Author Archives: The Red Dragon

Plastic  (2014)    68/100

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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.

The Other Woman  (2014)    17/100

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Rating :   17/100                                                                     109 Min        12A

Nick Cassavetes (‘The Notebook’ 04) directs Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann and Kate Upton in what is supposed to be a story of female friendship triumphing over all, in this case the man who had been cheating primarily on his wife, played by Mann, but also on his girlfriends played by the other two, ultimately though, it looks more like the director just pointed the camera at his actors and said ‘Ok, just make something up’. It’s completely terrible, without any moral fibre, decent laughs, believable characters or indeed stunts such as there are. At one point we see Diaz running barefoot along the beach trying to catch up with Upton, in order to rugby tackle her, but we can clearly see the sand is strewn with shells – lo and behold she stumbles and falls, but I would be very surprised if what we’re watching isn’t simply the performer cutting her feet open and they’ve used the take anyway. That’s the kind of level of thought and preparation applied throughout. Nicki Minaj makes a brief appearance in her first live action film role (it was only a matter of time really). Watch ‘The First Wives Club’ (96) instead, which essentially has the same premise but is also a really good film.

Transcendence  (2014)    73/100

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Rating :   73/100                                                                     119 Min        12A

A lot better than I was expecting, in fact they’ve done quite a clever thing with the trailer as most of what we see in it appears onscreen near the beginning reducing the amount of spoilers left to come. Will (Johhny Depp) and Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall) are completely devoted to each other as husband and wife, but they both also happen to be brilliant scientists working together on artificial intelligence projects – projects that will bring them to the attention of terrorist group RIFT, who deem their work a threat to all of humanity and plot to put a permanent end to their efforts. After Will is mortally wounded, Evelyn desperately tries to save him by transferring his consciousness digitally onto computer data banks.

One of the film’s strongest points is that it doesn’t waste any time mulling over the details and the far flung plot elements, it just gets on with it, which not only makes it more enjoyable but it also helps it seem more plausible. Hall is great as the doting and determined wife whose emotions blind her to the possibility that she has become a modern day Frankenstein, as Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman provide the perfect foil of concern to her unshakeable devotion as they question whether or not the Will they knew could possibly have ‘transcended’ as completely as they hoped. As with all good sci-fi, even though this takes us in leaps and bounds forward, the beginnings of the basic story are now a matter of science fact, from work on nanobots to our ability to transfer the electrical signals of our brain digitally – see the end of the review for The Zero Theorem.

Well paced and directed by Wally Pfister in his directorial début (he is best known as Christopher Nolan’s long running cinematographer, who won the Oscar for his work on ‘Inception’ 2010), an interesting story from Jack Paglen (also his first screenplay) and brought to life by a wonderful group of actors, this is enjoyable sci-fi with plenty of hooks to follow up on in the real world (click here for a few examples).

Tracks  (2013)    73/100

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Rating :   73/100                                                                     112 Min        12A

Wonderful film that shows the true to life adventure of one young woman’s determined journey through the deserts of Western Australia in the mid 1970’s, from Alice Springs in the heart of the country all the way to the Indian Ocean. The woman in question is Robyn Davidson, played in a fairly gutsy portrayal here by Mia Wasikowska, who became famous as ‘the camel lady’ through her stoic decision to try and travel alone with only a few camels to carry her luggage as company, despite not having a penny to her name to begin with. Eventually, she is forced to accept funding from National Geographic and begrudgingly has to occasionally suffer the company of their photographer Rick Smolan (Adam Driver), leading to one of the most interesting moments when she can’t stand his presence and talking anymore and so decides to shag him to just to get him to shut up. It’s certainly a novel approach to seduction.

Lurking behind this sudden jumping of her companion’s bones is a crawling loneliness that echoes throughout the film and eats away at the main character, who is kind of making the grandest statement of just how much it defines her, and we see shades of her past with the suicide of her mother that underpins her young adult relation to the world. The film takes its time and consistently treats us to views of the austere landscape whilst a very well judged score plays throughout, interspersed with moments of human interaction and reflection, and this technique works really well for the narrative, with the balance and tone suitably adjudged by director John Curran (‘The Painted Veil’ 06, ‘Stone’ 10), and it certainly shows lots of promise for debut screenwriter Marion Nelson. Definitely worth going to see.

