The Raid 2  (2014)    47/100

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 Last Days on Mars  (2013)    56/100

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.

Need for Speed  (2014)    34/100

Rating :   34/100                                                                     132 Min        12A

Adapted from the computer game of the same name – a fact alone that sounds a fairly deafening alarm bell, and sure enough we witness a concept that is fine on a console but does not work at all on the big-screen. It was always going to be a dubious attempt with the Fast and Furious franchise already well established within the niche market of motorhead fuel injected action, and doubtless the makers here were hopeful of a franchise of their own, with only bad acting, poor scriptwriting and tensionless directing standing in their way.

The central character is Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul) who is of course the most talented driver ever to have lived but for some reason is working in a garage in financial arrears, forcing him into the sphere of influence of bad guy Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper), who despite being evil to the core is remarkably successful and is the reigning driving champion, but deep down he suspects Tobey could beat him. Inevitably juvenile egos clash and a street race takes place between the two and Little Pete (Harrison Gilbertson), one of Tobey’s good guy buddies, and we see them dodging oncoming traffic at a million miles per hour in flashy sports cars as they heedlessly drive down the wrong side of the road until bad guy Dino commits a dastardly deed and sends Little Pete careering off to a spectacular crash and immediate cremation. GOOD RIDDANCE. If they are going to drive like madmen in public and put the lives of hundreds of innocent people at risk then, frankly, they all deserve to die as far as I’m concerned and the intention to gain the audiences sympathy at this point is woefully misplaced, plus Lil Pete was so completely artless and innocent it was entirely obvious he was about to splattered all over the place anyway.

Bad guy Dino pegs it when he realises he might have made a boo-boo, leaving Tobey to take the blame and go to jail as unfortunately for him it seems his lawyer was too lazy to interview the many countless witnesses they almost killed who could testify to there being three cars, and they were going too fast for any cameras on their journey to have recorded them. Eventually he gets out and so begins his long and very tedious journey to right this wrong as well as try and win a highly secretive race that’s in fact so secretive all the security forces and police know exactly where it is and try to stop it, just so he can rub it in bad guy Dino’s face that yes, he is in fact the better driver as well as being the innocent guy (though he also deserves to die) who will somehow prove his innocence. Oh, and bad guy Dino is banging Tobey’s ex-girlfriend, because they obviously felt they didn’t have enough clichés in there already.

The action isn’t completely dire, but it’s very run of the mill and the way the camera continually cuts from a first person view to a shot of the driver from around the gear stick, constantly destroys any real involvement or tension in the driving scenes. Morally bankrupt central character behaviour continues to the point of lunacy, the supporting characters are tragic and poorly delivered, Aaron Paul acts throughout like a grown angry baby, and really the only things of any value in the entire film are Michael Keaton’s supporting role as a radio disc jockey and race organiser, and Imogen Poots with her infectious smile and a stunt that she is obviously performing herself. Alas, neither of these two actors are enough to give this any appeal other than to perhaps undiscerning teenage boys with nothing better to do.

Non-Stop  (2014)    73/100

Rating :   73/100                                                                     106 Min        12A

Liam Neeson continues his winning streak of action films, following in the successful footsteps of the likes of his ‘Taken’ (08), ‘Unknown’ (11) and ‘The Grey’ (11), and this is another taught and very enjoyable thriller, predominantly sold by a trademark commanding performance from the leading man himself, here playing an alcoholic air marshal who begins to receive mysterious threats to his passenger’s lives whilst in mid-air. He knows that someone onboard is sending them, but who? The plot thickens when the instigator’s demanded money is requested to be transferred to Neeson’s own bank account …

The tension is held throughout, and, all in all, it’s a satisfyingly involving mystery.

RoboCop  (2014)    70/100

Rating :   70/100                                                                     117 Min        12A

This is actually better than the 1987 original, although it is not without its problems, chief among them massive overuse of shaky cam in some of the action sequences. The story is similar but not identical – here America and her giant corporations seem to be steamrollering the whole world (or Iran at any rate) due in no small measure to their manufacture and deployment of robotic military equipment, but the home market has remained a no-go for the technology due to public concerns over its safety, much to the chagrin of Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), CEO of OmniCorp the cybernetics juggernaut responsible for the mass production of robots and the prompting of the moral homeland debate (this is set slightly in the future, in case that wasn’t obvious).

The logical solution to this pesky setback is to plonk a man inside a robot who has a moral conscience, only the same conscience is a little too slow at deciding when to pull the trigger and when not to, so a little amount of cerebral ‘tinkering’ goes on behind closed doors with their first unwitting participant in the scheme (he gets blown to bits by the bad guys, fortunately one of the intact bits is his head) Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman). This tinkering and the core concept itself forms the central discussion of the film, in between RoboCop annihilating the criminals in his home town of Detroit, and it’s handled at a reasonable pace with solid performances and slick special effects, and although there are a few problems with some of the action, and it’s not especially noteworthy, it does hold its own for the most part.

