Chris At The Pictures

“All you do is shout at each other!” – the frustrated words of cyborg assassin Nebula (Karen Gillan) ring loud and true regarding Marvel’s dizzying and thunderous return to the stars. Following an incursion with a giant tentacle monster and gold-faced aliens, the Guardians of the Galaxy find themselves split in two. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Drax (Dave Bautista) head off into the unknown on the trail of the living planet, Ego (Kurt Russell), while Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and Groot (now Borrowers-scale and voiced by a squeaky Vin Diesel) are left to fend for themselves against hordes of space pirates.

To call anything that comes from the Disney-Marvel slate “risky” seems a bit much, but I at least confess my admiration for an audacious opening set piece, which places the action itself in the background and distracts us with a three-minute dance number as the titles play out. My enjoyment even stretched to the use of ‘Mr Blue Sky’, a song which I freely admit detesting, largely thanks to its association with many awful British summer time TV adverts.

Accidentally going along with things that shouldn’t work is an experience that defined my time spent in the company of James Gunn’s new film. Whether snorting at Drax’ cacophony of trouser humour or wryly noting the onslaught of 80’s pop culture references (is there really an audience crossover between Marvel and Cheers?), I had a great time with this movie, make no mistake…even if said movie itself is far, far from great. Despite its bum-numbing length, largely inconsequential roster of side characters and one moment where it turns into Man of Steel (and not in a good way), Guardians 2 is infectiously fun. The cast are engaging, the music – both the new Awesome Mix and Tyler Bates’ score – is glorious and hearty, and it leaves the audience awash with smiles.

Only occasionally does the smile falter. Constant bickering between the bunch gets a bit much, hence my sympathies with Nebula as the Guardians’ prisoner. Pratt’s delivery is the main offender, bouncing back between soft aural honey and wide-eyed barking, with Cooper’s shrieking raccoon a close second. Mercifully, they’re usually cut off mid-rant by Bautista’s pin-precise comedic timing or a relatable glower from Saldana. Even the extensively-marketed baby Groot gags take a good while to start wearing thin, stuffed to the brim as the film is.

Like a sports car stuck in traffic, the movie wants to whip-pan from scene to scene, but is reined in by sequences that take an age to pass. There’s so much going on visually and referentially (gags about Mary Poppins, Pac-Man and an allusion to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, to name but a few), crammed into a narrative that hops from one side of the universe to the other like there’s a hedgehog in its seat.

Here, Guardians 2 goes for the whole Empire Strikes Back deal (the gang are separated after an early conflict and familial ties are revealed), but with a modicum of the depth and none of the darkness. But that’s fine: in a film with the aesthetic of a Haribo factory on fire, anything too challenging or tonally murky would set the atmosphere askance.

In terms of the wider cinematic universe this is little more than a jaunty side-step from endless avenging; the filmic equivalent of a village fireworks display. It goes on longer than anyone really needs it to, but you stay the course and suffer the repetitive whizz-bangs because there’s free candy floss, your best mates have turned up and you’re all howling with laughter because the vicar just took a Catherine wheel to the crotch.

Fast & Furious 8 or, as I like to call it, Physics? Never heard of it!, opens with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) racing a flaming car backwards down the busy streets of Cuba, and only becomes more bonkers from there. After this brief display of disregard for civilian life, Dom turns this callous attitude on his own family, betraying Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), his wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and the rest of the crew for reasons unknown. He’s allied with Cipher (Charlize Theron in dreadlocks that she just about gets away with), a God-like hacker who – despite her ability to unseat entire nations with the flick of a switch – needs Dom for one last job. His heartbroken team have no choice but to join forces with a young upshot agent played by Scott Eastwood (a desperate and failed attempt to fill the seat left by Paul Waker) and old enemy Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) to bring their fallen leader to justice.

Yes, it’s all got a bit dark this time around. Or as dark as a film where Statham calls Johnson a wanker from behind bars can be, anyhow.  It’s the cars and calamity you’ve paid to see, and the film’s zealous delivery of conflagration and testosterone ensures you’re never distracted by the corny dialogue or questionable performances. For all the developments in digital technology the saga has grown into, the tools to make Vin Diesel emote anywhere in the realms between wry smile and concrete slab have not yet been invented.

Still, you’re not there to admire the cast's acting ability any more than they’re turning up to win Oscars: they’re here for the ride, and so are we. Want to see a six-way game of tug-of-war played with sports cars? They’ve got it. Fancy the sight of Tyrese Gibson ice-surfing on the severed door of a Lamborghini? Thought so. Ever wondered what happens when half of New York’s traffic piles down a single street? I’ll get the popcorn, shall I?

Everyone slides into their roles with the ease of slipping on well-worn shoes and the one-liners bounce around as harmlessly as their owner’s cars seem to do (although Gibson’s constant back-and-forth with the closest person/object/explosion is beginning to grate). Of course, it all starts to fall apart once anyone starts talking for longer than it takes for several showrooms worth of cars to blow up, but I’m willing to forgive Chris Morgan’s script purely because it gifts us the sight and sound of Dame Helen Mirren shouting “Devil’s bumhole”.

