Thriller

No Time To Die

Daniel Craig’s much delayed swan song as the world’s most famous spy concludes in spectacular style, proving once again that when it comes to being James Bond, nobody does it better.

Bond has always tailored himself in the cultural clothing of the time and now he’s refit for the #MeToo era, and his latest mission sees him not only saving the world but also being held to account for his litany of misogyny going back to the first Bond film, 1962’s Dr. No.

And the most powerful asset of this globetrotting action thriller is Craig’s willingness to the essay 007’s psychological pain, a bravura performance from a script which leans purposely on aspects of Greek tragedy.

Classical allusions include a scientific project called Herakles, a henchman nicknamed Cyclops, and Ralph Fiennes’ ‘M’ suffering an enormous bout of hubris. Meanwhile the traditional pre-title sequence plays as a prologue setting out the key characters as well as the more standard 007 action set-piece. And later we’re treated to a 21st century spin on a gouging of the eyes.

These elements are no cheap grab for cultural gravitas, but are embedded in the script’s DNA. Nor are allusions to myth and legend new to Bond, feel free to read about Skyfall placing Bond on a pedestal next to King Arthur, here.

Bond suffers emotional and physical punishment which leaves him bruised, bloodied and bereft. And the closer Bond gets to happiness the more his suffering and the dramatic stakes increase. It’s a dilemma which illuminates the dark heart of Bond.

Since Judi Dench’s ‘M’ called Pierce Brosnan’s Bond ‘a misogynist dinosaur’ in 1995’s Goldeneye, the franchise filmmakers have grappled with the sexism of Bond the man, and the franchise. However No Time To Die sees a reset of values, and Bond is made to suffer a series of humblings at the hands of a pair of high-achieving younger female agents.

British star Lashana Lynch and Cuban-Spanish actress Ana de Armas excel as play agents of MI6 and the CIA respectively, they’re equally as ruthless and skilled as Bond, and each essay a very different brand of humour. Plus the former answers the question, could we have a non-white and/or female 007, with a resounding yes.

This is all welcome but I wasn’t expecting for Bond to apologise and then attempt to atone for a lifetime of sexist behaviour. This would be a jaw-dropping move in any popcorn blockbuster, never mind the 007 franchise. Don’t assume this means Bond has gone ‘soft’. When the need arises he remains an absolute cold-blooded assassin.

With Rami Malek’s terrorist mastermind called Lyutsifer Safin plotting biological warfare, this leads to a not-so-subtle allusion to the dangers of Bond’s life of promiscuity. This is a long way from 1987’s The Living Daylights which arrived in during the AIDS epidemic, where the response of Timothy Dalton’s Bond was to keep the number of his sexual partners below three.

Having Bond confront the effect of his long-standing toxic relationship with women is presumably intended to wipe clean Bond’s ledger, a necessary step in the characters reinvention if he wants to successfully navigate the changing cultural landscape.

Billie Eilish’s haunting Grammy-winning title song sets the tone for this emotional smackdown, and the pre-title sequence offers a nod to Dr. No, before updating the long-since retired silhouettes of dancing naked women, with images of a fallen Britannia.

Craig carries us through this process with an extraordinary feat of acting, unlike anything we’ve seen in this franchise before. Having once rashly promised to ‘slash my wrists’ rather than play Bond again, the actor seems energised by the prospect of putting Bond to bed.

He strains every considerable muscle to deliver a performance which is not only hugely physically demanding for a man of our age, but dramatically impressive, wryly funny, and profoundly emotional. Craig gives it all he’s got left in the tank, and absolutely smashes it among the enormous explosions, high-speed chases and ferocious fights.

The car chases have a tremendous bone-shaking authenticity, and the four – spot them – different variations of Bond’s Aston Martin car, will have petrolheads purring with avaricious delight. Plus we have a return to the gadgets that Ben Whishaw’s ‘Q’ once dismissed.

Shot through with all the gun-toting glamour you’d expect, we see 007 gunning for Safin who operates from a secret lair worthy of the great Bond villains. Frankly we’ve been long overdue a proper Bond villain threatening death to millions of people, and the return to world-saving stakes are something of a relief.

Craig was cast as 007 in response to the Jason Bourne series. And having seen off that box office threat, the producers have turned their attention to Bond’s current box office adversaries, Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible movies.

Similar to Cruise’s agent Hunt, Bond is now the leader of a diverse if undeniably posh and British team, with Naomie Harris, Whishaw, and Fiennes reprising their roles as Moneypenny, ‘Q’ and ‘M’, and they provide plenty of humour as Bond’s surrogate family.

Legacy and family are the key themes of this mission, not least with the return of Christoph Waltz as 007’s foster brother and arch-enemy, Blofeld.

