James McAvoy

Split

Director: M. Night Shyamalan (2017) BBFC cert: 15

The master of the twist ending returns with this psychological horror. Director and writer M. Night Shyamalan made his name with The Sixth Sense but after a string of disappointing films, he is slowly rebuilding his career at the Blumhouse studio.

Better known as the makers of The Paranormal Activity franchise, the low budget horror specialists don’t care how much new age waffle about mind over matter Shyamalan squeezes into his script, as long as he includes a lunatic  terrorising semi-dressed teenage girls.

So its a win win for both parties then.

James McAvoy delivers an outstanding, showboating performance which includes menace, pathos, comedy and damaged innocence. The Scots actor  stars as Kevin, a multiple personality maniac who imprisons three girls in his basement.

Child abuse and cannibalism feature in the story which draws on Beauty and the Beast and Dr Jekyl And Mr Hyde.

The surprise at the end ties the film in with Shyamalan’s early, better work and hints at a sequel. Despite my better judgement, I’m intrigued to see what happens next.

★★★☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

X-Men: Apocalypse

Director: Bryan Singer (2016)

Yawn your way to the end of the world in this inert episode of the increasingly under powered superhero franchise.

Bloated and boring, an exasperting multitude of characters are poorly served by laboured direction, haphazard editing and dialogue empty of any lyricism, humour or subtlety.

Lines of exposition are expanded to scene length and decorated with close ups of actors indifferent to the weightless CGI events occurring behind them. Presented with a lacklustre script, the top drawer cast offer up correspondent performances.

James McAvoy returns as Professor X, the wheelchair bound and telepathic leader of supergroup the X-Men who believes in peaceful co-existence with non-mutants. As his one time friend Magneto, Michael Fassbender wants the world to feel his pain.

Minor characters pose in heroic silence as the pair once again rehash their world views. In a film adverse to brevity, their relationship is underlined by the inclusion of footage of earlier films.

Oscar Isaac is barely recognisable and mostly immobile as the eponymous Apocalypse, a mutant from ancient Egypt who is resurrected by devout yet curiously security lax followers.

With the  ability to turn people to earth and metal, Apocalypse wants to build a better world from the ashes of the present one and starts recruiting mutants to serve him in his nefarious plan.

Jennifer Lawrence looks bored as the shapeshifting Mystique who seems to have mutated into a thin copy of her character Katnis Everdeen from The Hunger Games series (2012-15).

Now a reluctant global poster girl for mutants in hiding, Mystique needs convincing to take arms against Apocalypse.

Hugh Jackman cameos as Wolverine while Rose Byrne is beginning to rival Fassbender for being the best actor making the weakest career choices.

Evan Peters and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Quicksilver and Nightcrawler are the best of the B team. Olivia Munn, Ben Hardy, Alexandra Shipp and Sophie Turner are eager but forgettable.

The setting of 1983 allows for pop culture references to be scattered around but there’s a lack of the wit to exploit their comic potential.

Though the Cold War and the nuclear arms race are a major subplot, a nuclear launch occurs and is promptly forgotten about while our focus hurries away elsewhere.

Director Singer kickstarted with his career with the masterful The Usual Suspects (1995) and launched this series with the energetic X-Men (2000) but this is closer in muddled mediocrity to his Jack The Giant Slayer (2013).

The end of the world can’t come soon enough for this flatlining franchise.

★★☆☆☆

 

Victor Frankenstein

Director: Paul McGuigan (2015)

There’s magnetism a foot as the electric talent of James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe jolt Mary Shelley‘s gothic horror back into life.

This romping reinvention relocates the story to London and is told in flashback by Radcliffe’s hunchback Igor.

Lurching from action set piece to another, it has someone’s tongue stitched firmly in it’s cheek.

McAvoy gives a gleefully twitching turn as the mad scientist who wants to prove death is temporary by recycling dead bodies and applying shock treatment.

Recreated as a Victorian gentleman adventurer, he’s a monster mash-up of Robert Downey Jnr’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing (2004).

Recognised as talented pair of hands, Igor is rescued from life as a brutalised circus clown by McAvoy’s mad medical student Frankenstein.

He’s the brains of the partnership with the choice cuts of dialogue, while Igor is the heart, feeding off the rump scraps of the script.

Soon the pair are in the laboratory and up to the elbows in blood and gore.

While Victor is working the graveyard shift cutting up cadavers to complete a creature, Igor and a trapeze artist called Lorelei practise making life the old fashioned way.

Better known as Lady Sybil from TV’s Downton Abbey, Jessica Brown Findlay role is only really required to add a pretty face to the bones of the action.

Unsurprisingly the finale involves a castle, a reconstructed cadaver and a lightning storm.

If it’s not quite the exquisite show of depraved lunacy a bystander claims he hopes to see, Victor Frankenstein does manage to be energetic and knowingly silly.

★★★☆☆

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Director: Bryan Singer (2014)

Hugh Jackman sharpens his claws for the seventh time as superhero Wolverine in this action-packed adventure with added time-travel thrills.

The film has exciting set-pieces, a terrific cast, some good jokes and an entertaining new angle on the Kennedy assassination of November 1963.

Yet the script struggles to find time for a plot amid the cacophony of characters – so the special effects have to do the dramatic heavy lifting.

The story begins with mutants under attack by super-powered robots called the sentinels.

Mutant leaders Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) send the mind of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 to inhabit his younger self’s body.

He has to find the young Xavier (James McAvoy) and convince him to help recruit Magneto (Michael Fassbender).

Magneto is jailed inside the Pentagon so they recruit a lightning fast mutant called Quicksilver (Evan Peters) to break him out.

This leads to a brilliant action comedy sequence set to the wonderful music of the late singer-songwriter Jim Croce whose music was also used in Tarantino’s bloody opus Django Unchained (2012).

Next the mutants have to stop the shapeshifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from carrying out a revenge killing of the scientist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage).

She decides to take direct action not realising his death could lead to the annihilation of the mutants by giving the the US government the excuse they’re looking for.

Fassbender and McEvoy have great fun in costume but neither has to squeeze himself into an unforgiving blue leotard like Lawrence.

It’s not uncanny of the film-makers to put the world’s most popular actress centre story. But even she can’t steal the show from the prowling, growling Jackman.

★★★☆☆