I Love 'Lucy'.

Luc Besson takes his basic girl-with-guns template ('Nikita'/'The Fifth Element'/'Colombiana') and applies it to the same concept as 'Limitless'. What would happen if a smart drug could tap into the latent powers of the human mind? The answer is invincibility, car chases, killshots, rocket launchers, fast montages, big questions, evolution, spirituality, time travel,  some blah blah about the internet and glowing eyes. I loved it. 

You can tick off all the usual Besson tropes and obsessions quite quickly. There is a badass heroine, some emotional melodrama, eye popping visuals, operatic violence, humorous action sequences, a super stylised Paris backdrop and weird offbeat moments. His aesthetic derives from French comic books rather than cinematic history. It's slick  and commercial Hollywood material but done with a European sensibility. It's what he's been doing for decades now. His films aren't always good but they are never boring and 'Lucy' sees a return to form of sorts.

It's all utter nonsense of course but propelled so fast that you don't really care. It helps that Scarlett Johansen is a good actress. She convincingly transforms from airhead to superwoman and keeps you connected emotionally. When she cries, when she's scared it really packs a punch. For the most part she just has to strut down corridors looking focused; even so she still manages to communicate enough to let you know that she is aware of her own transcendence and both awed and confused by what she is becoming. Morgan Freeman is reliably Morgan Freeman in the Morgan Freeman-explains-everything to-thickos-in-the-audience role. 

As an action film it paints itself into a corner in the final act and plot wise has nowhere to go. Thematically, however it goes....everywhere.... and you should be smart enough to realise by this point that Besson has only been using the trappings of the action genre to get us thus far. What he really wants to do, it becomes apparent, is throw you into a spin with some sci-fi philosophising. It's loopy as hell; on a par with' The Transporter' suddenly doing a U-turn and becoming 'The Matrix'. This is Luc Besson making his '2001: A Space Odyssey' statement. The head scratching finale also has a great punchline that will have you working backwards to connect the dots in a satisfying fashion....or will just make you shrug your soldiers and think - "well, that was okay....but I didn't really get it".

It's as daft in its own way as 'Noah' but a lot less turgid to sit through. Go and see this particular girl with the kaleidoscope eyes.

'Lucy' in the sky with diamonds.

Indeed.

Demonic Possession Is Nine Tenths Of The Law.

I must not possess people, I must not possess people

William Friedkin's 'The Exorcist' famously begins with an eerie scene set in Iraq, where a statue of the demon Pazuzu is uncovered at an archaeological dig. You can imagine that any remake would capitalize on the location and open with a similar sequence set in Iraq during the Gulf Wars. 'Deliver Us From Evil' begins in exactly that fashion as a small squad of American soldiers inadvertently unleash something evil in the warzone. I think I might have just spotted some subtext there.

Back on the streets of Brooklyn, family man cop Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) and his partner have a talent for zooming in on the most violent and disturbing cases thanks in part to Sarchie's sixth sense, or "radar" intuition.

After a violent domestic dispute case in which Sarchie is attacked and marked we follow the duo to a call at the local zoo. A lunatic mother has thrown her baby into the lion's dead. I think I might have just spotted some subtext there too.

The following sequence in which the cops try to get a grip on the situation is really well done. The zoo at night puts you in mind of 'Cat People' and is laden with nightmarish, surreal imagery. The power is out, the animals are going crazy and there's a real sense of dread pervading this sequence.

The mother  of the child is taken into custody. Everyone assumes she is a junky. She constantly repeats Jim Morrison lyrics so maybe the squares were right all along - the music of 'The Doors' really is the devil's music. The only person who believes that possession is at the root of this is an unorthodox hispanic priest.

Events lead to the cops trying to track down a trio of dishonourably discharged marines as supernatural events escalate around them and conspire to entrap them.

So far so good, but just as you are thinking how refreshing it is to see a devilish horror film that isn't about an attack on the family unit with a few crowd pleasing boo/jump scares thrown in, it becomes exactly that. The emphasis shifts from the carefully cultivated and interesting police procedural-meets-occult horror vibe that it had going and instead goes for the usual tropes. Here's the sudden appearance of a hooded stranger in the family home, here's the scary looking toy that moves of it's own accord, here's the piano that plays itself. It becomes an 'Insidious' clone instead of a 'Seven' clone. But I guess that's what the punters want these days.

