Thor in a Car

Rush is built like a formula one racing car. There's no room for error and every nut and bolt is tweaked to optimize performance. I enjoyed it a lot but I'm not nearly as impressed with it as I feel I should be. I'm not a racing fan and I don't on the whole like sports movies but that's not the problem here. There's something missing. All of the well-crafted elements didn't quite cohere into a satisfying whole for me. I thought it was weighed down by biopic cliches, some clunky lines and there was too much exposition disguised as race commentary. Thinking in terms of the film's own metaphors it needs a little more of Hunt's roguish cavalier hedonism, a little less of Lauda's precision, calculation and risk management. It needs poetry between the pistons because ultimately it's nothing more than the story of two unlikeable men trying to better each other. The result is a solid film, but interesting rather than intense.  It becomes much more fascinating if you imagine it to be an alternative version of 'Thor,' in which the God with the big hammer is exiled to Britain in the 1970s and falls naturally into the role of a playboy racing driver.

Zero To Thirty In Two And A Half Hours

Remember when Kathryn Bigelow made really exciting genre pieces about machismo and obsession? I do. Now she's the go-to Hollywood director for politically charged, controversial, Oscar-baiting docu-dramas. I wish she'd just make another Point Break, or Blue Steel, or Near Dark. I hated The Hurt Locker; thought it was really overrated but Zero Dark Thirty is much better, more interesting and provocative. It's also a draining two and a half hours of your time and a difficult watch because it is deliberately ambiguous. You can read it as militaristic propaganda. You can read it as the end not justifying the means. The film doesn't commit one way or the other. You'll see in it what you  want  to see in it. That's either masterful direction or sitting on the fence depending on your viewpoint. For the most part I think it has it's cake and eats it too. It disguises itself as a detailed forensic-level political thriller but when you break it down into three acts it is basically a torture bit, an explosions bit and a running around a compound bit. It should be unbearably suspenseful and build to strong dramatic payoffs. Instead, it is unremittingly dull, peculiarly lacking in tension and labored. To be honest I'd just rather watch an informed documentary. It does improve the longer you stay with it but not enough. The final act has special forces soldiers moving through the compound in the dark. Like the rest of the film it's  technically impressive but surprisingly hollow and as detached as Jessica Chastain's expression. Her character is hard to engage with over the length of the film. She has no back-story, no life, just a single minded resolve to get the job done. I know that's sort of the point but then don't expect me to get emotional about her crying at the end when you  haven't let me invest in her as a person.

Insidious Too

Insidious was one of the better mainstream horrors of recent years. It's a creepy little film that has a strong nightmarish quality to it that genuinely unnerved me when I saw it. It has a strong third act and a nihilistic 'game over' ending. It's a strong self contained film. It was also a hit -  so here's a sequel that nobody needs.

It makes no concessions to anyone who hasn't seen the original. It's more of a continuation of a story than a horror film. Every character is retained but less time is given to the Lambert family this time out which makes it less engaging. Instead the focus is on explaining  the back story of the 'old lady in black'.  I hate this film's obsession with explaining everything. I liked it better when I knew nothing other than she was the spirit of a  malicious crone. The revelation when it comes is quite mundane. Turns out it's the ghost of a cross dressing serial killer. Boring seen-it-before ordinary horrors. What scared me about the first film anyway was 'the man with fire on his face'. That freaked me out and seemed to belong in a David Lynch movie. There's nothing to rival that this time out and no surreal touches.

It seems reluctant to deliver any really big scares. There's a long sequence pre-credits which is apropos of nothing, the payoff being nothing more than the title of the film filling your vision whilst there's a big blast of noise. Is that scary? The filmmakers must think so because they do it again for the  cliffhanger ending. In between there's lots of long quiet stretches punctuated by sudden jolts of noise and movement.  All horror films are a bit like this to a degree. There's always a funfair ride element, but this seemed particularly lazy and contrived. I think that's ultimately why I took a dislike to it.

It is what it is: a quick sequel making a quick buck off a superior film and trying to draw in the largest possible audience. These are template movies aimed at the teen market who will react to almost anything.  The experience is strangely inert and oddly safe. Mark Kermode calls them 'horror movies for people who don't like horror movies'. Nigel Floyd call it 'cattle prod cinema'. We're all being snooty about it but it's clear that these films just aren't for us. Shouting 'Boo!' at someone will always get a reaction, but so what? That's how this left me feeling: so what?

Miller Lite

It’s fitting that We’re The Millers begins with some YouTube clips because the whole film feels lazy and plays out exactly like a teenager showing you all the stuff they think is really cool. In this case ‘really cool’ translates as pot dealers, strippers, sex jokes, spiders and giant testicles. We learn that crime pays if you’re a  deadpan snarker and ‘basically a good guy’ and that Jennifer Aniston can resuscitate her career by taking her clothes off, having her breasts felt and snogging a teen. All the best jokes were in the trailer and the gag reel. In between the clips at the beginning and the outtakes at the end it’s join the dots plotting in which the dysfunctional ‘family’ learns to be a proper family. It makes a show of being subversive but delivers so-so laughs in a very conservative bundle. It will be a massive hit and spawn many sequels but it’s reduced in content and lacks flavour. It’s piss poor lager. It’s Miller Lite

Wish You Were Here?

