Next Goal Wins  (2014)    77/100

Rating :   77/100                                                                       97 Min        15

Documentary following the exploits of the American Samoa national football team, against the beautiful backdrop of their capital Pago Pago, as they attempt to qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. America Samoa is a part of the Samoan archipelago which also includes the independent nation of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean and, unsurprisingly given its name, it is one of the foreign territories that are a part of the United States, much like Guam and the American Virgin Islands. With a population of just around 56, 000 we learn the nation’s team are currently residing at the bottom of the FIFA international rankings, and they also have the dubious honour of having suffered the greatest ever defeat in the history of international football – 31 nil by Australia in 2001.

Action, it seems, must be taken, and so the powers that be hire Dutch coach Thomas Rongen to try and lift the team from the doldrums, but will his expertise be enough and how will he react to a different culture at the other side of the world?

The film is divided in good measure between following the action in the games and following the reaction from the players and the coach, and we feel like we are getting to know a few of them quite well, which is of course necessary for the human element to work. We learn, for instance, that Rongen’s daughter tragically died in a car accident and that he and his wife are able to find a degree of spiritual healing in a sense from the island community, the same community that fully embraces Jaiyah Saelua, the transgender player on the team, who also proves gutsy and, ahem, ballsy enough to become one of the team’s greatest assets.

It’s a really wonderful film that perfectly sums up just what sport can mean to people and how much it can move everyone involved with it, from the players and their families to the supporters they are representing. There were more than one or two people sniffling in the audience before the end. Highly recommended.

Sabotage  (2014)    55/100

Rating :   55/100                                                                     109 Min        15

The latest film from director David Ayer, who continues with similar themes from his last film ‘End of Watch‘, although he has largely ditched the hand held camera aspect this time around. We once again are put in the midst of American law enforcement, this time a squad of hard as nails DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) operatives led by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, with Sam Worthington, Mireille Enos, Joe Manganiello, Terrence Howard, Josh Holloway, Max Martini, Kevin Vance and Mark Schlegel rounding out the rest of the group. Catchphrases like ‘high octane’ and ‘adrenaline fuelled action’ could probably be used to describe the action but really I think the term ‘sick’ is the most accurate descriptor for the piece. The team are caught up in a scandal when they all decide to steal some of the bad guy’s money before they burn the majority of it, but it’s not waiting at the point of egress as it should be – so where has it gone?

One by one we see the group brutally murdered, and we have to guess if it’s an internal thing, if the hits are being planned by the drug cartels, or if the rest of the department aren’t too happy about a rogue unit planning thefts of millions. The level of bloody violence has really been taken to the nth level here, which is just indulgent and silly – the same as in End of Watch when the officers uncovered all sorts of stuff when they were on the beat, things that you would normally expect to see in horror films. Olivia Williams turns up as the FBI agent assigned to investigate the assassinations and the acting is fine overall, but the plot, as well as being soaked in buckets of blood, just doesn’t add up in several places. Ayer has the skill to make an exciting action film, but he has to learn to ground it in reality, not the darkest regions of hell.

Frank  (2014)    68/100

Rating :   68/100                                                                       95 Min        15

This, to me, looked like a garish nightmare – some guy in a creepy head mask who used to be on TV sometimes (he was then Frank Sidebottom, comic persona of Chris Sievey, who sadly passed away a few years ago) – I never knew what the show was about, but I absolutely knew I didn’t want to watch it. However, the fact that Michael Fassbender was playing said guy in mask made me wonder … and actually it’s pretty good. The titular masked Frank is a mysterious, reclusive musician who never takes off the head – even when he’s in the shower. Him and his band, which includes Maggie Gyllenhaal and Scoot McNairy, are in need of a new keyboardist, which central character Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) sees as his big break, when he happens upon the event of their previous keyboardist trying to drown himself in the sea.

Gleeson was the perfect person for the role as his character begins as the sort of maudlin standard slightly posh ‘nice guy’, with a penchant for social media, that often populates British London centric films (this is a British-Irish film incidentally, directed by Irishman Lenny Abrahamson and largely set in Ireland), much as his character was in ‘About Time‘, but then it turns out he’s a total creep, which is not only a satisfying arc to follow, but it puts into wonderful perspective the other much more diverse and interesting characters, none more so than the delicate and passionate Frank.

An original film exploring the value of individualism and the old adage of not to judge a book by its cover, or in this case a person by their head. Some of the music they make is actually pretty good too.