I mean, why would you have this owl toy in your home? Why?

To be fair, by this point I was so involved with the characters that I was happy to ride with it and the film did continue to deliver some good stuff - it's just that I liked the cop partnership banter a whole lot more than the family stuff.

Bana is very good at creating a fully rounded tough guy character and I thought the supporting cast were great too. Joel McHale is excellent as Sarchie's cop partner and I wish there had been more scenes with them together. I liked Edgar Ramirez's priest and Sean Harris delivers another typically intense performance that is great to watch.

I played Ian Curtis once.

There's a good number of scares throughout, a surprising amount of gore and a dark, serious tone to it all, even during the most outlandish parts.  Overall I enjoyed it a lot and I'm not a big fan of exorcism/possession style movies.

If anything lets it down, it is the ending. The final confrontation is fine but there's a real anti-climatic epilogue that serves only to underline the fact that "this is based on a true story" and wrap everything up in an unconvincing moral absolute. Renounce Satan and all your problems will be solved is the message of the film. Very comforting I'm sure but it removes culpability rom the actual horrors we've seen in the film: post-traumatic stress disorders, domestic abuse, infanticide, mental disorders etc. and doesn't convince me that this is all the devil's own work.

Still, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would and a hell of a lot more than any number of family-moves-into-house-and-weird-stuff- happens movies.

As Jim Morrison once said, "People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all"

But then he also said "the blue bus is calling us". So go figure.

Shall we take a trip? The Congress.

'The Congress'. What a nothing sort of title that is.  What a nothing sort of poster. Both are instantly forgettable, void of anything denoting genre or content. It's such a shame, because this is a little gem of a film that everyone should be talking about.

Maybe they should have called it 'Trip Your Tits Off' as it is a difficult film to describe without coming across like a stoner. I'm going to dig deep into my big bag of movie review cliches and pull out the two biggest things I can find.

"You should see it on the big screen whilst you can." You should, you really should. Not so much because the visuals are overwhelming (which they are) but because if you see this on a small screen, or a laptop or a phone or whatever you use these days you'll feel compelled to fidget. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's boring - it isn't, but you just need to...you know...watch it. No distraction, no escape, just let it slowly seduce you and work its hypnotic power.

"You're best seeing it without knowing anything about it." I went to a matinee performance without any preconceptions . I was just interested because it was labeled as sci-fi, which it is, i in the same way as 'Solaris' is sci-fi - it's not robots, or superheroes or talking raccoons - it's philosophy...man. I was blown away by it. It's not an easy watch, it will make you use your brain and you will need a short period of reflection afterwards to process it all. You know, like proper ideas, like proper cinema.

Amazing, beautiful, intelligent actress Robin Wright plays an amazing, beautiful, intelligent actress called Robin Wright who may or not be a bit like Robin Wright. You still with me? Good. So far so meta. Robin Wright is the wrong side of forty and picky about the roles she chooses. In a system where female A-listers have a window of about 4-5 years that makes her just about obsolete. But she is an icon. Fortunately for the movie studios, technology has now reached the point where actors can be rendered convincingly on screen using computer models. 'Robin Wright' can now be digitally preserved as a perfect, flawless marketable brand to be animated in the movies forever. Her every emotion and action can be crafted by the CGI back-room boys.

Although reluctant, she makes her Faustian pact with the corporate devil and commodifies herself in order to give her son, who has a rare mental disorder, the very best medical care. Normally, I'd balk at this as an obvious plot contrivance designed to appeal to the emotions and push things forward but it is a little bit different here. Her son sees and hears the world differently to everyone else, which fits in with the major themes of the film, so it gets a pass.

The price of the contract is that Robin cannot ever act or perform anywhere again, ever.

Jump forward twenty years.

Robin returns to the studios and then something both wonderful and awful happens.

She becomes a cartoon character

in a cartoon playground

                                                                                   a psychedelic fantasyland

part Yellow Submarine

part Tex Avery

part Studio Ghibli

The studio, Miramount, is now the exclusive maker of dreams, controlling all emotions and desires through the use of mind altering hallucinogens. Anyone can be who they want to be and so there is an endless array of avatars derived from shared memories and pop culture reference points. What do these people do? They hang around in a virtual world watching each other in an endless feedback loop. They literally animate the world around them. It's a Second Life / twitter existence taken to the logical extreme. 