Thank fuck for Ben Wheatley; the director causing frissons of excitement in an otherwise dull British film industry. Sightseers picks at the scabs of a very particular English psyche and then flicks them at you. It’s not for everyone. Lord knows what the casual Netflix viewer is going to make of this as part of their comedy selection. It finds laughs in the mundane and the murderous and pulls you into that narrow pitch black trench between humour and horror. It’s like an edgier version of Mike Leigh’s Nuts In May with added splatter; uncomfortable but compelling to watch. This is banal Britain and beautiful Britain and brutal Britain where the pagan and the petty coexist. It’s a postcard from the edge of madness. Wish you were here?

Riddickulous

Remember Pitch Black? It was a terrific little pulpy sci-fi film that seemed to set Vin Diesel up as the next big thing and announced David Twohy as a director to watch. It never quite worked out that way for either of them. A misfire sequel seemed to stall both their careers and Vin seemed resigned to his fate, driving endless loops around the Fast and Furious race track. “Somewhere along the way I lost a step,” says Vin Diesel, in that trademarked gravelly voice. “I went and got sloppy.” He could be talking about a decade of bad choices.

It’s no wonder that after a decade both have returned to their roots with a Riddick character reboot. But this is where it all gets a bit meta. Where Pitch Black was a a pretty decent Alien rip off Riddick turns out to be a pretty lame Pitch Black rip off. There’s a hellish planet with some forgettable monsters that come out in the rain and some forgettable bounty hunters with forgettable dialogue apart from some horribly memorable misogyny.

Katee Sackhoff’s character Dahl seems to exist only to be called doll or whore, to be leered at, to be the butt of rape jokes and as a lesbian presents just another challenge for all this unbound masculinity in space. Yes she may end up on top of the outlaw in the end and may get to rescue him out of choice but it’s an unnecessary and distasteful misstep in this disappointing film that ultimately serves only to put the dick back in Riddick.

You're Next. To Waste Your Money.

The trailer promised so much: a home invasion movie that suggested a return to the savage cinema of the seventies, the slashers of the eighties and the knowing sensibilities of Funny Games. It looked like a hardcore horror film but it’s actually little more than Home Alone with machetes and crossbows. As a horror fan you get used to forgiving characters doing stupid things to move the plot forwards but when every character in the film makes you want to scream at their idiocy it begins to test your patience. The main characters are dumb enough but the bad guys are even worse. As a result the setup soon becomes farcical and tension soon descends into slapstick. Once people start swinging frying pans around you expect to see someone step on a rake or slip on a banana skin. The animal masks the attackers wear are a good metaphor for what’s wrong with this film. At first they’re creepy and disturbing but then you begin wondering how anyone can see out of them and start questioning the practicality of wearing them until eventually they become laughable, especially when filmed from behind and all you can see is the ears. It’s like Jason from Friday the 13th was into Mickey Mouse instead of hockey.

An adolescent weaned on Agatha Christie could construct a better plot. I expected the villains would be some sort of anti-vivisection group or violent anti-capitalists or something that at least would give this effort some sort of contemporary relevance, but no, it’s about murdering to claim an inheritance. So it’s basically nothing more than a creaky old The Cat and the Canary variant in which the twists are telegraphed well in advance.

Our final girl is a more than capable ass kicker but we never really care about her because all we really know about her is that she grew up on a survivalist camp. Aside from being highly convenient it denies any true character development. She is capable from the offset so we never properly fear for her.

It has the worst horror soundtrack in years, plot holes that you could drive a truck through and some scraping-the-barrel splatter set pieces (death by blender anyone?) but still somehow manages to just about hold your attention and entertain for it’s running time. It just feels that with a bit more thought this could have aspired to something so much better.

In Elysian Fields.

I have almost nothing to say about Elysium. It came and it went and I’ve not thought about it much since, which is a shame because it has a visionary director, a strong cast, big money, superior effects and an interesting premise. So what went wrong? Well, it sets itself up as a film about class war and then does nothing with it. The rich will abandon us, the poor will get poorer, life will get cheaper. Yeah, and? The film doesn’t really know. It pats itself on the back for having pointed inequality out and then gets on with the business of showing people in robot suits hitting each other….because we haven’t had enough films like that recently. We’re supposed to care about Matt Damon’s character because he had a childhood sweetheart who now has a sick child, he’s a nice guy in the ghetto, a hard worker who talks back to robots. There’s a villain called Kruger who’s a kind of Terminator throwback. He has an impenetrable South African accent, almost as impenetrable as Jodie Foster’s performance. What film did she think she was making? She has the worst lines in the film, pushes buttons and walks down corridors in a power suit. She should be doing better work than this. Everything stays at a very simplistic level except the violence which is taken to excess and that in the end is the problem; too much reliance on brawn rather than brains.