2018

BUMBLEBEE

Cert PG 114mins Stars 3

The Hollywood machine has retooled the Transformers franchise for a sleeker, quicker and more enjoyable ride in this character driven prequel set in 1987.

With an impressively epic sci-fi opening on the planet, Cybertron, it soon changes into an Earth-bound goofy high school comedy version of E.T. the Extra-terrestrial, with some Herbie Goes Bananas-style shenanigans bolted on.

Pitch Perfect singing star Hailee Steinfeld finds the right gear as a teenage mechanic who befriends a shapeshifting Autobot she names Bumblebee, who acts like an eager to please puppy.

While she struggles with school and a part time job with a complicated home life, they must stop a pair of killer alien Decepticons intent on world domination. 

New director Travis Knight aims for a lighter tone but very little kids may be in danger of having their circuits blown by some of the heavy metal action.

However the sparky chemistry of Charlie and Bumblebee means the series has got its buzz back.

 

PAPILLON (2018)

Cert 15 130mins Stars 3

Geordie TV star, Charlie Hunnam, takes on one of the iconic roles of Hollywood legend, Steve McQueen in this effective period prison drama remake.

As a prisoner nicknamed Papillon, he sweats through the vicious regime of a remote island prison in French Guiana, before being sent to the notorious Devils’ Island.

He befriends a forger called Dega, and as good as he was as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek is no Dustin Hoffman.

This second adaptation of Henri Charriere’s famous 1969 autobiography is straightforward, sturdy and handsomely designed with impressive location work and always commits to the brutality of the story.

But it cleaves so closely to the earlier film without offering any new perspective on criminal justice, colonisation, racism or any other subject, I wonder why they bothered.

And Hunnam’s a piece of casting on a par with Carl ‘Apollo Creed’ Weathers, stepping into Oscar winner Sidney Poitier’s shoes in the 1986 remake of 1958 chain gang classic, The Defiant Ones.

THE GRINCH

Cert U 90mins Stars 3

Benedict Cumberbatch goes green in this colourful animated family adventure from the makers of the Despicable Me franchise.

It’s based on the 1957 children’s book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, by the genius author, Dr Seuss, and the Sherlock star voices The Grinch, a mountain dwelling creature who lives all alone except for his faithful pooch, Max.

Due to having a heart two sizes too small, the Grinch hates Christmas and plans to run it for the happy singing townsfolk of Who-ville, a village which looks like an electric rainbow of Swiss chalets.

Meanwhile a pigtailed poppet called Cindy Lou lives with her hard working single mum and twin baby brothers, and she intends to trap Santa Claus so she can ask him for a very personal Christmas wish.

Cindy Lou is voiced by Cameron Seely, best known as Hugh Jackman’s daughter in the smash hit musical, The Greatest Showman.

As The Narrator, singer Pharrell Williams has nearly as many lines as Cumberbatch, though sadly too many of them have been written especially for the film, while veteran actress Angela Lansbury can be heard in a minor role of as the voice of The Mayor of Who-ville.

Home to everyone’s favourite yellow idiots, the Minions, the Illumination Studio are the same company who produced the 2012 adaptation of Seuss’s masterpiece, The Lorax.

Although it captured Seuss’s unique illustrative style while souping it up with state-of-the-art animation, it included too little of his wonderful whimsical charm and the childish delights of his verse. And this is no different.

Giving the Grinch a hard-luck backstory helps the scriptwriters flesh out the slim source material to a full 90 minutes, and encourages us to sympathise with him.

Mind you, it’s more than possible not to have been raised in an orphanage and hate Christmas songs playing on the radio with the same passion The Grinch does.

Equally under-served is the velvet voiced Cumberbatch who struggles with a strangulated US accent while striving manfully with some of the weakest material of his career, and is often reduced to  just providing yips, yowls and yelps.

However there’s plenty of slapstick and sentiment among the cute animals and crazy contraptions, plus all the fur and clothes look reassuringly warm and cosy in the frozen landscape.

More appealing than Jim Carey’s laboured live-action adaption which appeared 18 years ago, little kids will enjoy this version for its zippy pace, bold colours and daft humour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE 12TH MAN

Cert 15 135mins Stars 3

It’s ice cold in Oslo in this second world war thriller based on an extraordinary real life mission which inspired a nation when all hope was gone.

With wartime moral at its lowest point and his country in despair at Nazi occupation, Norwegian patriot Jan Baalsrud was one of a dozen Scottish-trained saboteurs sent home on a mission to destroy military airfields and installations.

