Captain America : The Winter Soldier (2014) 67/100

Posted on May 11, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 136 Min

I’m torn on this one, I was never completely sold on the original ‘Captain America : The First Avenger’ back in 2011, and I would say this one is better, but it kind of smacks of contractual agreements for some of the cast and a very determined view towards Marvel’s spin-off TV series ‘Marvel : Agents of Shield’, featuring story elements aligned with both these agendas and which very much flit around the borderline between interesting and idiotic. First and foremost it is enjoyable though. We begin with Captain A (Chris Evans) and Black Widow (the enigmatic Scarlett Johansson) sent to deal with pirates that have taken the crew of a large military vessel hostage, and the info they retrieve there will lead them and Shield onto a much larger and far reaching plot.

The action sequences throughout the film have clearly had a lot of thought and effort put into them, but some are marred by a jerky aspect to the motion of the camera which is a shame, though a number of them are definitely heading in the right direction in terms of creating real tension, just as some of the aerial shots are obviously still playing it a little safe but do create a bit of vertigo in the audience. The superhero genre still has the fundamental problem of avoiding the trope of good guy and bad guy duel it out in the end and good guy wins because either he has the moral high ground or he is smarter than the bad guy, with the occasional flourish of bad buy squishes someone the good guy cares about in the process, and here there are still too many moments of the hero achieving something at the last possible second etc.etc. and of all the Marvel superheroes Captain America probably has the least appeal outside of the States, partly because of the inherent jingoism, which to be fair they have done a good job of keeping to a minimum, but also in a general sense as his powers are in many ways comparatively less interesting, so his personality really has to shine through and the story really has to bite.

It is in this sense that the film doesn’t work so well, even for a souped-up soldier some of what he achieves is too over the top and the most off-putting aspect is when Fury (Samuel L Jackson) shows him early on the new airborne defences that Shield have been constructing and we hear C.A. moan about how unethical it all is, much like he’s done in the past, but it just doesn’t work. Earth has just been invaded by aliens who were narrowly prevented from annihilating everything (see ‘Avengers Assemble’ 2012), it would be ludicrous for every government in the world not to be working on new defence measures, but he could quite easily have approached the same moral perspective from a more believable angle, perhaps worrying about safeguards and things like that. As a supposed strategic genius he himself should really have been coming up with plans for national and international security, rather than just still being on the frontline for the military.

The camaraderie between Black Widow and C.A. is a bit stilted, and despite the wonderful character and the actress playing her, I wonder if she isn’t a bit too cutesy for a deadly assassin, but then Marvel are owned by Disney. As a curious aside, the take down she performs in ‘Iron Man 2’ (2010) where she wraps her legs around her opponent’s neck and then uses her body weight to bring him to the ground has been aped by films countless times since then, but I believe that was where the trend began.

Ultimately worth going to see but with a few provisos regarding believability, and as usual there are two end credit sequences to wait for, and if my suspicions are correct it looks like one of these scenes introduces two characters (Stephen Strange is also mentioned during the film, incidentally) who are the offspring of another Marvel character currently owned by a different studio …

Interestingly, here is the symbol of the bad guys in the first film, Hydra, compared to a coin originating in Eretria (the ancient Greek city, not modern day Eritrea in Africa) circa 500 BC

I, Frankenstein (2014) 67/100

Posted on February 17, 2014 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 92 Min

This is a pretty awesome, bad film. Given the concept is that Frankenstein’s monster has not only robbed his creator of his name, but has also managed to survive until the present day and get himself involved in an eternal battle between demons and gargoyles (yes, that’s right, gargoyles – but ones that can transform into attractive humans and which serve the powers of good) that, naturally, humans are blissfully unaware of, the discovery that this is a bit rough around the edges with bad dialogue and a fair amount of ropey acting, isn’t really an astonishing surprise.

In the beginning we see Mr F dealing with a few family issues, and his voiceover comes to us ‘I though it was the end ..(long pause).. But ..(long pause).. It was just the beginning’ and we very quickly assume this is going to be a nightmare to sit through. Responsible for the somewhat lacking screenplay is Stuart Beattie, but credit where credit’s due – in his dual role as the director he has also created some pretty cool action sequences and somehow gelled everything into a very flawed, and yet very likeable film. Aaron Eckhart can take a lot of credit for anchoring the piece as Frankenstein, getting the tone spot on in what can’t have been an easy role to play, and Yvonne Strahovski as the hot blonde scientist in tight jeans adds the right touch of schlock sex appeal and the two of them, as well as the rest of the cast (Miranda Otto, Jai Courtney and Bill Nighy are in support – with the latter of those gleefully delivering his cheesy lines), with the direction, weave the right threads of ridiculousness and entertainment unashamedly together.

