Chris At The Pictures

The Best 10 Films of 2014 (Ascending order)

10. Noah – Conquered all my issues with the original Biblical story with incredible spectacle, visual grace and powerhouse performances.

9. Pride – Wonderful historical drama with more than enough laughs and a cast so enjoyable you’ll want to hug them all…twice.

8. Gone Girl – Delicately crafted and gorgeously mounted ‘who-dunnit’ which brings David Fincher back to his A-game.

7. Lone Survivor – Brutal, nihilistic and avoids flag-waving throughout. Career performances from all involved and a well-handled tribute to those who lost their lives is the blood-soaked icing on the cake.

6. The LEGO Movie – Funny, flashy and sumptuously creative. Other toy-based franchises could learn an awful lot from this…I’m looking at you, Transformers.

5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – State-of-the-art special effects genre picture meets political and philosophical drama. The director risks placing the simians over the human characters and the film is all the better for it.

4. X-Men: Days of Future Past – Simultaneously paves a new path for the franchise and effectively erases the worst parts of it. Bryan Singer’s return is more than a cause to celebrate.

3. The Raid 2 – Flawlessly executed martial arts picture that fuses the thematic structure of The Departed with the one-man army of The Dark Knight (minus rubber suit).

2. The Guest – Helmed by people who know exactly what they’re doing and how to get the best reaction from an audience. It’s gorgeous, gory and an absolute ball from start to finish.

1. Interstellar – As much as I hate to sound like a stuck record, there’s really no competition here: Nolan has crafted a monumental sci-fi drama that brings the works of Lucas, Spielberg and Kubrick into a glorious melange of brains and heart.

The Worst 10 Films of 2014 (Descending order)

10. Divergent – Another dystopian teen franchise that feels dead on arrival. Key features are bland leads and a void-like abyss of humour and wit.

9. If I Stay – Chloe Grace Moretz bats her eyelashes and swishes her hair at the camera for 90 minutes while everyone around her sobs rather annoyingly.

8. A Million Ways to Die in the West – Witless, done-to-death comedy tropes fall flat while Charlize Theron and co. look on in horror. Go back to TV, Seth.

7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Heroes in a half-assed shell of a movie: ugly to look at, irritating to listen to, it’s a chore from start to finish.

6. Annabelle – A prequel no-one wanted that has a total lack of visual flair, good scares and interesting characters, making it either painful to sit through or bliss to sleep through.

5. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones – Painfully slow, not scary in the slightest, and all over the place. Paramount, please stop funding these; you’re only making it worse.

4. Devil’s Due – Vomit-inducing garbage to which the label ‘horror’ only applies once you’ve seen the box-office takings.

3. Transformers: Age of Extinction – Michael Bay continues in his quest to burn the nostalgia of the 80’s to the ground and modern action cinema along with it.

2. Tarzan – Childhood-destroying rubbish that looks like the Postman Pat movie trying to mate with the corpse of Avatar.

1. The Other Woman – A handbag full of sick.

An explosion is an incredible thing; an expanding ball of superheated gas that can turn metal to molten slag, incinerate human flesh, and reduce entire buildings to heaps of unrecognisable rubble…and Michael Bay has found a way to make them boring. I bring this up as my main problem with Transformers: Age of Extinction because not doing so would mean facing the many, many others seeping from the films’ every orifice like bubonic pus.

The plot of the film (as much as there is one) is this: five years since the events of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, aliens both good and evil have been outlawed from Earth, and an elite task force of government agents aided by a mysterious figure known as Lockdown are tasked with finding and killing those that remain. Aspiring inventor Cade Yeager (a name that will go down with ‘Cypher Raige’ from After Earth as one of the most ridiculous names in film) discovers a beaten up old truck that he intends to scrap for parts is in fact Optimus Prime, leader of the heroic Autobots. With the government determined to hunt them, and a new alien threat emerging, Cade and Optimus join forces.

The main issue that makes Age of Extinction such an unbearable mess is the million different subplots clambering over each other, desperate for screen time. These range from a conspiracy by humans to create Transformers of their own from the element known as ‘Transformium’ (original, right?) to a prison ship full of bizarre aliens to Cade (Mark Wahlberg) arguing over the statuary rape laws of Texas with his daughter (Nicola Peltz) and her boyfriend (Jack Reynor). The film is 166 minutes long, and rather than using that time to make an effort to develop a proper story, throws in as much as possible in the hopes of entertaining even those at the back whose brains switched off many minutes ago.

All the usual Bay-isms are there, but turned up to eleven: Cade makes a comment about his daughters shorts being too short, that men might leer at her, and the camera literally cuts to about an inch away from her bottom. One of the worst female characters (if one can even use the word ‘character’ to describe her) in recent memory, she is constantly in need of saving, screaming and crying, and at one point – very uncomfortably – has a probing alien tongue wrap itself around her inner thigh. The rampant product placement has reached interstellar levels of ridiculousness, to the point that the only part of a bus that survives an explosion is the Victoria’s Secret advert wrapped around it, and massive firefights between robots and humans are set against the backdrop of Georgio Armani and Budweiser billboards.

An alien robot sporting the voice of Ken Watanabe refers to everyone as ‘Sensei’, is armoured like a Samurai and spouts almost as much pseudo-philosophical nonsense as Optimus Prime, who swings back and forth between contemplating the ‘soul’ of a Transformer before yelling “I’ll kill you all!” at approaching enemies. Oh, and once the ‘action’ moves to China, even random innocent bystanders know Kung-Fu. Why is ‘action’ in inverted commas, I hear you ask? Because by that point in the film, explosions have as much effect on the brain as a light breeze, you can barely tell which robot’s hitting which, and the ones you do recognise you just want to get blown up because they keep spilling out dialogue that could be improved by a five year-old playing with his toys…which is what Transformers should be about.

All charm has been sucked from the franchise, and the one small glimmer of hope amongst the cinematic carnage being vomited from the screen – the giant robot dinosaurs – have passed through the Michael Bay machine and had their personalities removed. Even composer Steve Jablonsky (who I wish would just take his considerable skill somewhere better), whose epic score underlies the whole film, gets his part ruined by a cringe-inducing vocal pop/rock track that fades in and out of the sound mix whenever it pleases.

There is one sequence towards the beginning of the film that really sums it up: Cade is searching for spare parts in an abandoned cinema, and the owner is complaining about how all the movies nowadays are sequels and remakes. In the hands of anyone else, this would be humorous in a self-mocking, satirical kind of way, but in the hands of Michael Bay, it is a hollow, vacuous display of just how far down the pan things have gotten.

Half-star.