Chris At The Pictures: samuel l jackson

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Thursday, 24 August 2017

'The Hitman's Bodyguard' - Review

thriller 8/24/2017 10:30:00 pm 0

★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Ryan Reynolds stars as Michael Bryce, a professional bodyguard looking to restore his damaged reputation in this self-satisfied smirk of an action comedy. Bryce’s ex, Ameila (Elodie Yung), an agent at Interpol, begs for his help to escort incarcerated assassin, Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) from the streets of Coventry to a trial at The Hague. Determined to stop the pair is defendant Vladislav Dukhovich (a supremely bored-looking Gary Oldman), a convicted war criminal with ties to ethnic cleansing. Yep, that’s right, the main subplot in this knockabout buddy comedy is about genocide. Mass graves and anatomy jokes; it’s a match made in heaven!

At least, it is for Jackson: I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw him so happy. While it’s not a particularly revolutionary role (smattered with a meta gag or two about his infamous devotion to the MF-word), it’s nice to see he’s having a laugh…because the audience sure ain’t. I counted one chuckle amongst the crowd during my matinee, at a fart noise. Comedy lives?

If Jackson’s performance is a hopeful reflection of how we’re meant to feel, Reynolds is the realisation of our true feelings; namely boredom and resignation. That’s to say nothing of Elodie Yung and Salma Hayek (as Kincaid’s imprisoned wife). Come on, people, it’s 2017, is it really too much to ask that roles for women offer them more than to be sexually objectified (Hayek), to be rescued from fights with out-of-shape men that their character should easily be able to defeat (Yung), or just plain forgotten for entire acts of the movie (see both)?

When the film’s not saddling its women with perplexing double-agent plot threads or giggling along with the chummy antics of the central duo, it displays some genuinely respectable action sequences. A bike ‘n’ boat chase through Amsterdam packs a wallop, but it’s like someone airlifted a separate production crew in to film it. The shooty-stabby brawls elsewhere in the movie are efficiently swift, but the ruthlessness of the gore is never quite reconciled by the one-liners. There’s barely even a Nice Guys-style pause from Reynolds to pale at the carnage accrued by his client, and his reactions to Jackson’s guffawing amount to little more than parental exasperation.

Anyone paying a modicum of attention knows where Kincaid and Bryce’s relationship is heading, but just to make sure, the movie deploys heavy-handed musical cues at every possible moment to light our way. If it’s not through Atli Örvarsson’s sub-David Arnold score, it’s by calculated deployment of Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is; a tactic which proved the final straw for me. Granted, not for the reason it’ll irk many people (I actually like the track, despite its place in the eighties soft rock canon I wish would disappear from pop culture for five seconds), but it’s still unearned and – like the endless CGI blood splatter – extravagantly cheap.

Friday, 17 March 2017

'Kong: Skull Island' - Review

tom hiddlestone 3/17/2017 09:47:00 am

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

We wave a cheerful goodbye to awards season and prepare for the imminent onslaught of summer blockbuster season with this, the latest incarnation of King Kong and the second in Warner Bros. monsters shared universe. If even half of the franchise properties headed our way in the coming months are as amiable as this fantastically enjoyable romp, we have little to fear.

Kong: Skull Island leaps a few decades past the usual 1930’s escapades and lands just as the Vietnam War is coming to an end, and so that conflict becomes the metaphor at the heart of the film. A band of US soldiers led by war-starved Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and a constantly-sleeveless SAS tracker (Tom Hiddleston) are tasked with protecting a scientific expedition to a hitherto unexplored island in the Pacific. Brie Larson tags along as magazine photographer Mason Weaver (a decent attempt to knock Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager in Transformers from the top spot of dumbest action movie names).

You’ll notice I just sort of stuck Larson on the end there as a footnote but believe me, that’s more appraisal than the film gives her. She’s mostly there to provide (admittedly very convincing) horrified stares and awe-inspired gawping. And, for most of the running time, we’re firmly with her. To use a phrase I promised never to use; this movie is a visual feast. Cinematographer Larry Fong – so usually stuck with adhering to the iron-grey sensibilities of Zack Snyder – makes full use of an eye-piercing colour palette here, creating a myriad of iconic shots that you just want to bathe in. Kong’s silhouette framed against a burning sunset, napalm explosions reflected in a grinning pilot’s aviators and a dozen others that I daren’t spoil ensure this film is at least a stylistic match for Gareth Edwards' Godzilla.