Not sure if this would work as well on the small screen, but I went into this in a foul and vituperative state of mind, and I left in a good mood. I’d recommend it if you’re feeling the same way.

Homefront (2013) 67/100

Posted on December 24, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 100 Min

What is by and large a really good film unfortunately dwindles into all too familiar territory come the end, but nevertheless it remains on the whole worthwhile. It’s the latest action number from Jason Statham and features James Franco, Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder as the supporting bad guys trying to trade off his life and that of his little girl to an incarcerated drug baron, who was of course put behind bars by Statham during his days as an undercover DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) officer. Trying to lay low and just look after his family now, things are set in motion after his young girl, whom he has taught how to defend herself, bedecks a local bully, and his hick junkie mother (played wonderfully by Bosworth) sets out for vengeance. Definitely worth a look for Statham fans.

The Call (2013) 67/100

Posted on September 26, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 94 Min

Haley Berry stars as an emergency call centre operator who one day makes a mistake that results in the brutal execution of a young teenage girl at the hands of a sadistic serial killer (Michael Eklund). As she has questions of faith about herself the killer remains at large, just waiting to strike again….Of course, casually chatting with people on the phones and just as casually taking self appointed breaks in the beginning never really boded well for her career. Brad Anderson of ‘The Machinist’ (04) fame directs, and despite an iffy start this becomes an engaging thriller with moments of both genuine excitement and revulsion. I’m not convinced by the ending, but Eklund and Abigail Breslin as a young victim in particular give very good performances.

World War Z (2013) 67/100

Posted on June 22, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 116 Min

This is a reasonably good zombie film, but one massively hindered by a director who hasn’t learned from previous mistakes. The man in question, Marc Forster, was criticised on a grand scale for his ultra fast editing of the action sequences on the Bond film ‘Quantum of Solace’, and here the same problem all but ruins the opening section of the film, where we are granted our first visual treatment of the zombie hordes (they are effectively the same as the zombies infected with the rage virus in 2002’s ‘28 Days Later’) and everything is so completely frenetic we can’t make out what on Earth is going on. The idea was to put the audience in the situation as much as possible, but ironically it has the very opposite effect, deadening our perception of events, in much the same way as watching a tense scene in fast forward would do.

It’s based on the novel by Max Brooks (the son of Mel Brooks), and after the first half an hour or so things start to pick up, and the story gets going. Brad Pitt does a good job of playing the central character, Gerry Lane, employed to investigate the source of the outbreak due to his military connections with the U.N. At one point he awakens to find himself tied to a stretcher and facing none other than Malcolm Tucker (well, Peter Capaldi) from ‘The Thick of it’, which is potentially far scarier than any of the zombie attacks. Decent, but never as tense as it should be.

The film is already famous throughout Scotland for being partly filmed in Glasgow, doubling up as Philadelphia, most notably in the city centre for the aforementioned starting attack. It is great to see the city on the big screen, and it’s obvious not just because of its architecture, but also because it looks decidedly coooooold and dreich (for anyone not familiar with Scots, this word is almost always used in connection with the weather and means dreary and miserable, we use it a lot) and I wonder if local business won’t be able to milk that to some degree, a zombie cafe perhaps, or the occasional zombie flash dance on unsuspecting tourists would be interesting …

The film is planned as part one of a trilogy, so the studios may return to Scotland’s largest city in the future. On a similar vein, Neil Marshall’s ‘Doomsday’ (08) revolved around a deadly killer virus which, naturally, began with one person coughing on the streets of Glasgow city centre. England’s response to the outbreak is to build another wall to keep us out, much like the Romans did, and the rest of the world pretty much leaves Scotland to die. Being a hardy bunch we don’t, of course, but we do degenerate into cannibalism and tribal warfare. All, that is, except for Dundee, which essentially carries on as normal.