But when his colleagues are caught and his mission plans are intercepted, the injured Baalsrud makes a daring attempt for the heavily guarded border with Sweden, a neutral country.

Among the perils he faces are avalanches, fighter planes and frostbite, plus moments of gruesome horror as he endures some emergency do-it-yourself surgery which Arctic explorer Ranulph Fiennes would be impressed by.

Through his contact with the farmers, fishermen and midwives who help him, we see how Baalsrud’s epic journey raised morale, inspired those he met with his grim determination, and turned him into a folk hero for the fragile resistance movement.

Thomas Gullestad delivers an  impressively physical and convincingly anguished performance as Baalsrud, whose arduous cross country journey across the bleakly beautiful landscape of the Norwegian artic circle is reminiscent of Leonardo DiCaprio’s in 2015’s The Revenant.

In order to convey the importance of this marathon journey the filmmakers want us to experience every painful and punishing step of the muscle sapping way.

And as the unrelenting harshness of the Norwegian winter closes in, so do the merciless and brutal Nazis, in the form of Brit actor. Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Best known as Henry VIII from TV’s The Tudors, he plays a vindictive SS Officer for whom it is a matter of professional prestige and personal pride to apprehend the saboteur.

Although initially a bit of a slog the final leg is superbly staged and finger chewingly tense, leaving me with almost as few nails as our frost-bitten hero.

OVERLORD

Cert 18 110mins Stars 4

Zombie Nazi’s make a frontal assault on the senses and take the Second World War to a new level of hell in this full-blooded action horror.

With a knowingly uproarious tone, it’s a brain-splatting, gut-ripping blood-drenched thriller which isn’t for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.

British born actor, Jovan Adepo, is one of a team of paratroopers whose deadly mission behind enemy lines in France is to help enable the Allies’ 1944 D-Day landing goes to plan.

However the radio mast they must destroy is above a heavily-guarded church crypt, where Nazi scientists are attempting to create a breed of ‘thousand-year’ soldiers of super-human strength. 

Fortunately help comes from Mathilde Ollivier’s glamorous local who has the Germans hot under the collar and is burning for revenge.

Being produced by Star Trek’s J.J. Abrams gives this a big screen sweep and gloss, and though it’s arguably in bad taste, it’s also a great deal of over-the-top fun.

WIDOWS

Cert 15 129mins Stars 3

An Oscar winning director has reinvented a famous TV heist series and left me feeling robbed.

Lynda La Plante’s famous 1983 series saw a trio of widows deciding to pull a criminal raid for themselves after their gangster husbands are killed during a robbery.

Brit director Steve McQueen has transferred the story from white London to racially diverse Chicago, a city as crime ridden and corrupt as it was in the days of Al Capone.

And in crossing the Atlantic McQueen has used his art-house sensibility to turn it into a bleak and sombre slog, in a similar manner to his previous film, 12 Years A Slave.

This is far removed from the glossy fun of Sandra Bullock’s recent caper, Ocean’s 8. Even with plot twists from co-writer Gillian Flynn which are as preposterous as those in her 2014 hit film, Gone Girl, this lacks the necessary sense of gleeful mischief to carry them off.

There’s no faulting the performances of Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki and Michelle Rodriguez as the wives who are pushed towards criminality, and there’s serious strength of depth in the supporting cast which includes Colin Farrell, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall and Liam Neeson.

It all starts very promisingly with ten minutes of kisskiss bangbang, and there are some bravura scenes, such as a tense interrogation in a gym, and a wonderfully staged conversation in a car.

But there are too few scenes with this type of energy to sustain our interest, and it’s a long plod to the heist.

From Turner Prize-winning artist to Hollywood glory, McQueen has explored the issues of violence and emotional isolation, and this essay on the failures of the American Dream contains many cynical swipes at the dehumanising nature of capitalism. 

And as McQueen fails to resolve the tension between between following his artistic muse and finding a tone which suits the trashy source material, he unfailingly leans towards the former.

And McQueen is now so expert at making us experience the alienation of his characters, we unintentionally become detached from the drama, leaving us wallowing in the women’s considerable grief and despair.

 

MORTAL ENGINES

Cert 12A Stars 3

The latest blockbuster to rumble across the big screen from the makers of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is surprisingly clunky and run of the mill.

Adapted from a series of books by Brit author Philip Reeve it’s a steampunk sci-fi fantasy epic set 1000 years into the future on an apocalyptic Earth.

Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar plays a young orphan bent on revenging her mother’s death and becomes involved in a fiendish plot to unleash centuries old technology with the power to destroy the world.

Her target is Hugo Weaving’s duplicitous patrician, who’s geared to driving London to a brighter future.

Tremendously designed and rendered in faultless CGI throughout, it’s a world where Europeans inhabit cities resting on ginormous armoured vehicles which prey on smaller mechanical towns for scarce materials such as fuel and salt.

There are sea-travelling prison towns on crab-like legs, small scavenger villages and a floating hot air balloon metropolis, while in the Asiatic east a static settlement sits behind a huge wall, and is presented as a fortified Shangri-la.

However the inspired premise is crushed beneath the wheels of misfiring storytelling, which has clanking dialogue, comedy and romance which barely register and is bereft of a sense of time or distance.

London is a giant tank thundering across Europe, flattening opposition and scooping up resources for it’s over-privileged upper classes, but this abundant wealth of satirical possibilities is wasted.

Despite determined efforts by the actors to provide emotional fuel, they’re too often squandered as grist for the towering spectacle.

Plus Hilmar’s nominal central role is squeezed out of focus by a bevy of subplots and not particularly interesting characters.

The best of which are Stephen Lang’s undead cyborg, who takes the story into an agreeably dark place, but it’s all too quickly back-pedalled from in favour of more family friendly action scenes.

And despite some game playing by Irishman, Robert Sheehan, his lowly historian and wannabe aviator is required to bridge an awkward divide between romantic lead and comic support.

With it’s strong Antipodean accent in front and behind the camera, this too often feels like an enormously souped up riff on Mad Max, but one with a fraction of the dynamism.

 

 

SUSPIRIA (2018)

Cert 18 153mins Stars 2

This leaden-footed ballet-based supernatural horror is a not only a drab remake of 1970’s lavishly coloured classic original, but is also an unforgivably indulgent hour longer.

Fifty Shades star Dakota Johnson is impressively physical as Susie, who flees her restrictive Christian community in Ohio to join an austere dance academy in 1977’s Berlin, schooled by Brit actress, Tilda Swinton.

Meanwhile an ageing psychiatrist is searching for Chloe Grace Moretz’s disturbed missing dancer, who believed the ensemble is secretly a witches coven.

Earlier this year director Luca Guadagnino won a best screenplay Oscar for Call Me By Your Name, and but he won’t win any awards for this.

Self-importantly divided into seven chapters, the story links witchcraft and religion to corrupt and destructive political ideologies, but fails to develop or clarify its ideas.

A trio of striking dance sequences aside, Suspiria is a muddled and murky mess which will curdle your attention far more than it will your blood. 

DEAD IN A WEEK (OR YOUR MONEY BACK)

Cert 15 90mins Stars 3

There’s an unexpected gentleness to this charming and life-affirming British comedy thriller which finds death is very much a laughing matter.

Aneurin Barnard gives a thoughtful and deadpan performance as a depressed writer called William, who employs Tom Wilkinson’s avuncular assassin to kill him within the week.

The hitman himself has his own concerns and is resisting retirement, something he regards as a death sentence.

However when Freya Mavor’s attractive literary agent shows an interest in William’s work he rediscovers the will to live, but he has to run for his life in order to beat the deadline on his contract.

Former Dr Who Christopher Eccleston shows his gift for comedy as the foulmouthed head of the Assassin’s Guild, who has to ensure the small print is executed.

Debut director Tom Edmunds fills his script with wry observational humour and is emphatic on living for the day because after all, none of us are getting a refund.

ROBIN HOOD (2018)

Cert 12A 116mins Stars 1

This brain-numbingly awful re-imagining of my favourite legendary outlaw is a mythological medieval mess.

A shoddy riff on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, it sacrifices coherent fun for blundering action and a grab-bag of styles, and feels as if it’s been adapted from a Batman video game.

The plot at least is familiar with Robin returning to Nottingham from the Crusades to find his mansion destroyed and the peasants taxed to high heaven.

Whether Lord of Locksley or the outlaw known as ‘the Hood’, Taron Egerton’s geezerish Robin is smug and charmless as the Kingsman star fails to convince as either to the manor born, or an inspirational man of the people.

Meanwhile Eve Howson, the daughter of U2 singer, Bono,  plays Marion, and struggles with everyone to rise above the woeful script.

Unfathomably stupid and unforgivably dull, it’s an abomination worse than Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur, and as bad as 2015’s Assassin’s Creed, wildly misfiring and always off target.