action adventure

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: VOL 2

Cert 12A 135mins Stars 4

Brace yourself for cinematic hyper-speed as Marvel’s bickering band of galactic outlaws return in another loony tunes outer-space adventure.

Once again the inadvertent heroes have to save the universe, this time from a celestial being who wants to recreate  all life in his own image. 

The Guardian’s first adventure in 2014 was a £600 million box office supernova, and this one is bigger, brighter and funnier.

Although it is set in the same universe as Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk and the rest of Marvel’s team, there are only fleeting references to it. This gives it a stronger identity than most of their comic book adaptations.

Chris Pratt is the nominal star but is comprehensively outshone by pretty much all of the crowded cast.

He plays the super cocky half human halfwit Star-Lord, the leader of the pack. Sharing considerable screen time with the charismatic Kurt Russell, Pratt wilts in the heat of the veteran’s screen presence.

But even the scene stealing Russell can’t compete with the Baby Groot, an adorably cute animated stick creature, voiced by Vin Diesel. 

The laid back freewheeling groove disguises a remarkably smooth and accomplished ride, of dazzling sophisticated design, and an eye bending sense of scale.

Space battles riff on 1970’s Atari video games and are set to another soundtrack of 1970’s pop hits. It’s a trippy experience in 3D.

With a multi-coloured cast engaged in cartoon action and a laboured emphasis on friendship and family, The Guardians are clearly racing with the Fast and Furious franchise juggernaut to be box office champ. 

Fully clothed, covered in paint and half robotic, Karen Gillan and Zoe Saldana prove to its competitor, films don’t have to rely on upskirt shots to be sexy. 

Almost needy in it’s desire to entertain, this is a rocket-fuelled psychedelic roller coaster of cosmic fun.

FAST AND FURIOUS 8

Cert 12A 136mins Stars 3

Get your motor running for the long haul, as the formula one of petrol powered action becomes an endurance rally.

Now on it’s eighth lap since 2001 and with no destination in sight, it’s another rigidly marshalled parade of stage managed thrills. As its familiar faces are manoeuvred around a global circuit of locations, they deliver the expected lame banter and homilies on family and respect.

Vin Diesel is back in the driving seat as former criminal and professional street racer, Dominic Toretto. While enjoying his honeymoon, he’s blackmailed into betraying his crew and stealing a weapon of mass destruction.

As a cyber-terrorist and criminal mastermind called Cipher, Charlize Theron comes equipped with a god complex, a plan worthy of a James Bond villain, and a fired up nuclear sub.

Helen Mirren pops by with a weapons grade cockney accent, and Kurt Russell offers more fun than many of the regulars.

Bald buddies Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham are hot on Dom’s trail, leading Dom’s abandoned friends and family. These minor characters have too little to contribute, and act as a brake when the action needs to accelerate.

As the motorised mayhem moves from the heat of Cuba to the arctic ice of Russia, it’s kept on the road by its hardworking pit team of stunt people, mechanics and CGI wizards.

Fast 8 will have to burn rubber to overtake the turbo charged success previous movie. Furious Seven raced to a colossal £1.2 billion at the box office in 2015.

However it lost the race to be champ that year, coming home behind Jurassic World and Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens. With Beauty and the Beast already breaking records, I doubt this film will feature in this year’s top three.

Nevertheless, this pileup of preposterous pandemonium provides robust mechanical fun for its large family of fans.

POWER RANGERS (2017)

Cert 12A 123mins Stars

It’s mighty morphin’ time as the rainbow coalition of colour coded superheroes spring into action. This big budget reboot of the TV show is good surprisingly fun, in its empty headed way.

Five ordinary teens are rescued from high school detention hell when they are chosen by an ancient alien being to save the Earth.

A young attractive cast bring an earnest enthusiasm and commit themselves with a goofball energy. Their bonding sessions reference the 1980’s classic, The Breakfast Club, but with smartphones and a higher moral purpose.

They’re given special powers to battle a 65-million-year-old alien invader who is trying to steal the source of their powers. Rita Repulsa is looking good for her age, and is played by Elizabeth Banks with a gold swallowing demented glee.

Decent CGI bring to life robot dinosaurs and an army of rock monsters for a town-smashing finale. My 6 year old will probably love it.

SEOUL STATION

Cert 15 Stars 4

Fast track yourself to the South Korean capital for this bloodthirsty zombie thriller. It’s an animated spin-off of the ferocious live action and must-be-seen Train To Busan.

As a father searches desperately for his daughter while fellow citizens are devoured by the undead, there’s no shortage of surprises, grit or gore.