Boy, this film does not disappoint. At an extravagant 163 minutes it’s the longest Bond film yet, and uses it’s running time to bring Craig’s five film 007 tenure to a satisfying climax, and comes extremely close to allowing him to depart on an all time high.

The end credits conclude withe familiar promise James Bond will return, and with Craig leaving the series in the rudest of health I can’t wait to see the face of the future.

Nemo’s Fury

BURDEN

Cert 15 Stars 3

Racism, rednecks and repentance are the key ingredients in this earnest drama based on a true story from South Carolina in 1996.

Garrett Hedlund is unrecognisable from his biggest role in sci-fi action Tron: Legacy, and stars as violent bigot Mike Burden who falls for Judy, an impoverished single mother, who awakens in him a desire for a better life away from the Klan.

This is much to the disgust of his mentor at the local  Ku Klux Klan, who’s played with avuncular intimidation by Brit actor Tom Wilkinson.

Geordie actress Andrea Riseborough is a magnetic presence full of integrity and conviction as Judy, easily overshadowing her scowling, mumbling co-star.

One time Oscar winner Forest Whitaker brings dignified conviction to his impassioned and softly spoken role as Reverend David Kennedy who preaches peaceful protest as he attempts to save a sinner.

Although there’s no shying away from hatred and brutality, and scenes of assault are necessarily upsetting, as a drama Burden treads a well worn path, is a tad over-sentimental and doesn’t reach the Oscar-worthy levels of redemption it aims for.

BLACK WATER: ABYSS

Cert 15 Stars 4

Cinemas reopen with a big bite of adventure as a killer crocodile goes on the rampage in this brisk, tense and claustrophobic action thriller which delivers a torrent of terror and no-nonsense popcorn thrills.

Featuring everything I find most terrifying in nature such as small spaces, deep water, hungry predators and angry Australian women, it sees five attractive young holiday-makers explore a remote cavern under the wild forests of Northern Australia.

But a tropical storm cause the cave system to flood and traps them beside a subterranean lake with a rising water level, and they realise they must play chicken with a croc if they want to survive.

Four of the cast have served time on Aussie TV in either Neighbours and Home and Away, and top billed Jessica McNamee featured in Jason Statham’s giant shark thriller, The Meg, and as well as experience of underwater on screen peril she brings a fierce determination.

All of the actors put in a shift forced to spend most of the time in the dark, wet and cold, and dealing with a pregnancy subplot which is pure soap opera, and that’s ok as this is a movie where the fun is all about guessing who gets eaten next.

‘Don’t splash’ is about the best of their limited survival knowledge, and they kindly make jokes about Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee, so I don’t have to.

Director Andrew Traucki was responsible for 2007’s Black Water which also featured a vicious croc, and also 2010’s killer shark flick The Reef, so he’s definitely on solid ground when filming in the water.

Making a virtue of his lean concept Traucki keeps up a decent rate of knots and sensibly keeps the croc at a menacing distance or up close and very personal, and this is a good fit with last year’s croc shocker Crawl, or 2016 shark thriller, The Shallows.

With preview screenings tomorrow {Saturday} it’s on release from next Friday.

INHERITANCE

Cert 15 Stars 3

Simon Pegg and Lily Collins star in this enjoyably preposterous US thriller which sees Collins play Lauren, a principled New York attorney who’s horrified to discover a prisoner in an underground bunker on her family’s estate.

Played with a wounded, grubby and gleeful menace by Pegg, the captive seems to know all about Lauren’s recently deceased father and offers to trade the truth for a juicy steak, some chocolate and a cigarette.

Lauren can’t call the police as a scandal would ruin her highflying career and that of her smoothly amoral congressman brother who’s running for re-election.

The pair’s exchanges deliberately echo scenes in 1991 cannibal horror Silence of the Lambs, and though the pair are decent neither are a patch on the Oscar winning stars of that classic. Anthony Hopkins in particular would have Pegg for breakfast.

Mind you as he whispers and growls in an American accent, Pegg’s presence lifts the quality of the film which suffers a noticeable dip in energy and interest whenever he’s absent. I haven’t enjoyed a performance of Pegg’s this much for years.

THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET

Cert 15 Stars 3

There’s a calm chilly elegance to this diverting German language psychological thriller which sees director Marie Kreutzer give us two Hitchcock blondes for the price of one, and asks questions as to the nature of obsessive behaviour, the definition of madness and the possibility of total honesty in relationships.

Valerie Pachner and Mavie Horbiger star as Lola and Elise, near identical icily glamorous corporate executives and lovers, whose relationship is threatened when the erratic behaviour of Lola’s sister becomes increasingly wild and begins to affect Lola’s carefully controlled life, causes her to doubt her own sanity.

ENEMY LINES

Cert 15 Stars 3

Opening titles of real war footage set a chilly and sombre tone to this respectful and effective Second World War action adventure is a by-the-numbers boys’ own adventure lifted by its great locations and a hard working cast.