While the first of Warner/Legendary’s series was about the myth and mystery, Skull Island is all about the monsters. Almost no time is wasted on shipping our intrepid cast to the island, where they’re immediately set upon not only by the giant ape, but also by skull-faced lizards, enormous spiders, tree-like carapaces and all manner of creepy crawlies. The enormous success these creatures have on drawing the eye is commendable, not least because they distract from the risible dialogue (poor John Goodman’s professor is dealt a bad hand in expedition exposition from the start).

Luckily, clunky lines are often overridden by thunderous sound design or the music. Henry Jackman’s score plays much like his Captain America: Civil War album on shuffle, but it works fine. His part usually plays second fiddle to the jukebox collection of 60s/70s hits, just in case you forgot the whole thing was a metaphor for Vietnam for two seconds.

The military forces ill-prepared to face a jungle-bound enemy, extensive use of napalm, a sophisticated and resourceful indigenous populace and more (Hiddleston’s character is literally called Conrad, for goodness sake) create an analogy so heavy-handed they may as well have called the movie Viet Kong. But Kong: Skull Island is a film that thrives on lack of subtlety, on creatures and camp and its British hero slicing up giant lizards with a samurai sword. It’s one Wilhelm scream away from a classic.

Sunday, 10 January 2016

'The Hateful Eight' - Review

walton goggins 1/10/2016 07:29:00 pm

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Quentin Tarantino is admired by many as an adventurous director, someone who never lets himself feel trapped by the traditional constraints of narrative film-making, but if you’ve been following his career closely, you’ll often find he’s been directing ‘by-the-numbers’ for a long while. This manifests in several forms, be it the obsessive cataloguing of the films he’s proud of as ‘The x^th Film by Quentin Tarantino’ or referring to sequels as ‘Volume 2’. Even the project he likes to write out of his history is titled Four Rooms. His latest film, The Hateful Eight, arrives adorned with similar legends: ‘The 8^th Film…’, ‘see it in 70mm!’ etc.

Sticking with the numerical theme, the questions I wanted answered going into the film were limited to just two:

1) Would the super-wide, 70mm Panavision lend itself well to what is essentially a bunch of people grumbling at each other in a hut?

2) Is there some justification for the three hour-plus running time besides pure self-indulgence?

Personally, the answer to both queries was a resounding ‘no’, but that’s certainly not the be-all and end-all of the experience.

First, the set-up: we open in the dead of winter in Wyoming, post-civil war. Bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) and prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wend their way towards Red Rock, where the latter is set to face the rope. They are joined by Major Marcus Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and soon-to-be Sherriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) before taking refuge from the approaching blizzard in Minnie’s Haberdashery. Inside, they are confronted by a host of deceitful characters, one or more of whom secretly plan to spring Domergue. And with that, the stage is set for a sinewy, snowbound game of Cluedo, where the smallest detail and movement cannot escape scrutiny as each patron and their every move are placed under the watchful eyes of Ruth, Warren and Mannix.

Admittedly, the very idea of post-nineties Quentin Tarantino heading up a self-contained story relying heavily on small signifiers seems about as natural as Brian Blessed crooning a lullaby, and is often just as subtle. Yep, that means shrieked expletives aplenty! The post-civil war setting could feasibly lend itself to a narrative thick with relevance, but one feels more often than not that any comment on race-relations is suffocated by showboating. The deliberately outrageous, black-versus-white nattering comes to a head with a typically grim and grotesque story told by Major Warren to embittered general Smithers (Bruce Dern acting everyone else off the screen with his eyes alone).

Jackson slips into his commanding role as if taking a seat in his favourite armchair and Russell carries himself with rough-hewn charisma, but the limelight is snatched feverishly by Leigh as Domergue, spitting out great hunks of scenery from between her toothy witch’s gape. Goggins’ southern drawl garners a smattering of laughs early on, before the comedy crown is swiped by Tim Roth, sporting a British accent so ludicrous it makes the Queen resemble a cockney.

The much-advertised 70mm cinematography, far from framing the haberdashery and its occupants as an all-encompassing eye taking in a stage-play (indeed, the first performance of the screenplay was itself a stage reading) refuses to stop fidgeting. We flit from the face of one actor to another as they spew forth one outrageous line after the next, or simply circle the proceedings as a partially interested bystander.

