RETURN TO SENDER

In which Rosumund Pike (GONE GIRL) plays a nurse who is raped in her house by a man (Shiloh Fernandez) who she thinks is her blind date. To the incomprehensibility of her father (Nick Nolte) she befriends this man in prison and even asks him to make amends by renovating her now unsaleable house. The twist at the end is straight out a Japanese ultra-violent revenge flick. The problem with this movie is that it’s filmed like a Hallmark Channel afternoon movie and paced with similar banality. It’s very much a workmanlike, obvious, sunlit movie. Rosamund Pike is just fine but it feels like the script isn’t giving her anything to do. We painfully and mechanically wind our way toward a very underplayed twist in the tale which isn’t really worth the candle. Revenge flicks can be done better - the plots don’t need to be any more complex. Just think how David Fincher transformed GONE GIRL into something truly creepy and brilliantly off the hook. If only the film had had the self-confidence to go big, or director Fouad Makiti (OPERATION: ENDGAME) and the cinematographer (can't find the credit on IMDBPro) had had the inspiration to do something edgy and tense with the visuals.

RETURN TO SENDER has a running time of 95 minutes. It is rated 18 for scenes of sexual violence.  It is currently on very limited release in the UK but is also available on demand.

SYRUP

SYRUP is a tonally uneven, unfunny but provocative satirical romance starring Amber Heard (THE RUM DIARIES) and Shiloh Fernandez (EVIL DEAD) as two media obsessed  advertising execs who fall for each other despite their inability to lead authentic lives.  Fernandez plays Scat - a slacker who has one good idea - to great an energy drink called Fukk. It doesn't care what it tastes like. The taste is not the point. And of course it's a runaway success. In the midst of all this he falls for the marketing exec Six, oh yes, complete with ludicrous back story of how she came up with that name. Because Amber Heard, dressing way above her age and clearly angling for the remake of BASIC INSTINCT, is so wrapped up in creating the perfect image of herself, she doesn't actually know how to express her own name and back story.  Corporate shenanigans ensue.  In the cut-throat capitalist world every great marketing scheme runs the risk of a social media backfire and when both characters hit the buffers real feelings start to be revealed, insofar as they can be.

As rom-coms go the movie has few laughs and the characters aren't that engaging. The irritatingly smug straight to camera exposition is, well, irritating, in the same manner as Don Cheadle in the TV show House of Cards. But somewhere amidst the rather soupy and predictable romance there's a telling satire on marketing and mass hype which piqued my interest. It may not have satisfied it, but elevated this film from being utterly unmemorable.

SYRUP has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is available on streaming services.

RED RIDING HOOD - sexless

With her self-consciously naive re-telling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale, TWILIGHT director Catherine Hardwicke undoes all the good work of Angela Carter in bringing Charles Perrault's original story up to date with modern sexual mores. For, as she revealed in her brilliant short story, which was itself made into the film, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, Red Riding Hood is really a story about a young virgin fearful of the bestial sexual appetites of men. In the original fairytale, the young girl is taught to stay well clear of men, lest she be raped and murdered. But in Angela Carter's retelling, the young girl takes control of her fate, fucks the wolf and lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, in this strange new world of teen cinema, where teenagers fall in love as if their lives depended on it, but no-one actually has sex, there is little room to explore the themes of The Little Red Riding Hood story. The resulting film is strangely neuter - strangely childish - a lot of fuss about nothing.

In this film Amanda Seyfield (MAMMA MIA!) plays Valerie aka LRRH as a drippy emo teenage girl, desperate to get it on with her dishy boyfriend Peter (Shiloh Fernandez - a poor man's Ed Westwick) but affianced to the similarly dishy Henry (Max Irons - a poor man's Robert Pattinson). She nearly fucks Peter, and flirts a little with Henry, but the potential for anyone with brown eyes to be the Big Bad Wolf obviously puts a dampener on things. Is it Peter? Is it Henry? Is it Julie Christie's gothic-loopy Grandmother? Who knows? Who cares? The movie grinds through its hokey whodunnit plot and the big reveal turns out to be dull and sexually uninteresting.

Amanda Seyfried is, I suppose, passable as the drippy teen, but both Max Irons and Shiloh Fernandez are wooden. Virginia Madsen as the mother and Gary Oldman as the sinister inquisitor are wasted and Julie Christie is in hammer-horror territory. The soundtrack, with music by Fever Ray, is suitably atmospheric, and Mandy Walker's photography is suitably moody, but she is let down by Thomas E Sanders' (Coppola's DRACULA) too shiny, too over-designed Alpine village set. I particularly hated screenwriter David Leslie Johnson's attempt to critique the use of torture in a war on terror (I kid you not!) and as I said before, his refusal to deal with the sexual subtext is just bizarre.

Overall, RED RIDING HOOD is just absolutely zero. A movie with no soul, no heart, no sex, no tension and no resolution worth its name. The only possible reason to watch it is for the comedy gold moment when you realise that the Reeve is Colonel Tigh!

RED RIDING HOOD was released in March in the USA, Singapore, Canada, Iceland, the Philippines, the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It was released earlier in April in Turkey, Armenia, Australia, Kuwait, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, Slovenia, Colombia, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in France, Sweden, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Italy and Venezuela. It opens on April 28th in Greece, Hungary and Estonia. It opens on June 10th in Japan, and on June 24th in Poland.