Worse still, for Robin, is the fact that the studio has betrayed her. Whilst she has remained a superstar and is still forever young on the screen, her likeness is used in exactly the kind of crap she despises: adolescent sci-fi fantasies. She has become 'Rebel Robot Robin', a super-heroine battling robots in films that exist only to regurgitate tropes from earlier classics. Imagine if Cate Blanchett were doomed to appear in Zack Snyder movies until the end of time.

It gets even worse. Her 'Robin' essence can now be distilled into a chemical formula that be consumed as readily as a milk shake. Effectively you can now drink your favourite celebrity and use them for whatever purpose you can imagine.

It's one total mindfuck of a set up and builds up to the inevitable choice that Robin will have to make. Will she succumb to the immersive fantasy or kick against it? Will she choose the blue pill or the red pill?

It's one hell of a trippy ride which I suspect will be met with indifference and then emerge in ten years time as a cult classic. Go see it now if you can. It's a visual and mental feast and a bang on the money satire. 

Go and see it because one of the ideas that it postulates is that the death of cinema is the beginning of the end of everything. You don't want that. You don't want to immerse yourself in a cinema that just spoon-feeds you superhero fantasy crap for the rest of your days. You don't want to exist in a world where social media and celebrity are the only things that matter.

Do you?

The Waistline Expandables 3.

Stallone

Statham

Schwarzenegger

A Woman

Ford

Gibson

Li

Snipes

Banderas

Lundgren

Some Other Guys

Stuff happens, big buildings explode, people die and nobody on the team is ever truly expendable. It's business as normal for the third in the franchise that's never really bad, never good - just sort of there - doing what it does in a vaguely satisfying fashion. The action scenes are competent, not thrilling. The dialogue ho-hum but not witty and everyone goes through the motions to varying degrees depending on their fee and screen time.

There's more of Stallone in this one, which is a problem considering he ceased to be intelligible ten years ago. He plays a guy who gets all emotional at photos of the villain's war crimes and then machine guns down an entire Baltic state to get at him.

The 'old' old guys make way for a new team that wouldn't even pass the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D entrance exam. There's a computer hacker one and an extreme sports one and a lady who punches people whilst wearing high heels and probably another one I've forgotten. You're just left shrugging your shoulders about why you should care. Inevitably they fuck up and the old dependable Expendables have to step in. That's pretty much it for plot. Just a series of rescues - with an overlong 'recruiting a new team' bit in the middle.

The new 'big name' has-beens are (mostly) welcome additions. Mel Gibson makes a good bad guy but the final showdown with Stallone is a damp squib. Wesley Snipes plays it lunatic and gets away with it. Harrison Ford reportedly once said to George Lucas - "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it!" but the thing is - Ford can deliver the most terrible of lines with conviction and he does a splendid job here. He seems to be having more fun than anyone else, but boy, does he look old - not a promising sign for the next 'Star War's movie. Speaking of 'Star Wars', Antonio Banderas is this team's very own Jar Jar Binks - camp, wearying and unwelcome.

Famous hard man, straight-to-video, '80s action flick star Kelsey Grammer is in it too.

There's some okay stunts but also some appalling CGI and rear projection. For a mega budget movie it all looks quite drab with dull locations and flat cinematography. It's violent, but always that safe, family friendly '12A' violence that makes everything look mediocre. The over-emphasis on the newer, younger team is galling and you can't help the feeling that the franchise is abandoning it's unique selling point - old stars doing what they used to do one last time - in order to get the kids interested. That said, all of the films in the series have felt a little bit rushed, a bit undercooked and bit underwhelming. This one is no better and no worse than any of the others. It's no 'Wild Geese', it's no "Wild Geese 2'  -  more like an unenthusiastic turkey

.

Press The Eject And Give Me The Tape. Guardians Of The Galaxy.

To paraphrase Freddy Mercury: 'Godzilla' was never my scene and I don't like 'Guardians Of The Galaxy'.

I didn't dislike it. I thought it was entertaining and I did laugh out loud a few times but I just wasn't blown away by it.