The fast and loose emphasis on framing, character and dialogue permeates the first half: ninety minutes seem to crawl by. Rather than the spicy back-and-forth and quick-fire taste for blood we expect, the initial chapters are weirdly slack and occasionally dull, giving us an inscrutable build right up until Warren’s tale: the very epicentre of the film. Before…WHAM! Cut to the intermission.

When we pick up the story with a catch-up narration from the director himself, it’s almost as if the Tarantino who sent us to sleep in Deathproof and stretched Inglorious Basterds way past its due takes a shotgun blast to the chest. His body is kicked aside by his younger, fiercer self to make way for a second half that has everything we actually wanted: there’s tension, excitement, intrigue, a furious race to the finish line and before we know it the last hour has raced by in a sea of blood, sweat and fear. Agatha Christie meets Wes Craven, essentially.

All the pretence of holier-than-thou, film geek prestige melts away and the Quentin we all know and love shines through…I only wish it hadn’t taken an hour and a half to do so. As a singular piece, The Hateful Eight serves as a passable romp, but more effectively as a showcase of a director at his best and worst.

Friday, 30 January 2015

'Kingsman: The Secret Service' - Review

thriller 1/30/2015 11:38:00 am

Adapted from Kick-Ass collaborator Mark Millar’s comic book, Kingsman: The Secret Service is the latest offering from director Matthew Vaughn. Veteran agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) takes streetwise teenager Eggsy (Taron Egerton) under his wing as the world is threatened by megalomaniac eco-warrior Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson).

The characters – whilst enjoyable to be around – are paper-thin from the offing. Colin Firth fills in the father-figure/gentleman spy role and Taron Egerton is the charming if predictable child prodigy who we all know will develop into the hero. Mark Strong is a reliable screen presence (even if his Scottish accent isn’t) and Samuel L. Jackson gets to deliver the funniest lines in the film whilst Vaughn proves yet again that he cannot write female characters to save his life (Eggsy’s pug sidekick appears to have more screen-time than Sophie Cookson as Roxy).

Where Vaughn really excels is as an action director: unlike the awkward and heavy set-pieces of an Olivier Megaton project, the fight sequences in Kingsman are delirious and erratic yet expertly directed, light on their feet but skull-crackingly felt. His trademark approach to violence is ever-present and you will chuckle as much as you wince. The editing is continuously stylish (presented in the director’s usual golden-yellow colour scheme) and though it tends to beat you over the head a little with the ‘style’, it never becomes dull even after an outrageously protracted sequence in a church that pushes the 15 certificate to the very limit.

Aside from the comic violence, there’s an awful lot of geezers-versus-poshboys snickering, Bond pastiche and (towards the end) a very poorly handled sequence of bawdy humour that is increasingly infantile and – much like the entire plot – will fall apart if you stop and think about it for more than two seconds. But the film prevents that by simply upping the ante every five minutes so you’re too busy trying to keep up with the pace to pause for thought, a problem (if indeed it is a problem) exacerbated by a cracking soundtrack that begins with Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing and goes up from there.

Politically bonkers and flimsily written but packed with inventive gadgets, villains and quips to rival Bond, Kingsman is an entertaining if forgettable action flick whose spell will be broken the instant you leave the cinema. Despite half the synapses in your brain screaming at you to stop watching – that it’s riddled with cliché and the characters are one-dimensional and the whole thing is throwaway nonsense – you’ll have a lot of fun, and having fun is what Vaughn does best.

★★★☆☆

Thursday, 27 March 2014

'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' - Review

the winter soldier 3/27/2014 12:04:00 pm

There’s a moment in Avengers Assemble where Tony Stark/Iron Man and Steve Rogers/Captain America are arguing, and Stark says ‘It’s not really my style.’, to which Rogers replies snidely ‘…and you’re all about style, aren’t you?’. In a way, this one line encapsulates the difference between the different strands of the Marvel cinematic universe. After the high-octane thrill rides that were Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World brought the style, Captain America: The Winter Soldier brings the substance.

The latest instalment in the Marvel franchise follows Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in the months following Avengers Assemble, adjusting to life in the 21^st century and helping S.H.I.E.L.D, led by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) track down and eliminate threats, with the help of an elite commando unit led by Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Upon returning from a successful mission with some key enemy information, the tables are turned and a nefarious unit within S.H.I.E.L.D make it their mission to track down Captain America, who goes undercover with Black Widow to discover the truth.