Locke  (2013)    72/100

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Rating :   72/100                                                                       85 Min        15

An extremely focused and potent film about consequences and responsibility. The entirety of this film takes place within the car of Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) as he drives away from work and not to home as usual, but to deal with the long shadow cast by some of his previous actions. Although it does not explicitly say so for a little while, it’s fairly obvious from the beginning that this event is the birth of an unplanned for child, one that Locke’s loving wife and current two sons do not know about. We learn the central character has issues of abandonment with regards to his own father, and so he makes several potentially life changing decisions as events pile on top of one another – he was due to pour the largest amount of concrete in Europe ever the following morning and has to prep someone else to do it via phone, for example, and he is partly forced and partly decides for himself that the time has come to confront everything.

The way we hear all of this play out via hands free phone conversations as he’s driving works really well, and it’s quite heart breaking listening to some of the reactions. Hardy is wonderful in the role, sporting a Welsh accent here, one with echoes of Bane in the background which kind of fits with his first name of Ivan, and both he and the script hold and carry interest from beginning to end, resulting in a captivating and meaningful drama.

I shan’t list the names of the actors in voice support as it’s actually better not to match faces to them as you watch the film. Movies that concentrate on only one or two characters in restricted settings are usually always worth watching – see the original ‘Sleuth’ (72), ‘Closet Land’ (91) and ‘Buried’ (10).

The Raid 2  (2014)    47/100

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Rating :   47/100                                                                     150 Min        18

The sequel to Indonesia’s smash martial arts/action hit ‘The Raid’ back in 2011 returns Iko Uwais to once again fill the shoes of Jakarta’s hardest cop Rama, this time sending him undercover to deal with organised crime families that have eluded the long arm of the law for too long. Director and writer Gareth Evans has returned to deliver the second instalment, but things have gone very, very wrong this time around. Previously we were taken into the tense environment of a single tower block that the police were infiltrating and then had to fight for their lives to escape from – it was a pretty solid action film. Here, with the story expanded significantly it’s all over the place, with loose direction, editing and screenwriting meandering from the word go, degenerating into essentially a big-screen version of GTA but without the enjoyment of being in control. It even comes dangerously close to aping a scene from ‘The Godfather’ (72) and, by extension, one of the most famous scenes in all of film history.

This is all negative. However, it’s worst trait is the level of deplorable violence it smashes onto the screen constantly, which is not only unnecessary but goes much darker to the point of revelling in its own blood soaked gratuity. It’s pretty disgusting to watch, and often difficult to follow it’s so badly put together. Indeed, the main character at the beginning is dead against the killing of a bad guy who is tied up, wanting instead to bring him to face justice, but I’m pretty sure about twenty minutes later he can be seen bashing someone’s skull in with a rock for no good reason – I can’t be certain because it’s been filmed in such a scrappy way, all with relentless hues of grey used throughout the film which absolutely doesn’t help, in fact the one or two moments of real light and sunshine are a massive welcome relief from the enforced dreariness of the film.

It absolutely glorifies violence, but then it’s so horrific that it also manages to negate that effect at the same time. Some of the scenes are well choreographed and work as intended, and Tio Pakusodewo and Arifin Putra are good in their roles as one of the Kingpins and his son, but this is ultimately disastrously misjudged.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2  (2014)    67/100

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Rating :   67/100                                                                     142 Min        12A

The second instalment in Sony’s Spider-man reboot, one of the most pointless restarts in the history of cinema after the hugely successful Sam Raimi Spider-man films which have hardly faded from the public consciousness at all. One possible reason for the decision may be the limited number of Marvel characters that Sony have the rights to, and if that’s so we can expect to see another reboot in four or five years time, but they most certainly based much of their premise with the first film on the success of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Here, once again, we see echoes of that trilogy, but with another action orientated and largely forgettable storyline (as I was watching this I was surprised how difficult it was to remember what happened in the previous one).

