iPad Round-Up 4 - SEASON OF THE WITCH

Evidently, the Nic Cage crusader-slash-religious-hysteria flick SEASON OF THE WITCH is a bunch of ridonkulous hokum. The key question is whether, like SOLOMON KANE, it manages to embrace its pulpy traits to become a truly entertaining piece of work. The sad answer is, "a thousand times No". SEASON OF THE WITCH is a confused, sub-par piece of hammy genre entertainment, in which Nic Cage is disappointingly not as crazy as he was in BAD LIEUTENANT. 

The plot is pretty simple.  Nic Cage and Ron Perlman are 14th century Crusader knights who, despite battling for their Christian Kings, end up falsely accused and on trial for their lives. Thus newly sensitised to the cruelty of arbitrary justice, they journey home through a plague-infested land.  A monk charges them to deliver a Witch to an exorcism designed to rid the country of the plague, but of course Nic Cage's Knight wants her to have a fair trial. And, after all, we sort of think that the plague might be caused by a travelling salesman with infected reliquaries rather than an innocent girl attracting unwanted attentions. That said, as Roger Ebert points out in his review, the film's post-modern cultural sensitivity is somewhat undermined by the fact that the poor girl doesn't even get a name!  

The look of the film is sort of lo-rent Conan slash Coppola's highly colour-coded Dracula with battle scenes from the Ridley Scott school of loud noises and incomprehensible editing. Lots of over-wrought CGI backdrops, mud and sweat, but not much actual inspiration or imagination. DP Amir Mokri (TRANSFORMERS 3, FAST & FURIOUS) obviously long since sold his soul to Michael Bay and is probably a better candidate for  salvation-by-exorcism than the poor girl. And as for Director Dominic Sena, where's the visual wit and verbal cheekiness that enlivened SWORDFISH? 

SEASON OF THE WITCH went on global release in January through March. It is currently on release in Italy and opens in Japan on July 30th. It is also available to rent and own.

THE INTERNATIONAL - 'enslaved to debt'; betrayed by modern art

I really enjoyed THE INTERNATIONAL: it's a solid, intelligent thriller that neatly side-steps a few irritating genre conventions but also delivers a very slick, satisfying action set-piece.

The set up is simple. Clive Owen and Naomi Watts play an Interpol officer and a New York DA trying to frame a case against a shady Luxembourg based bank. Based non-too subtly on the infamous BCCI, the bank is using its capital to broker arms deals, selling cheap weapons from China to fund coups in Africa. It uses any means necessary to protect its interests. The movie is essentially a police procedural in which our two investigators track an IBBC assassin. CSI: Eurozone leads them back to New York where a quite magnificent shoot out takes place in the Guggenheim. (I acknowledge that, strictly speaking, there is no reason to have a shoot-out in an architectural marvel, but my word, it's glorious.) Thereafter, it would've been quite easy for director Tom Tykwer to have rolled into a high-octane, pat ending. Rather, he reverts to the discursive, restrained tone of the preceeding scenes. There is no simmering sexual tension between the leads; no dramatic denouement a la MICHAEL CLAYTON. We leave the film as we begin - the world is "enslaved to debt". I find this a fitting, if bleak, film for our times.

THE INTERNATIONAL played Berlin 2009 and is currently on release in Germany, the USA, Egypt, Australia, Sweden, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, South Korea, Finland, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Norway, the UK, Venezuela, Denmark and Estonia. It opens next week in Belgium and France and on March 19th in Argentina, Greece and Italy. It opens on March 27th in Russia, Poland and Romania. It opens in April in Japan, the Czech Republic, Israel, Singapore and Turkey.

HITMAN - now, if you were a super-smart assassin would you really walk around with a conspicuous bar-code tatooed to your skull?

HITMAN is a surprisingly good action movie despite its genesis as a video game and the imbecility of the bar-code in the back of the head. Not that I have anything against video games: I've spent many a happy weekend kicking seven shades of crap out of the Parthians with my cataphract cavalry. However, in my experience it's much more fun to blow shit up yourself than to outsource the blowing up of shit. Added to that, a lot of VG adaptations make zero attempt to super-impose silly little things like...well...plot or character development onto the stylised violence of the source material.

In this respect, HITMAN is miles ahead of any other VG adaptation, though still a goodly mile behind the best of the spy/assassin genre. For a start, the violence is not as stylised and unrealistic as you sometimes get, and it's actually surprisingly discreet. Oftentimes the camera cuts away from the worst of it. Second, the production design is full of care, attention, atmosphere and, presumably, cold hard cash. Our protagonist, Agent 47, guns down a Russian premier in St Petersburg, before heading to Istanbul. All the while he stays in lush hotels and drives swankier cars than, say, James Blonde. A particular marvel is the creation of the FSB headquarters, which is all diffused light in baroque corridors.

But the biggest win is the script by Skip Woods, who also wrote the super-stylish SWORDFISH (one of the coolest opening scenes in cinema.) His Agent 47, portrayed by Timothy Olyphant, has a dry wit and a moral centre. But he never betrays his psycho upbringing in a sort of Catholic boarding school cum assassin training camp. I love the fact that the film-makers resist the temptation to have a teen fantasy sex-scene between Agent 47 and his Russian damsel in distress (Olga Kurylenko). I also invested in the relationship between Agent 47 and his nemesis, Brit copper Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), as well as buddy cop relationship between Whittier and his side-kick, Jenkins (Michael Offei.)

Don't get me wrong. HITMAN is no work of genius. Any movie that has to tell viewers that London is in England or that Istanbul is in Turkey is playing to a low common denominator. And don't even get me started on the fictitious Russo-Turkish border! But I have to say that I had a good time watching this flick, and when they make the inevitable sequel, I'll anticipate it with more eagerness that I did its predecessor.

HITMAN is on release in Canada, Egypt, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the US, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Lebanon, Indonesia, Taiwan, Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Colombia, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK. It opens next Friday in Australia, New Zealand, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Rumania and on December 13th in Bolivia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Brazil, Finland, Sweden and Chile. It opens on December 26th in France; on January 24th in Argentina and in Japan on April 5th 2008.