Whilst the two previous films felt more like action-adventure romps, The Winter Soldier feels more like a cold-war espionage era thriller that just happens to have a couple of great big special effects sequences in it. Whilst Iron Man 3 – which I really liked – felt somewhat all over the place in terms of pacing, this feels much more coherent and sticks to a much tighter narrative structure, which works very well. Even when the plot twists do make themselves known – and I can assure you that you won’t expect them – the story remains coherent and ordered. Much like the first hour or so of Avengers, this film takes it’s time to give proper, fleshed-out character development, in such a way that even the audience who just turned up to see things explode won’t find it dull. It’s all offset with the reliable Marvel humour and a visual style that is cleaned to a mirror-shine, the fantastic digital cinematography really bringing out the colour in the costumes and the polished surfaces of the S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters.

The leads all give very fine performances; Evans retains his role of trying to keep things morally straight, Johansson continues her alluringly deadly facade but conflicted under the surface. Samuel L. Jackson is always reliably grumpy as Fury and new-comer to the franchise Robert Redford is very good as a morally suspect S.H.I.E.L.D executive. When the action sequences do turn up, they’re a well-balanced mix of in-camera effects and CGI, the hand-to-hand fights packing a real punch in terms of visuals and thumping sound effects, and the great big computer-generated effects still carry enough weight to be believable.

The only issues with the film are that it stretches the mark in terms of running time, and doesn’t have the fun-factor that felt much more prevalent in the former Marvel films, plus it has little to contribute to the Marvel cinematic universe as a whole (save for a very brief post-credits scene). Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still a worthy addition to the canon, making its mark with an intriguing story, well-developed characters and some extremely well put together action sequences. Roll on, Avengers 2.

4 Stars

Saturday, 8 February 2014

'Robocop' - Review

thriller 2/08/2014 02:27:00 am

When news, on-set photos and trailers finally emerged about the remake of RoboCop, Paul Verhoevens 1987 action flick about a debilitated police officer consigned to a robotic suit, you could practically feel waves of cynicism emanating from the internet. The issue with remaking this film is pretty much the same faced by 2012’s Total Recall: it’s a big budget eighties action movie that was massively successful and has gone on to become regarded as a classic. The difference is that whilst Total Recall (the remake) tried too much to change the formula of the story (Mars was replaced with Australia), the trailers and promotional material seemed to denote that RoboCop was merely an updating of the original story with CG effects and contemporary actors.

Considering the less than friendly response to the news of the new movie (I can’t deny being very sceptical at first), plus the fairly mediocre trailer, it’s a great relief to say that the remake is actually very well done. The main moral issue that was briefly raised in the original but sank beneath the brash action set-pieces is brought back to the forefront in this version, best exemplified in a startlingly bleak sequence in which detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is shown the full extent of his transformation into the Robocop suit by Dr. Norton (Gary Oldman), unable to cope with his less than half human existence and asks Norton to end it.

The other political and moral issues concerning the ethics of keeping Murphy alive, the blurred lines between man and machine and the issue of technology as protection are all raised in their own distinct ways, the former two being played out between Oldman’s character and Sellars, the owner of Omnicorp (Michael Keaton giving his best shot at a morally suspect, moustache-twirling villain), and the latter brought to the forefront by Samuel L. Jackson as a Fox News style presenter in a series of propaganda-like news reports, claiming that America is ‘Robophobic’ and presses the case for America to exploit its drone technology from the Middle East on home soil (rather symbolic considering the controversy surrounding the real-life use of such drones by the US Army in its overseas operations).

As for the action sequences, the main selling point for most people, they’re fairly well executed, packing a great punch in terms of sound design and visual effects, the use of handheld cam placing the audience in the thick of the fight, although it should be noted that this handheld element does find its way, rather distractingly, into the much more quiet, intimate scenes involving Murphy’s wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) and son (John Paul Ruttan). This may be an attempt to liven up these small vignettes as the acting by Cornish is a little uninspiring and the brief moment she shares with her husband before his accident seems fairly rushed. This means investment in their relationship is a little on the light side, and the family drama supposedly at the heart of the story seems like a sideshow in comparison to the much more interesting scenes between Murphy and Norton, the latter played sublimely by Oldman, who seems to only improve with age.

So on the whole, RoboCop may lack the family drama we were promised and some of the acting is less than impressive, but the perfectly fine, nuts and bolts actions sequences are up there with the original and the moral/political issues at its heart are still relevant and hold their own amongst the other elements of the story. A worthy remake, but a fairly functional film on its own.

3.5 Stars

Chris At The Pictures