The Wind Rises / Kaze Tachinu  (2013)    70/100

Rating :   70/100                                                                     126 Min        PG

Written and directed by the animation legend that is Hayao Miyazaki (who retired after the film’s completion, although he also did the same thing after releasing ‘Princess Mononoke‘ …) this latest from Studio Ghibli returns to a familiar motif for the company – that of aerial flight, portraying a fictionalised biography of Jiro Horikoshi who we see literally dreaming of becoming an aeronautical engineer in Japan in the decades leading up to the Second World War, and we watch as he realises his dream, creating planes far greater than anything Japan had to offer previously, but at the same time they are perverted by the powers that be into machines of death and destruction. With the time and setting such as they are, there are constant haunting echoes of the disastrous future awaiting everyone, again a theme not new to the animation house. The film is very heavily burdened by a lacking narrative that really tests the audience’s patience, but it does just manage to salvage itself via, eventually, the introduction of a love story with a girl Jiro once saved when they were both younger, and who is now suffering from TB. This adds to the whole transient snapshot of creativity and life we’re watching, before the billowing flames of war burn all, and the variety of the skilled animation together with a very fitting score and sound design ensure it’s still a film of merit, but it probably should have been quite a bit better.

Bad Neighbours  (2014)    57/100

Rating :   57/100                                                                       96 Min        15

American comedy focusing on two young parents, played by Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, dealing with the fallout from a fraternity house moving into the the neighbourhood right next door to their newly mortgaged home. Zac Efron, Dave Franco and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (of whom, not enough is made) are the more recognisable members of the outgoing party mad students, and things kick off after the police are called to deal with the noise, with no surprises as to who called them. War ensues.

Rogen and Byrne are pretty much the worst parents ever, having sex in front of their infant and leaving her unattended whilst they nip next door to indulge in whatever drugs are on the go, but ultimately the film just isn’t that funny. Many of the laughs seem to be improved, and on this occasion that hasn’t worked so well – the best gag was ruined by putting it in the trailer as per the usual marketing error, and the rest simply aren’t inventive or original enough to extract more than the occasional titter. A nice cast, but ultimately quite a missable film.

Blue Ruin  (2013)    73/100

Rating :   73/100                                                                       90 Min        15

Funded on Kickstarter by its writer and director Jeremy Saulnier, this is a study of vengeance and the cycle of violence that it can begin. Dwight (Macon Blair) has never been able to deal with the murder of his parents by a man whom he learns is about to be released from jail. At the film’s beginning we see Dwight living out of his car, rummaging in garbage for anything edible, and we learn later that he hides from remaining family members, fully aware of the shameful state he has allowed to become the norm. The knowledge that the person he holds responsible for everything is to be set free though, galvanises his long gestating hatred and he plots brutal recriminations.

Well shot and acted, this doesn’t pull its punches, dealing in a very real way with the harsh reality of violence, hate and anger. Some of the scenes aren’t as successful as they could have been, in terms of character reactions and the staging of some of the action, and it would perhaps have not been amiss to show more moments of inflection from the protagonist as he continues his descent into hell, but this is nevertheless believable overall, and compelling throughout.

Pompeii  (2014)    31/100

Rating :   31/100                                                                     105 Min        12A

This really couldn’t be any more derivative of ‘Gladiator’ (2000) if it tried – you can imagine the execs behind it .. ‘hmm polls show that audiences loved Gladiator, and that films with lots of explosions in them do pretty well, so what we’ll do is make another Gladiator and then half way through it we’ll blow the shit out of everything!!!’. Which is exactly what we see as Vesuvius, the volcano that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in 79AD, detonates like a well timed nuclear explosion for the second half of the film, showering the audience with meteors, tsunamis, earthquakes, surprisingly little lava, and dreadful escape sequences with that horrible trope of action and disaster films – characters fleeing with disaster literally just one step behind, something we have largely been mercifully spared from of late, possibly after it was taken to excess by M. Night Shyamalan with his central characters managing to outrun the wind itself in ‘The Happening’ (08).

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who actually has done some really good films (well, one anyway – ‘Event Horizon’ in 97), but also has a series portfolio of lead weight B movies, here he’s not only copied the plot from Gladiator, but also tried to mimic the way it was directed, alas he is no Ridley Scott and it really shows. We see the warrior forced into slavery and the life of a gladiator (played in a wondrously wooden way by Kit Harrington, who seems to think he’s in a Vidal Sassoon advert for the film’s duration, see the picture above), who vows vengeance against the Roman ruler (Keifer Sutherland, attempting a posh English accent for some reason) that he will defy in the arena, cue thumbs up or down moment, but not before he’s befriended the nearest large black man to do a lot of the fighting for him (played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who is the only one that can hold his head up high with a strong performance here) and managed to turn what was supposed to be a massacre for the slaves into their victory (battle against the Celts here replacing Carthage, although interestingly Scotland remained one of the few places the Romans failed to conquer – eventually opting to build not just one, but two walls to actually try and keep us out from the rest of their domain, ha!) and also captivating the sexual desire of the same woman that the Roman patrician also has his eye on (not the Roman’s sister on this occasion and played by Emily Browning, she is also sporting an English accent, so maybe she began as his sister and then they changed it).