Support work from Gary Oldman as ‘tinkering’ scientist Dr Dennett Norton (inspired by Norton anti-virus?), Abbie Cornish as Mrs Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson is good, and the film successfully makes the OmniCorp board seem more like morally questionable people rather than the cardboard bad guys that so often frequented eighties action movies, RoboCop amongst them. In a scene where oodles of data and perp profiles are downloaded into Murphy’s noggin so he can immediately identify people wanted for arrest, I couldn’t help but think – don’t we already have the technology to do this? There are plenty of programmes that can identify faces, just pair it with a database and strap it to an officer’s squad car/ass kicking visor and bob’s your uncle, you could even apply it to a network of surveillance cameras and call it ‘The RoboCop Protocol’ …

Lone Survivor  (2013)    30/100

Rating :   30/100                                                                     121 Min        15

A huge opportunity missed here as what could have been a tight, thrilling and quite moving war piece based on a true incident taking place in Afghanistan in 2005, descends into complete farce and jingoism with the main American soldiers each being shot about five hundred times, exclaiming ‘damn it’ with each hit as if they’d merely been stung by some nettles as blood spurts everywhere all leading up to dramatic Boromir style death scenes in slow motion with the sun setting on the picturesque landscape surrounding them. The title itself completely blows much of the story as for anyone who wasn’t aware of the details (the vast majority of viewers one imagines) we know only one of the four man team survives, and the very beginning compacts this gross error by showing it is very clearly going to be Mark Wahlberg’s character Marcus Luttrell, and indeed the film is based on Luttrell’s novel recounting events as they happened on the ground (reputedly his original report put enemy troop numbers at circa 20 -30, then in his book they became more like 200, whilst an alternative novel published about the operation puts them at more like 9 or 10).

The other three combatants are played by Emile Hirsch, Taylor Kitsch and Ben Foster, and, frankly, if I died fighting for my country I’d be pretty pissed off with some of these casting choices, and the film opens, after some decent real army footage, with what seems to be some sort of homosexual soft porno with the focus on the bodies of the men instead of the camaraderie or characters. Without knowing the exact details of the events that actually occurred, their assignment according to the film was to covertly approach an Afghan village and take out a Taliban leader, or ‘the bad guys’ as they put it, thought to be there, but it many ways it seems doomed from the beginning. They quickly find the mountains are making radio communication impossible – how is it they didn’t factor that in? It surely cannot have come as a surprise. Then they encounter their first major obstacle and make a complete dog’s breakfast of it, before failing to properly conceal themselves in what seems pretty good terrain to disappear in, especially if there are only four of you. Not only this, but instead of both hiding themselves and also preparing cover where they would have the advantage, they elect to run at the superior numbers taking very little precaution with cover (but when you can take multiple bullets without even noticing I guess that’s not so much of an issue), and then, when they should once again be trying to disappear, they loudly call out to each other creating a very, very easy duck hunt for the people trying to kill them.

It ends with what is actually a very moving tribute to the real men that lost their lives there, but this is cheating – an emotional punch at the end that people are naturally going to feel and empathise with and yet it cannot make up for the majority of the film being terrible. I say the majority – the last quarter of the story has more of a heart to it, which took me by surprise, and some of the scenes at least successfully begin to set up tension, with at least one of them slightly uncomfortable viewing, as was intended by the clever way it was shot. However, when you are watching the main characters effectively play Cowboys and Indians and pretending to be riddled with lead and hit every bone of their bodies off rocks, still calmly delivering cheesy lines to one another, then the thing is sunk without any real hope of redemption. This is entirely the fault of director Peter Berg as he not only helmed the project but also wrote the screenplay, in fact, and I may be misremembering this, but I think he tells us he is the director twice during the opening credits. His last film was ‘Battleship’ (12) and this is in the same league as that, notwithstanding the real world relevance.

Out of the Furnace  (2013)    71/100

Rating :   71/100                                                                     116 Min        15

A dark, perhaps a little too dark, tale focusing on two brothers in a small American town dominated by the steel works that one of them works in. Life is tough, and for the other brother who has returned from several tours of duty in the Middle East full of bile and hatred, the only thing he feels he can do now is fight for money. Cue the ‘just one last fight’ line and we know bad things are going to happen. It’s a brutal tale of violence, desperation, regret and revenge, very well acted by Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Woody Harrelson, Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker (Casey Affleck also appears but he really needs to take some diction lessons) and it’s a film that, although it hides nothing, it does throw an uneasiness at the audience, forcing them to ponder and consider it.

Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit  (2014)    73/100

Rating :   73/100                                                                     105 Min        12A

Finally – a new Keira Knightley film woohoo! No doubt everyone was as distraught as I was when last year didn’t feature miss Knightley in any film on general release, but here she is back on fine form as Cathy, the wife of the late Tom Clancy’s long running fictional character Jack Ryan, with Chris Pine filling in his shoes – he has been previously played by Alec Baldwin (‘The Hunt for Red October’ 90), Harrison Ford (‘Patriot Games’ 92, ‘Clear and Present Danger’ 94) and Ben Affleck (‘The Sum of All Fears’ 02). The role of his wife was a fairly small one in the previous films, and screenwriters Adam Cozad and David Koepp have done a good job of writing her a larger part whilst managing the difficult task of avoiding it becoming too cheesy or predictable, although despite the end of the cold war, the Russians are still the bad guys.

Clancy passed away last October (the film is dedicated to him), and this is the first movie to feature his characters but to not be based on one of his novels, and one does wonder what he would make of it. It’s a series reboot, with Ryan initially an economics student in London who becomes galvanised to join the Marines after the 9/11 attacks on New York. He receives a crippling back injury and is close to despair when he is recruited as an analyst for the CIA but also meets Cathy as the undergrad doctor who promises to go to dinner with him if he dedicates himself to his physical recovery. If only Keira had won the role of Catwoman in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, poor old Bruce Wayne wouldn’t have had to get punched in the back and thrown down into a grotty hole to recover from his spinal fracture. Indeed, pretty sure if she went around the NHS wards and made similar propositions we might see a remarkable recovery rate in patients ….

“Keira Knightley says she’ll go on a date with you if you get better.”
“…what?”
“Yeah, she said she wanted to give sick people something to live for.”
“Are you fucking shitting me?! Quick, cancel all my visits – give me that fucking water {stands} I’m better! {vomits} Get off me! I’ll be fine!”

The film has almost certainly been inspired by the reboot to the Bond franchise, and there are possibly a few nods in its direction, with an inaugural fight in a toilet and a few camera shots of glass elevators similar to the ones in both ‘Casino Royale’ (06) and ‘Skyfall’ (12) as well as a set up not too dissimilar to the one in Skyfall’s Shanghai skyscraper scene, not to mention putting the character name in the title of course. Kenneth Branagh directs and stars as the Russian bad guy, with the trailer making his accent sound a little ropey (the trailer and marketing for the film was not great in general) but its actually pretty good, and Keira sports a new American one (she has several – she is very talented), the two of them, Pine, and Kevin Costner as Ryan’s CIA contact all sell the film well with their combined talents and, together with tight direction, it all comes together nicely as a good, fun, spy thriller. It amply supplies the base for a new franchise and although it’s not quite in the same league as ‘Casino Royale’, there are plenty of good things to build on for the next one …

Paranormal Activity : The Marked Ones  (2014)    43/100

Rating :   43/100                                                                       84 Min        15

Grooooooan. Yet another stale and regurgitated horror film from Blum Productions in the Paranormal Activity series, this time swapping surveillance cameras for handheld ones and revolving around the story arc of certain people being chosen for demonic possession by a coven of Satan worshippers and dark magic practitioners. The cameras are held by three friends, one of whom has been chosen to have his brain turned to mush by a demon, but not before he subjects us to terrible camera work and predictable jump moments. There’s a semblance of a story, but not much else going on here.

Irresistible  (2006)    65/100

Rating :   65/100                                                                     103 Min        15

A fairly intricate psychological drama but one that’s hindered by slightly odd editing choices, though it is still worth a look and features strong central performances from Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill and Emily Blunt – for whom this was her third feature film, billed just before her appearance in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ the same year, though you would never guess she was new to big-screen productions based on her onscreen confidence here. Blunt plays the ‘irresistible’ bait, the attractive young woman Sarandon’s husband, played by Neill, is working with who is seemingly obsessed with their relationship and seems to have taken to sneaking into their home and stealing items on a regular basis, but is this really the case – or is it just a series of strange coincidences, or indeed has the stress of the wife’s pressing artwork and the recent loss of her mother taken too much of a mental toll on her?

The sympathetic and involving performances certainly hold attention throughout, and ultimately it’s a decent film, it just lacks anything to elevate it beyond that, other than an abundance, or a parliament if you prefer, of owl related things which the central character has a thing for – in fact in a dream sequence a deck of owl themed playing cards can be seen. I WISH TO POSSESS THESE ARTEFACTS.

To date the most recent film to have been written and directed by Australian filmmaker Ann Turner.