The Look of Love (2013) 67/100

Posted on April 29, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 101 Min

A biographical portrait of Paul Raymond, one time richest man in Britain and head of soft pornography giant ‘Men Only’ magazine, along with many infamous Soho establishments, convincingly played here by Steve Coogan. The film really focuses on his relationship with his daughter, played by Imogen Poots, but it tries to squeeze in all of the other women in his life as well; his wife, long term girlfriends, threesomes, and general one night stands. A lot of these elements take up the first half of the movie, and are given too brief a treatment to be effective, and indeed the cutting and editing is far too rapid here generally. This may be to do with the content, as we see an endless stream of bare breasted girls parade up and down the stages of his London attractions, at once containing enough nudity to offend and off-put some viewers, and yet cut far too sharply to be used for any effect other than to show Raymond was constantly around attractive young women.

It’s like the film is playing it safe, commenting on the infamously conservative British relationship with sex and pornography in general (see this article, for talk of the current government banning all porn in the UK) and talking of its evolution in history, and yet also suffering from that same slightly repressive culture – accentuated with sex scenes that are shot in a traditionally prudish way, especially with regards to male nudity onscreen. There’s really nothing here to offend or, ‘ahem’, titillate your average audience member. There is a lot of cocaine use throughout though, especially with Poots’ character, in fact we are to believe she essentially takes the stuff with her Cornflakes for several years, and yet she continues to still look pretty good, which is perhaps a bit of a visual oversight.

Despite its flaws and a dull first half, ultimately the slow burn effect begins to work, and together with the music and feel of the era it evokes, it does build to a reasonably memorable emotional end. Admittedly, having a slight crush on Imogen Poots probably helps (also, see her surprisingly accomplished Scottish accent in ‘Centurion’). It’s directed by the man who effectively brought Coogan to an international audience with ‘24 Hour Party People’, Michael Winterbottom, and marks the latest of a long running collaboration between the two, after further films like ‘The Trip’ and ‘A Cock and Bull Story’. Also with good turns from Anna Friel, Chris Addison (‘The Thick of it’) and Tamsin Egerton (‘St. Trinians’, ‘4..3..2..1’) and features a brief but pretty good Marlon Brando impression from Coogan too (he began his career onscreen as an impressionist for ‘Spitting Image’ in the eighties).

Speaking of which, here are some equally good impersonations from another famously famous thesp.

Love is All You Need / Den Skaldede Frisør (2012) 67/100

Posted on April 20, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 116 Min

From acclaimed Danish director Susanne Bier and starring Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm, this is a very traditional tale about hardship and the redemption of finding rejuvenating love in the most unlikely of places. Brosnan’s son is marrying Dyrholm’s daughter in Italy, and the two of them meet when their cars collide accidentally in the Danish airport they are to depart from. One has an adulterous husband and lives with the threat of returning cancer (he cheated on her whilst she was undergoing chemotherapy no less), the other lost his wife many years ago in a tragic road accident and has allowed himself to be consumed by work ever since. Both central performances are extremely good, and indeed the pain in Brosnan’s eyes looks very real when he talks about the loss of his wife, so much so Red Dragon decided to do a little checking and sure enough, he sadly lost his first wife, actress Cassandra Harris, to cancer. Ever since he has been a vocal supporter of cancer charities (he is also an ardent environmentalist), including being the celebrity spokesman one year for the breast cancer fundraiser ‘Lee National Denim Day’, run by Lee Jeans and which reputedly raises more funds than any other annual one day event for the cause – you can find more details about it here. Interestingly, Cassandra Harris appeared in the Bond film ‘For Your Eyes Only’ (81) as Lisl, and visiting her onset Brosnan was introduced to Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli which, despite setbacks due to his ‘Remington Steele’ contract that allowed Timothy Dalton to take the reins for two films, eventually led to his casting as the fifth actor to play James Bond in the Eon series.