Featuring homelessness and prostitution, it’s a far from glowing portrait of modern Korea. However the commitment to scathing and subversive social commentary never side lines the delivery of first class thrills.

With strong language and adult themes, this cartoon is not for the kids.

 

KONG: SKULL ISLAND

Cert 12A 118mins Stars 2

British heartthrob Tom Hiddleston, has a passionless encounter with Hollywood’s biggest swinger, in this fruitless jungle romp.

The high profile star with great hair and glad eye for the ladies has been rampaging through cinema for eighty years. King Kong, that is, not the posh Brit actor from TV’s The Night Manager.

It’s 1973. Hiddleston plays a former RAF officer hired for his tracking skills. Alongside scientists and Vietnam war-hardened soldiers, Captain Conrad flies off to the mysterious Skull Island.

When Kong attacks their helicopters, the few survivors have a two day trek across the island to the rescue rendezvous. They must fight a series of giant critters on the way. As there’s only one of each species, the island feels strangely underpopulated.

The local tribe of transcendental woodworking communists are a photogenic afterthought.

A portable – if unfathomably durable – record player, survives. This enables the director to squeeze in far too many of his favourite songs from the era.

It’s beautifully photographed, the locations are epic, the creature design spot on and the cast features stalwarts of the calibre of Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman. But the script is terrible.

John C. Reilly appears as a US airman, stuck on the island since 1944. His larky performance succeeds in bringing the humour, which elsewhere is absent or fails to work.

Gorgeous sunsets are everywhere, ape-ing the high maintenance vacuity of an aftershave advert. When Conrad shares an almost romantic moment with Brie Larson’s war photographer, it’s in front of a glorious aurora. This doesn’t begin to compensate for their absolute lack of chemistry.

Wafer-thin characterisation is the norm, and not just of the humans. The filmmakers have little interest in their biggest star.

Never has any version of Kong lacked such personality. Going full frontal demonstrates how the once proud King of the jungle has been neutered. And he’s just like this beautiful but sexless film, all fur coat and no bollocks.

 

 

 

MILE 22

Cert 18 94mins Stars 4

Mark Wahlberg is at his single-minded best in this blistering and bone-snapping action thriller.

As a top CIA agent in it’s most secretive branch, his task force must convey an ‘asset’ 22 miles through a hostile city in Southeast Asia to a remote airstrip where a transport plane will hopefully pick them up.

Indonesian stuntman turned actor, Iko Uwais, plays  the ‘asset’, and the straight-forward narrative allows him to deploy the ferocious combat skills demonstrated in 2011’s The Raid, which made him a star.

And with Asia once more a proxy battlefield between the US and Russia, the script plugs straight into historic and contemporary political concerns.

This is the fourth collaboration between Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, and it is every bit as flag-wavingly entertaining as their previous films, such as 2013’s Lone Survivor.

Perfectly tailored to Wahlberg’s spiky tough guy screen persona, it’s as intense as the astonishing exercise regime he recently revealed to the world.

GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS

Cert 12A 131mins Stars 2

This super-sized creature feature with a pea for a brain stomps into cinemas intent on ruling the box office by squashing the audience into submission.

A sequel to 2014’s visually gorgeous but dramatically sterile Hollywood reboot of Japan’s most iconic export, this is a screaming CGI assault on storytelling as well the senses.

As giant reptiles threaten all human life, it’s up to Godzilla to restore order and balance to the planet, aided by a plucky band of scientists and soldiers armed with nothing but heavily armed hi-tech bunkers, battleships and fighter jets.

Neither Aaron Taylor-Johnson or Elizabeth Olsen return so humanity’s survival rests on the ability of ‘B’ list middle-aged leading man Kyle Chandler to deliver pitifully poor dialogue with the maximum dignity a fine actor can muster knowing his agent has sold him a ginormous pup.

As Dr. Mark Russell, he’s determined to rescue his teenage daughter Millie Bobby Brown, and ex-wife Vera Farmiga, from a host of ancient monsters who are battling for supremacy.

Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe reprise their roles as anxious and awe-filled scientists who stand around and throw scraps of info to the audience.

While this delivers on its promise of epic monster action, this is an adventure which manages to make a staggering dull spectacle of someone scrabbling through an ancient lost city being consumed by lava to defibrillate a giant monster with a nuclear warhead.

Plus the script suggests we live in a world where massively powerful secretive global corporations are a force for good, while eco warriors are evil, and nuclear weapons have health giving properties.

Any film with the smallest degree of self-awareness or irony could have a lot of fun with these topsy turvy concepts, but not this one.

While the beasts have every excuse to be lumbering, incoherent and boring, this expensively assembled wannabe blockbuster has none whatsoever.

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 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.