The exotic locales and apparently uncontested damage to property is highly reminiscent of the James Bond series and – while it’s more Die Another Day than Casino Royale – Fast & Furious is well on the way to overtaking the British spy franchise in terms of instalments, box office heft and pure brainless enjoyment. Its complete self-awareness, total aversion to any façade of prestige and willingness to embrace the modern blockbuster landscape is a winning formula.  I’ve even been moderately enthused by the series’ strive for diversity, but it needs to drop the needless ogling of women’s backsides before I embrace it wholeheartedly.

It’s honestly astonishing to see just how far a franchise that began as Point Break with street-racing has become. The original film’s grimy aesthetic and plucky band of believable characters now seems ludicrously understated compared to Fast 8, which involves set pieces where around 100 cars drop from the sky and Diesel attempts to outwit a heat-seeking missile. At this point I’m tempted to slam the brakes and take a moment to wonder how much further they can possibly go with this, but we’ve all been here before and know the answer: a lot. Fast & Furious (Deep Space) 9, anyone?

On April 20, 2010, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. By the time the fires had been put out and the spillage had been capped 87 days later, it had been named the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Being a 14 year-old at the time, with the minimal interest in current affairs that comes with adolescence, my knowledge of the incident prior to this cinematic retelling was limited to the ecological fallout. Not only had I never heard of the Deepwater Horizon itself, it never occurred to me that its destruction even carried an immediate human cost. The great success of the film is that the loss of those eleven men is keenly felt, even if their characterization is slim to non-existent.

Returning from 2013’s rather excellent Lone Survivor is the triple threat of director Peter Berg, leading man Mark Wahlberg, and composer Steve Jablonsky. They take on the day of disaster from ground zero, following rig worker Mike Williams (Wahlberg) as he leaves his wife (a seriously under-utilised Kate Hudson) and daughter to supervise blowout prevention on the Horizon. Upon arrival, Williams mingles with fellow crew members, suffers through uncomfortable encounters with BP moneyman Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich) and is suddenly thrust into the inferno when a pressure accumulation beneath the rig triggers a total meltdown.

I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll happily watch Mark Wahlberg in anything, from his deer-in-headlights performance in The Happening to his comparatively subtle but scorching role in The Departed. Here, we find him somewhere in the middle. He gets a lot of running about to do and dodges a lot of blistering debris, but the strength of his performance is that he sells the good-natured, slightly unkempt labourer in the build-up, so his later good deeds feel completely characteristic (though the film makes the error of playing us a recording of the real Williams before we even get a glimpse of the actor; always something to avoid in biopics).

He shares the screen with a finely-moustachioed Kurt Russel as Jimmy Harrell, the rig’s manager. His main job is to glower at Malkovich a lot, which he accomplishes with aplomb. Dylan O’Brien is also pretty effective in sporadic appearances but is barely noticeable through the layers of mud (and until the credits rolled I was thoroughly convinced it was Evan Peters playing the role).

With the focus initially planted on the humdrum working day of the rig, there’s little need for digital gloss, but when the rig bursts into flame in a series of seat-shaking explosions, the blaze (when seen on a significantly big screen) is enough to burn out the retinas. The physical blood, sweat and tears are also appropriately visceral, and though any gore is toned down in comparison to Berg’s previous picture, the fate that befalls Russell’s character when things go south is sure to induce a good half-hour of sharp winces. Refreshingly, there’s no slow-motion, piano-tinkled attempts to exploit any deaths for entertainment, either, merely a final roll call that says more with just eleven names than any heartstring-tugging music could accomplish.

That said, the score is peak Jablonsky; a collection of sweeping, spinning stringscapes dashed with incidental thrums that speak to an unmistakable milieu of Americana, in which the film is steeped. Sure enough, as Williams turns back from loading life rafts to gape at the pandemonium, the stars & stripes hang intact.

The sight and sound is all very evocative, but a screenplay penned by Matthew Michael Carnahan leaves something to be desired, Carnahan having taken over from previous writer/director J.C. Chandor, who left the project due to creative differences. Chandor made the unintelligible unmissable in Margin Call, and I feel his hand may have prevented the screenplay’s rank and file versus suit-and-tie metanarrative from coming across so blindingly obvious. The labourers are fast-talking, techno-babbling everymen, while the BP reps are smirking, beady-eyed taskmasters with their shirts tucked in so tightly they may as well be robots. Malkovich’s painfully enunciated accent does little to stave off this comparison.

Demonstrably, it was the oversight of those representatives that enabled the catastrophe to take place, but there’s no nuance to the divide at all. Lone Survivor managed to reproduce a harrowing event with minimal flag-waving, but Deepwater Horizon is constantly out to place the blame. Berg effectively combines the dangerous allure of Irwin Allen movies with the real-world gravitas displayed by Paul Greengrass’ United 93 (still the high watermark for the post 9/11 disaster subgenre), but the latter element is somewhat lacking. As he now takes on the Boston Marathon bombings in next year’s Patriots Day, it seems his and Wahlberg’s template for true story dramas is paying off dividends, but one wonders how much longer the formula will last.