Despite the likeability of the central characters, it’s the supporting roles that drag this film into the realm of melodrama, and although it’s not insufferable, it does begin to fray the edges of its believability, with almost everyone else at the wedding having some sort of personal drama which will come to the fore, and which ultimately takes up too much screen time and detracts from the core of the film. The Mediterranean setting is picturesque, evoking Brosnan’s vocally challenged trip to Greece in ‘Mamma Mia’ (08), and there are a lot of beautiful landscape shots of the town they go to, indeed it would not have gone amiss to have cut them longer and extracted some of the soap opera to make room. Brosnan exists here as box office draw, but one cannot imagine this going down too well in Denmark as although his character is deemed to be fluent in Danish, the actor is most certainly not, and so the film constantly flits between English and subtitled Danish, purely to try and appeal to a wider market. A tactical ploy which appears to have been successful, with this screened more commercially than most of Bier’s previous work, although I wonder if something did not go awry with their marketing, as the only time I’ve seen a trailer play for this was a mere one day before it went on national release, and, equally, I wonder if a wider release would not have been secured anyway, given the success of her previous film ‘In a Better World’ (10), which took home the best foreign language film award from the Oscars (notably, against the wonderful ‘Dogtooth’).

A nice film worthy of a look in, even if the supporting story arcs hinder rather than help.

Rec 2 (2009) 67/100

Posted on April 7, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 85 Min

The 2009 sequel to 07’s wonderful Spanish handheld horror film ‘Rec’ (which was given an American makeover in 2008 with ‘Quarantine’, which was also very good). The original featured a documentary crew embedding themselves in a Barcelona fire station and tagging along with the response to an emergency call. Little did they know they would be entombed within a building whose inhabitants were all turning into flesh eating zombies….

Rec 2 picks up exactly where the first one ended, with the camera inside a vehicle taking a military Swat Team to the cordoned off infested building. They haven’t been fully briefed on exactly what they can expect to be confronted by, so the film does suffer a little from the inevitable, ‘What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? You mean they’re freaking zombies?! Like brain eating freaking fracking zombies?!’, ‘Yup’, ‘Fucking shit man!! Wait, what’s tha…Aaaaaargh!’, ‘Well now that was pointless explaining to you, wasn’t it.’

The story behind what’s going on is expanded upon a little, and the unholy nature of the zombification process, or rather the prospect that there may be a cure or reversal, genuinely makes some of the brutality a little difficult to watch. Not as taught as the original, but still pretty good and justifying the making of a third released in 2012, and the announcement of a fourth and concluding chapter, expected toward the end of this year. The original writing/directing team of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza returned to helm the sequel, this time joined by Manu Díez for the screenplay instead of Luiso Berdejo.

The Closed Circuit / Uklad Zamkniety (2013) 67/100

Posted on April 7, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 100 Min

The story behind this really makes it work. It’s a Polish language dramatisation about the true tale of three friends who set up a successful multi-million Euro company in Poland, but were then hounded by serious bribery and corruption charges. It begins painfully slowly, with many imperfections and an all too grey blueish texture that never leaves the film, a common complaint for the Polish film industry, and it would be tempting to label it a remnant of the soviet era if it were not also commonly found in the mainstream cinema of the west. Despite these faults (the grammar used in the English subtitles could also use a bit of work) the events are compelling and the performances for the most part are pretty good. In fact, in many ways the drama is underplayed – what unfolds deserved to be much more tense and harrowing for the viewer than it is.

It would be interesting to know just how close to the bone the film runs – the director Ryszard Bugajski struggled for many years to have his 1982 film ‘Interrogation’ about Stalinist repression released, and was finally able to do so with the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, seeing it nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990 and Krystyna Janda take home the best actress award. Given that level of commitment to voicing the truth, The Red Dragon is hopeful that Uklad Zamkniety sticks largely to the facts.

Robot and Frank (2012) 67/100

Posted on March 9, 2013 by The Red Dragon

Rating : 67/100 89 Min

An original story set in the near future that sees a concerned son buy a robot companion for his memory troubled ageing father, a father who had an infamous cat burglar career and ponders the possibilities of his adroit and loyal new friend. The character of the father is a little acerbic, but our sympathies still lie with him, and the robot is humanly likeable enough for their relationship to feel real. Interesting and at moments touching, although there is a subdued feel to the conclusion – it’s easy to dismiss it but it’s worthy of much more thought. Frank Langella plays the lead, with Peter Sarsgaard as the voice of the robot (though he does sound a little like Kevin Spacey, a la the computer in ‘Moon’), James Marsden and Liv Tyler are his siblings with Susan Sarandon in support. One feature of the plot sees the local library recycling all but the most precious of the books, once they’ve all been scanned as ebooks, a concept which may well come into reality in our modern digitised era. The film is also the first from two friends – writer Christopher D. Ford and director Jake Schreier.

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