The bad guys are Electro and the Green Goblin, played by Jamie Foxx and Dane DeHaan respectively, with a little extra help from Paul Giamatti having a lot of fun as Rhino, and Emma Stone reprises her role as love interest Gwen Stacy, Spidey’s occasional bit of stuff when MJ wasn’t around. Helming the web slinging hero himself is, once again, Andrew Garfield who looks the part of the geek but who has all the charisma of a brick swinging its way through the streets wrapped in spandex, even his jokes leave you feeling embarrassed for the criminals that have to suffer them. Spider-man was my favourite comic growing up, but even though I read it as a child the Peter Parker it featured was in his twenties, more grown up and masculine (and he actually was funny) and it still worked, I really wish they’d ditch this coming of age hopeless geek routine that was already plotted across Spider-man 1-3 with Tobey Maguire, they should simply have carried on where they left off and made it ten times more interesting.

One of the film’s biggest selling points is the technology behind it. As one would expect from Sony, the picture quality is great and in fact it might be one of those rare cases when it is slightly better to view it in 3D (this is conjecture rather than a comparative suggestion) with fairly inspiring visuals of Spider-man flitting and diving between buildings. The rest of the acting is fine, and the special effects are pretty good. Essentially it’s a polished superhero film that although lacking anything distinctive or special, it does do the basics well enough to be worthwhile, and although it is a little corny to say it, I think you do always get something out of almost any film in the genre. It also sets up the ‘Sinister Six’ – a collective of various supervillains which were great in the comics, something which has no doubt been inspired by the success of the Avengers film, much like the upcoming Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman flick from Zack Snyder. Interestingly, there is a post credits scene that is actually from the upcoming X-Men film – could a cross company collaboration be on the cards … ?

The Love Punch  (2013)    30/100

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Rating :   30/100                                                                       94 Min        12A

The title encapsulates the only striking or interesting thing about this film, in fact the whole thing plays out like a long winded joke with no punch line, told by a friend that you only listen to until the end out of politeness. It’s a comedy crime caper that sees a separated couple, played by Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson, forced to join forces again to try and recapture their financial loses after Brosnan’s company is bought over and then immediately liquidated, annihilating the family savings. This leads them on a jaunt to Paris and a life of crime as they opt to try and steal the money back any way they can, helped out by their mutual friends, played by Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie. Will the ex-lovers also manage to recapture their passions of yester-year?

Indeed.

Calvary  (2014)    72/100

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Rating :   72/100                                                                     100 Min        15

Another film featuring Brendan Gleeson and a healthy dose of Irish black humour (see ‘In Bruges’ 08 and ‘The Guard’ 11 for good examples of more) and once again featuring topical satire at the expense of the Catholic church, here courtesy of Gleeson’s central character, father James Lavelle, who is told during the film’s introduction he will be killed in a week’s time by a victim of child abuse at the hands of a different Catholic priest in years gone by. The setting is a small Irish town in County Sligo (Easkey was the main filming location) so Lavelle knows who his would be assassin is, but we the viewers do not. This mixture of dark comedy, serious issues and not quite whodunit but who is going to do it, creates a unique film with another predictably great leading performance from Gleeson, but also very solid support from the likes of Dylan Moran, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly Isaach De Bankolé and David Wilmot. The title is taken from the name of the site just outside of Jerusalem where the Bible tells us Jesus was crucified, and it’s written and directed by John Michael McDonagh who’s last project was the aforementioned ‘The Guard’ – here he has maintained the same level of humour as before, but injected it with a memorably dark and astute portmanteau of the often scandalous situation the Catholic church finds itself in worldwide, combined with ever relevant questions, and tests, of faith.

The Last Days on Mars  (2013)    56/100

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Rating :   56/100                                                                       98 Min        15

A zombie film set on Mars, not unusual in terms of the genre but slightly so in terms of its general release at the cinema and not straight to DVD.  Mankind has recently established a base on the red planet and the present crew are due to be shipped back to Earth for the next staff rotation when one of them happens upon sings of microbiological life. This life form, as one would expect, starts to turn the humans into flesh eating zombies that are impervious to the atmospheric conditions of Mars and the laws of science and nature in general. You can tell who is going to meet their undeath first based on their acting calibre. It’s not all that bad, is just isn’t interesting, original or tense enough to be particularly worthwhile, nor is it sadly bad enough to be especially good fun. Watch ‘Mission to Mars’ (2000) instead, which was also ropey in places but was great to watch, or the Mars episode of Doctor Who with the aliens in the water which was also good apart from the completely nonsensical ending. With Liev Schreiber, Olivia Williams, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai and Johnny Harris.