The effects are fine, but it fails in pretty much every other department. We even see our leading man make a getaway from Pompeii with girl in toe on his horse’s back behind him (he can talk to animals and befriend any horse as well incidentally, which is no doubt what attracts the virginal attention of his mistress, whose previous sexual encounters will all have been on horses) and they are clean off into the night, when our hero decides he doesn’t want her to be a fugitive and he had best give himself up and say he gave her no choice. Or they could’ve kept on going and lived happily ever after. In fact they perform this same routine of complete stupidity not just once, but twice. Sigh. Despite the carnage and annihilation suffered by all around the two lovers make sure to always have enough time to fix their hair and deal with all their side plot elements, but at least Vesuvius doesn’t disappoint on the destruction scale, indeed this particular eruption is historically estimated to have emitted an amount of thermal energy many thousands of times that produced at Hiroshima and also buried several other cities in the region under ash – with tens of thousands of fatalities incurred by the roiling clouds of hot gas and rock (pyroclastic density currents) that swept the area at enormous speeds, something the film does represent, at times, really well (I don’t believe there were any meteoric asteroids though, I was there you see, chortling away to myself).

Vesuvius is currently one of sixteen volcanos being closely monitored around the world which are all volatile and present a serious threat to large populations, Naples for example is only circa 10km from Vesuvius.

Brick Mansions  (2014)    60/100

Rating :   60/100                                                                       90 Min        15

The last film starring Paul Walker to have been completed before he sadly passed away last year features him as an undercover cop buddying up with French legend David Belle, one of the founders of parkour (which gave rise to free running), as the local resident of Brick Mansions who has fallen foul of the drug running crime lord in charge of the downtrodden area of future Detroit, and who represents a way in for the law to diffuse a stolen nuclear bomb due to go off in a matter of hours. It’s a remake of the French film ‘District 13’ (04 – also starring David Belle) which helped bring parkour to international prominence in the first place, with now perhaps the most famous instance of it on film being the first chase sequence in ‘Casino Royale’ (06).

The story isn’t too bad, and the action has been well choreographed, but it’s just too silly to be believed and it manages to be very stale from start to finish. In Casino Royale it was used to good effect, but here it mainly seems to be for show – we see Belle’s character trying to make an escape early on, and his physical feats to do it are very impressive – quickly taking him far from his would be pursuers, and yet there they are again, no matter how many floors or buildings he leaps and bounds around/over, ubiquitous bad guys are waiting to start the chase all over again, which is just a bit daft. The acting is good overall, with support from RZA, Catalina Denis and Ayisha Issa, but despite a few moments of playfulness it’s no more interesting than watching other showpieces for the physical activity.

Interestingly, the big guy that can be seen behind the two leads in the picture above is Robert Maillet, who moved from WWF wrestling as Kurrgan (taking his name from the villain, The Kurgan, in 1986’s cult classic ‘Highlander’, a name itself derived from the theorised early Indo-European people) into film and who you might recognise as having played other fairly memorable ‘heavy roles’, chief among them his first big-screen appearance as the giant immortal Persian warrior in ‘300’ (06).

Tarzan  (2013)    11/100

Rating :   11/100                                                                       94 Min        PG

Third rate animation that can only have secured a wide release based on the fact they were adapting Edgar Rice Burrough’s most famous character for his first big-screen outing since Disney did a pretty great job back in 99. The backgrounds and some of the animated creatures in this are good – but the humans look terrible, and the story is just hopeless. Tarzan, for example, is a already a young boy of about eight or nine and able to speak fluently when his parents bite the dust in the jungle and a Great Ape adopts him, which is a fairly major departure from the novel and yet still sees Tarzan able to communicate with the animals and swing from the trees by the time he is in his late teens and he meets a ridiculously sexualised Jane, who’s constant tight fitting shorts and Barbie doll breasts seems to even attract the amorous attention of her father.

Central to the plot is the fanciful notion of a crashed meteor that, if found and harnessed, could be a source of limitless power, but this same power can prove destructive if disturbed as Tarzan’s loving parents that take him on a perilous journey into the middle of nowhere find out. This crashed meteor also looks rather like the island thingy at the end of ‘Superman Returns’ (06). There really is no skill or class whatsoever here, I wouldn’t even recommend it for the youngest and least critical of children, just rent Disney’s far superior version instead. With Kellan Lutz and Spencer Locke as principal voice leads.

Plastic  (2014)    68/100

Rating :   68/100                                                                     102 Min        15

A fairly low key British crime thriller featuring lots of up and coming talent, and it’s actually quite good if you can stomach the preponderance of Cockney accents that verge on the hammy. A group of fledgling credit card thieves get in over their head and are forced to recruit someone working on the inside for a large card company in order to score it big and loosen the noose that’s been placed around their necks. The group, pictured above, are played by (from left to right) Sebastian De Souza, Alfie Allen, Emma Rigby, Ed Speleers and Will Poulter. Rigby shows a lot of promise but, as you can get a hint of from the picture, sadly the film plays a little too much on her womanly assets. The entourage head to Miami to bait their primary target, and so we are treated to some nice weather which makes a change for the London gangster genre, and the story holds its own for the duration of the film, as the group must contend with issues of infighting, greed and trying to keep their strongest resource in the dark as to their real motives.