS was released in summer 2010 and is available to rent and own.

JUST GO WITH IT

JUST GO WITH IT is an Adam Sandler vehicle directed by his long-standing collaborator, Dennis Dugan (HAPPY GILMORE, BIG DADDY, GROWN UPS).  It's based on a French farce, which means that you have to willingly suspend your disbelief as layer after layer of ridiculousness takes place. I don't mind a good farce, but one tolerates the nonsense plot in exchange for consistent raucous laughter. Sadly, JUST GO WITH IT  doesn't deliver. In fact, barring a few sly plastic surgery jokes, the movie is by turns dull, mawkish and plain embarrassing.

Adam Sandler plays an emotionally scarred plastic surgeon who avoids real relationships by shagging young birds while wearing a wedding ring. When he finally meets a girl he actually likes (Mrs Andy Roddic - Brooklyn Decker) he has to magic up an actual ex-wife, and persuades dowdy co-worker (Jennifer Aniston looking about as un-dowdy as, well, Jennifer Aniston) to pretend. Of course, when the girlfriend twigs that Jen has kids, she wants to meet them too - cue a massive extended family holiday in Hawaii.  The pretence gets even more complex when Aniston's character bumps into her super-successful college bete-noire (Nicole Kidman) and wants to pretend she's still married to Sandler, much to the confusion of his current girlfriend.

The problem is that a) Aniston doesn't look dowdy so her transformation into hot chick lacks punch b) Sandler's character is meant to realise that he should grow up and date a real women rather than a super-model. Except that he ends up realising the grown woman is for him because she turns out to look like a super-model - having your cake and eating it much?! c) the scene where Aniston and Sandler tell each other what they like about each other made me want to vomit d) the scene where Kidman gets on stage and tries to out-shine Aniston's character was probably the most embarrassingly unfunny thing I'll see on screen all year. 

JUST GO WITH IT is on release in the US, UK, Egypt, Israel, Singapore, the UAE, Canada, Iceland, Ireland and Mexico. It opens later in February in the Philippines, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway and Spain. It opens in March in Brazil, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Kazakhstan, France, Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Australia, Malaysia and Peru. It opens in April in Colombia, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Belgium, Portugal, India, the Netherlands, Panama, Venezuela and Argentina. It opens on July 1st in Paraguay.