Chris At The Pictures

Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux charm their way through this thrilling – if flimsy – ‘Best of Bond’ highlight reel. 007’s world is under threat from the inside and out as intelligence higher-up Denbigh (Andrew Scott) promises to scrap the Double-0 programme, while the mysterious Spectre organisation and it’s enigmatic leader Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) is brought into the light.

If this is truly to be Craig’s final outing as Bond (one can never be too sure given the erratic nature of his recent press outings) then I can’t imagine we could have asked for better demonstration of his commitment to the role. Craig’s Bond has been visibly moulded by the events of the previous three films (yes, even Quantum of Solace!) while still keeping his rough-hewn, bulldog appeal in full effect. His better side is especially brought out during his scenes with Madeleine Swann (Seydoux), a sly and shining character who injects a healthy dose of complexity and depth to the Bond girl formula.

Christoph Waltz (even in movies that don’t deserve him) never half-arses a performance, and Spectre refuses to be the exception. He’s cool and calculating without simply forming a carbon copy of his character from Inglorious Basterds: Hans Landa had a twisted logic and code of ethics about him, but Oberhauser is classic, unswayable Bond baddie. The unravelling plot that falls upon his shoulders also does a very nice job of neatly tying together the story of Craig’s Bond so far (again, even Quantum of Solace factors into the equation without everything falling apart!).

Following on from the original hit 2011 movie, Horrible Bosses 2 sees Dale (Charlie Day), Kurt (Jason Bateman) and Nick (Jason Sudeikis) decide to jump-start their own business to avoid ever having to answer to authority again. Things go awry when a scheming investor and his son (Chris Pine and Christoph Waltz respectively) disrupt the trio’s plan, leading them to attempt a madcap kidnapping in the hope of recouping their losses.

Having not seen the original nor read any reviews of it, I had almost no expectations going into Horrible Bosses 2, so while they were somewhat exceeded, I can’t find it within myself to praise it too much for one simple reason: there’s a limit to how much leery, laddy humour I can take, even as a member of the straight white male audience. It’s the same problem I had with The Inbetweeners 2, but to a much larger extent because the latter had characters I’d gotten to know and even like a little.

The problem with the movie is not that it isn’t funny at all, because the opening twenty minutes are raucously funny, as are a number of moments towards the end. The issue is with the remaining 80 minutes, which range from laugh-free to gratingly irritating. Jokes about genitalia will get you so far, but once those in question are those of fourteen year-olds, you’ve lost me, as you have with the Jennifer Aniston character, of whom we shall hear more later.

Where the cast is concerned, Charlie Day is easily the funniest thing in the film, while Jason Sudeikis does the usual ‘shouting it makes it funnier’ campaign much to the visible annoyance of Bateman, who for all the world looks like someone praying for it all to be over so he can buy something nice with the hefty pay-check he no doubt received. Now we come to the crux of the problem: Jennifer Aniston as Julia; a dominating, sex-addicted boss who desperately seeks intimacy with Dale (Day), who constantly refuses her advances. This is a character that  - I think – is intended to revert the sexually predatory stereotypes, but in this case it doesn’t work because no man in his right mind would turn down Aniston’s character because, in the eye of the camera, she is everything the target audience is supposed to want.

Asides from Aniston as the walking bottom, the only other female characters are crazy, annoying or promptly thrown aside while the three leads continue with their lewd and crude conversations about ‘who you’d rather do’. The usually amiable Chris Pine plays the whole thing as drunk Captain Kirk and is frankly embarrassing, and one even wonders why they brought in the magisterial of Christoph Waltz for what is essentially a walk-on role.

While it may pass the laugh test for many, and the 110 minutes zip by surprisingly quickly, Horrible Bosses 2 is not one for the history books: the occasionally sharp script is hampered by an over-reliance on crude humour and misogyny, while the impressive cast swan about in their finery looking merely happy to be working, bored, or occasionally half asleep. Not horrible, just uneven and ultimately empty. 

Having never seen any of the previous Muppet films (save for a brief bit of Muppets Christmas Carol when I was very young), but familiar with the most famous faces among them, I wondered whether I’d find much to enjoy in a full-length movie about them, and worried that 107 minutes might be stretching it too far. What a relief it is to say that Muppets Most Wanted is a charming little bundle of joy. It’s the sort of film that reminds everyone why Disney is the great powerhouse for entertainment no matter the age or taste of the audience (this is coming from an eighteen year-old science-fiction and horror fan). 