Maybe my expectations were set impossibly high. Try finding a bad review of this online and you'll struggle. Ditto finding someone who doesn't tell you that  "it's awesome!". It currently has the same imdb rating as 'Star Wars' ffs. Marvel can't seem to put a foot wrong with their movies. The trailers promised something special. I went in expecting to love it but left feeling that it was....only so-so. Really 2014, is this the best you have to offer? I did enjoy it....but...here I am a day later and I'm just not bothered by it at all. Not even for review purposes.

Maybe it's just indicative of how accepting audiences are of anything so long as it has a peppering of one liners, a hip soundtrack of forgotten 70s pop, a reliance on CGI battles, irreverent talking animals and lashings of pop culture references. The more I think about it, the more I realise that 'Guardians Of The Galaxy is like the inevitable bastard spawn of Lucasfilm, Disney and Tarantino; the only logical endgame for contemporary cinema.

So, why was I so underwhelmed by it when others are so impressed? I thought it was 'Firefly'/'Serenity'-lite for one thing. It does feel strangely like a TV show for such a mega budget movie. A bit "Farscape: The Movie". For every well rendered CG landscape there's a laughably spray-painted alien character. Does Michael Rooker in blue body paint look truly alien? Does Zoe Saldana painted green really evoke the mystery of far off worlds. No.

Blue One

Green One

 Orange One

Maybe it's that I'm not familiar with the source material. This part of the Marvel canon means nothing to me. It reminds me when Marvel started doing their own Star Wars stories and included six foot tall, green talking rabbits into the mix. 'Guardians of the Galaxy' seems to exist in that universe to me. It's best avoided.

Maybe it's Marvel's insistence on interweaving every aspect of their franchises together through big, lumbering, planet destroying Uber-Villains. They're all the bloody same these guys: pompous, big, po-faced titans sitting on thrones. They have portentous names like Thanos and Ronan. They always sound like brand names for laxatives. I don't care about the orb of blah blah that will open a blah blah to destroy some blah blah somewhere and release a power that mortals won't be able to resist. I don't care how cleverly it ties Marvel strands together. Just. Tell. Me. A .Fucking. Good. Story.

The best sequence in the film for me was the prison break. We had the characters working together as a team, we knew what the goals were and what the stakes were and it was all done with wit and vigour. After that it quickly becomes a repetitive cycle of fights and chases and battles where you're not really sure what's going on or what anyone is trying to achieve. Or I just lost interest. 

It even throws away it's best sci-fi idea - a space port built in the decapitated head of a celestial being - by doing nothing with it visually. Overall there is nothing that surprising in the film. For me, it seemed to lack awe, invention and an aesthetic of it's own. It's clearly a Frankenstein monster created from the parts of other successful franchises. I was expecting that, but I was expecting something more too, something like 'Serenity' which gave me a rush akin to seeing 'Star Wars' for the first time. Instead I got 'Battle Beyond The Stars'; an obvious, fun, enjoyable pastiche - but not wholly satisfying and certainly not deserving of being praised to high heaven.

It has some great comedic moments, but nothing like as many as I had been led to believe. I've said it before but witty one liners are not the same as dialogue and after a while that particular style of American humour just irks me.

The characters are little more than marketable action figures. 

Cocky, laid back, loveable rogue for a captain. Han Solo via Jack Burton. Check.

Token girl. Green skinned alien. Good at fighting. Check.

Insolent rodent with a big gun and attitude. Check.

A talking tree fulfilling the Chewbacca role. Check.

A professional wrestler turned actor. Check

"Hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker!"

On the plus side I thought it was just goofy enough for me to give it a pass. I liked all the dancing stuff. There should be more dancing in big budget blockbuster movies. There should be more dancing in general.

Overall 'Guardians Of The Galaxy' just wasn't for me. I've no interest in seeing it again. I'm not particularly interested in seeing a sequel, or a prequel or the "lets get all the Marvel characters together in one film" clusterfuck that is surely inevitable in ten years time.  I wouldn't say to you - don't bother. You'll probably enjoy it.  I'm sure the problem is me and I'll get my coat now as the internet turns its wrath upon me.

What I can tell you is that the obligatory post credits scene is worth sitting around for (and not just for the spectacle of grown adults being glared at by the cleaning staff) - it's a good one....and isn't that ultimately how you're supposed to rate the worth of a film in 2014 - as if judging a three course meal on the strength of the after dinner mint.