John Hannah keeps a stiff upper lip as the British Army liaison officer back in Blighty as English actor Ed Westwick stars as a square-jawed US Major leading a team of British commandos to extract an important scientist from the hands of the Germans in Nazi-occupied Poland of 1943.

Of course plans go awry, radios don’t work, they can’t identify which locals are collaborators, and the Russian army who are much more used to fighting in the bleak snow covered landscape, are also the same target.

There’s plenty of courage and sacrifice among the many shoot-outs, and the fierce and the excitingly staged three-way battle of foreign troops on Polish soil to determine ownership of Polish resources, can be read as a scathing view of the war.

THE ASSISTANT

Cert 15 Stars 4

A claustrophobic and chilling exploration of workplace exploitation, this small scale precision-crafted drama moves through a murk of whispers, collusion and paranoia to explain how the sexual abuse which resulted in the #MeToo campaign was able to continue for so long.

Jane is a hard working office admin assistant tasked with organising hotels and flights for a Hollywood mogul, and begins to suspect a new young female employee who is a very attractive but utterly unqualified is being sexually abused.

But Jane soon finds herself caught between the career price to be paid for whistleblowing, and the personal price for keeping quiet.

Julia Garner is best known as the combative and foul mouthed curly haired casino manager in the Netflix series Ozark, but is radically more unassuming, fragile and sweet as Jane.

And fresh from his brilliant performance as the ‘Coughing Major’ on TV’s dramatisation, Quiz, Brit actor Matthew Macfadyen is quietly and horribly manipulative as her complicit office manager.

THE HUNT

Stars 4

Fans of Scandinavian drama will enjoy this absorbing and darkly disturbing tale of mass paranoia set in a small Danish village.

It centres on the members of a close knit hunting party when Mads Mikkelsen’s primary school teacher, Lucas, is accused of indecent behaviour towards the child of another.

Investigation is followed by arrest and the loss of his job but as Lucas awaits formal charges, the village turns against him and a campaign of violence begins.

Lucas’s sense of isolation is heightened by the haunting winter landscapes and the semi-rural environment where everyone regularly carries knives and rifles.

Mikkelsen is on award winning form leading a uniformly excellent cast that includes Alexandra Rapaport and Thomas Bo Larsen.

The taut and paranoid atmosphere is punctuated only by the black humour of Lucas’s brother in law, who is not afraid making callous jokes in the face of extreme adversity at Lucas’s expense.

Slow and quietly gripping tension is firmly built and when violence erupts it’s with a powerful and shocking fury.

END OF WATCH

Stars 3

The writer of the Oscar winning smash hit Training Day, returns with another gritty police thriller set in South Central LA, but with a Denzel Washington-shaped hole where the charisma should be.

Writer and director David Ayer, shot entirely on location in fidgety, semi-documentary, police-cam video style, creating a loud and tense gun and drug movie where the highest ambition police officers have is to survive their shift and have their timesheet signed off, End Of Watch.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Mike Zavala Michael Pena are patrol car partners who come across a safe house belonging to a Mexican cartel who immediately put a price on their heads for disrupting their lucrative drugs trade.

The cops aren’t the brightest guns on the street but they are mostly honest and unquestioningly brave. Patrolling is a series of verbal abuse, brutal fist fights and vicious gun battles, and even the music is aggressive.

Off duty, Anna Kendrick and Natalie Martinez provide strong acting support as their wives, with America Ferrera and Frank Grillo as their fellow officers.

Watching this film is like being trapped for two hours in a small steel cage with a pair of uniformed, squabbling, slurping, chattering caffeinated kids, before being released on a regular basis to be shot at by angry Uzi abusing gangsters.

Ayer doesn’t wholly commit to his handheld format which reduces its authenticity, and the last two scenes are unnecessary and lessen the films impact.

Despite this the two officers hold your sympathy and attention because although they’re not as interesting or entertaining as the film believes they are, even the most basic police work involves being screamed and shot at.

Their wives are the only lightness in their lives and in the movie and are a sweet and sassy counterpoint to the constant aggravation the men experience on duty.

This is a portrait of a city in a state of siege, and the only advice the script can offer is to wear comfortable shoes and a bulletproof vest.

THOROUGHBREDS

Cert 15 Stars 4

Take a punt on this immaculately poised and nihilistic black comedy thriller which carries its chilly premise across the finish line with tremendous composure and style.

Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy give deliciously dead-pan performances as a pair of teenagers born to a world of wealth and privilege and bred to be social show ponies.

With the former saddled with a creepy and controlling stepfather, a plot is hatched to dispatch him. The film is dedicated to the late Anton Yeltsin who plays the local drug dealer whom they rope in to help.