The story follows the Muppets immediately following the events of the last film, the gang deciding to go on tour after meeting Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais). Before long, a criminal frog known as Constantine, in league with Badguy, has replaced Kermit and is using the tour to further his own mischievous schemes, with the other Muppets none the wiser. 

It really says a lot about the endurance of the Muppets that the puppets themselves have aged incredibly well since the 1980’s and there seems to be a conscious decision by the film-makers to make the non-puppet effects to look as much like the puppets as possible, down to the inaccurate jerking of Constantine’s legs as he leaps around. The huge array of Muppets are all brought into gorgeous relief in the colourful cinematography, each still possessing their own individual characteristics when in the limelight and blending into a charming menagerie of weird and wonderful creatures when in the background.

In terms of the human characters, Ricky Gervais is great as a slimy, sneering secondary villain and Ty Burrell is smirk-inducing as an Inspector Clueso-esque French detective. A few of Tina Fey’s gags as the lead officer of a Russian gulag do fall slightly flat but she lends a chuckle here and there. There is also an extraordinary amount of cameos, from the ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ (James McAvoy as a UPS delivery man) and some that are even worked into the jokes (Christoph Waltz performing the waltz). The jokes, both vocal and visual come thick and fast, and like the best family films, there’s something for the children and a couple of knowing gags for the adults. The soundtrack features a collection of catchy and amusing musical numbers, including ‘We’re Doing a Sequel’ and ‘Something so Right’, the latter of which involves a duet between Miss Piggy and Celine Dion (a song which actually made me forgive her for that abhorrence in Titanic).

This is not to say the film is perfect, even at just over 100 minutes it feels a little stretched towards the end and some of the fake Russian accents feel misjudged at times (especially considering the recent goings-on in that particular part of the world), but overall, Muppets Most Wanted is a bursting barrel of bright colours and big laughs, and well worth a watch even if you have no expectations of what a Muppets movie should be, and a must watch if you have a love for them to begin with.

4 Stars

Terry Gilliam’s latest work, The Zero Theorem, follows the trials of Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), a number-cruncher living within a dystopian future. At the beginning of the film, Leth is instructed by The Management (Matt Damon) to begin working on the ‘Zero Theorem’, a mathematical certainty that the point of the universe equals nothing. Struggling with his own belief that he is dying, and anxiously awaiting a mysterious phone call, Leth descends into self-deprecation and bizarre virtual reality worlds.

As one would expect from Gilliam, the visual level of the film is sublime, the future landscape echoing the drab, over-layered look of Blade Runner by way of a Lady Gaga video with a little Tim Burton thrown in. The cinematography is all about following people and studying them; when it’s not hot on the heels of Leth or other characters as they wander around the astounding urban sprawl, it’s sat at someone’s desk, focusing on their face, reading their every thought.

Considering this, it’s bizarre to find that the film is very hard to get into, in terms of emotion. Waltz gives a brilliant performance and the supporting characters are all good fun (particularly David Thewlis, who seems to have been told to channel a Python-era Eric Idle and a wonderful but brief performance by Tilda Swinton), but I just couldn’t find any way into them, and in the end I put that down to the fact that the characters are always talking about ‘the bigger picture’. And when the smaller, more personal and emotional dialogue emerges, it’s all conveyed in scenes of boardy, Carry On-esque humour which – whilst raising a few laughs – just feel out of place and further enhance the sense of un-engagement.

So whilst the film romps along at a great pace, introducing new colourful characters and locales every few minutes which are all memorable and all serve the story in their own way, so whilst the audience is left feeling more of an observer, what they do observe is, like all of Gilliam’s work, visually coherent and interesting. By the time it reaches the end, some plot threads are left dangling but the finale is so visually astounding and raises so many questions that it can be forgiven for it.

The Zero Theorem may not be Terry Gilliam’s best work (Monty Python and the Holy Grail still holds that spot) but even Gilliam failing is a lot more interesting than a great deal of mainstream cinema and it’s refreshing to see a director who won’t shy away from the weird and wonderful side of film, whether it’d done successfully or not.

3 Stars