Month: September 2020

Ek Hasina Thi

  By

★★★
“Hell hath no fury…”

A somewhat cheesy melodrama, this throws together elements from Western pot-boilers Double Jeopardy and If Tomorrow Comes, adds a handful of Bollywood spice, and to be honest, probably overcooks the whole thing a bit. The title translates as “There Was a Beautiful Woman”, presumably referring to the heroine of the piece, travel agent Sarika (Matondkar). Into her office one day comes hunky businessman Karan Singh Rathod (Khan), and after some reluctance, she begins a relationship with him. However, it turns out he is actually a mobster, and manipulates her into taking a fall rather than incriminating him, which nets Sarika a seven-year prison sentence. Escaping from jail, she vows to destroy her former lover, and in turn, works on framing Karan with his criminal pals, by making it look like he murdered a colleague and stole money.

The most fun part for me, was the section in the middle where it turns into a Bollywood women-in-prison movie. I’d have watched an entire movie about that, as Sarika – wholly unprepared for the experience – gets dropped into the literal hell-hole which is an Indian jail. [Seriously: I don’t want to hear any complaints about Western prison conditions ever again] This is what transitions her into being the bad-ass she needs to be, to be able to take down Karan, and is where the melodrama reached its peak, right from the get-go. Her cellmate offers Sarika a biscuit, then warns her, “There’s a woman here named Dolly. Beware of her. She’s crazy. She’s a real wretch. She has committed four murders.” Of course, the cellmate is Dolly. It’s like watching an entire season of The Yard, condensed into thirty minutes.

The strong female characters aren’t limited to the heroine. There’s also the prison matriarch, Pramila (Kazmi), who takes Sarika under her wing. And on the other side, is ACP Malti Vaidya – she is portrayed by Biswas, who played the title role in Bandit Queen. Vaidya is the no-nonsense policewoman who gets the heroine convicted (what’s a little finger violence between cops and criminals?), yet also wants to work her way up the chain and catch Karan as well. I’d not have minded seeing either of them get more screen-time, perhaps at the cost of the early scenes depicting the growth of the relationship between Sarika and Karan.

For at 137 minutes, it does meander a bit much, especially when its story should be accelerating forward. I have some questions about the final act, after the heroine escapes from jail during a fire. Firstly, whoever is in charge of security for Karan’s mob friends is in for a really poor performance review this quarter. And the eventual revenge taken, would have made more sense if we’d seen Karan suffer from musophobia, rather than Sarika. Overall, however, it’s an entertaining piece of nonsense, which even got Chris off her mobile phone for its duration. If you’re averse to the Bollywood standard dance routines, you’ll be pleased to learn they don’t show up here at all.

Dir: Sriram Raghavan
Star: Urmila Matondkar, Saif Ali Khan, Seema Biswas, Pratima Kazmi

X-Men: Dark Phoenix

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★★★
“I’m SO confused…”

I can’t believe there have been seven X-Men movies now. I think the last I saw was the second, which came out in 2003. Since then, there seems to have been a lot of mutants under the bridge, so to speak – and, it appears, some jiggery-pokery with timelines. That’s the only way to explain the death early on in this origin story, of someone I’m fairly sure was in the films I saw, which took place later in the chronology. Still, all I can do is presume it makes sense if you’ve seen the whole series, and on that basis this was fine. Indeed, by coincidence. we watched this the same day as Black Panther – and if I didn’t already know, I’d be hard-pushed to tell you which was a cultural phenomenon, and which was among the biggest bombs of the year.

It is the first Marvel feature since Elektra with a female lead, so there’s that. In this case, it’s Jean Grey (Turner), who is taken under the wing of Charles Xavier (McAvoy) after losing her parents in a car-crash triggered by Jean’s psychic talents. She joins the rest of the X-Men – though as Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) puts it, “The women are always saving the men around here. You might wanna think about changing the name to X-Women.” On a mission to rescue the crew of a crippled Space Shuttle, she absorbs a cosmic energy blast. This makes her incredibly powerful, yet also unleashes her insecurities, a situation not helped after she discovers that Xavier has been more than economical with the truth. Meanwhile, a group of extra-terrestrials led by Vuk (Chastain) arrives, seeking to use Grey and her powers. It becomes a race between them and the X-Men to find the runaway Grey.

Push comes to shove, I probably enjoyed this slightly more than Black Panther. It seemed less concerned about making statements, and more about simply providing entertainment. As mentioned, I have to take all plot-logic as read, and also that there’s an explanation for the biggest number of blue people in a film since The Smurfs Movie. I was here simply for large-scale, visually slick imagery, things blowing up and epic fight scenes, and on that level, I can’t say I was disappointed. Sure, the characterizations were often little more than obvious [for example, Grey comes from the “disgruntled orphan” school of superheroes], and Chastain is sadly under-used; that whole “not blinking” thing is sublimely creepy.

Yet it’s hardly alone among comic-book movie, in these or its other flaws, and I couldn’t find anything to justify the dire box-office fate suffered. Sure, it’s never going to be mistaken for a classic, and as a (supposed) wrap-up to the franchise, is probably unsatisfying to ardent fans. However, I am not one of those. As somebody who hasn’t seen an X-Men movie for seventeen years, this was the kind of overblown spectacle I expected – and, truth be told was wanting. Having watched rather too many over-inflated genre entries of late, that seek to be Very Important, I was fine with just seeing subway trains getting hurled around city streets.

Dir: Simon Kinberg
Star: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Michael Fassbender

Ava

  By

★★★
“Haywire. With baggage”

It has been a rough year for action heroines at the cinema. Actually, it has been a rough year for everyone everywhere, thanks to COVID-19. But for the purposes of this site, we have been sadly lacking the kind of tentpole releases which we usually write about over the summer. Wonder Woman 1984, for example, was to have come out in June. But with all venues bar the few remaining drive-ins closed, that was moved first to August, then October [and I don’t know about you, but I’m still not comfortable with the concept of cinema going]. Disney’s live-action version of Mulan opted to bypass theatres all together, and will instead be released on their streaming service.

Poor Ava is suffering a similar fate, going straight to video-on-demand in most places – except, bizarrely, in Hungary, according to Wikipedia. Certainly, given its rather high-powered cast, you would have expected better for this, in a normal world. It still, however, probably ranks as the biggest-profile action heroine movie of the year – at least for a few days until Mulan shows up. To be honest, though, it doesn’t do enough to justify that position. While Chastain is very good in the central role, it’s burdened down by too much drama to be effective, and comes over mostly like a soap-opera adaptation of Haywire.

Ava (Chastain) has overcome a troubled past to become an assassin for a murky intelligence agency, working for Duke (Malkovich). But she is increasingly questioning her work – indeed, literally doing so, having an unnerving habit of asking her targets why someone wants them killed. After a supposedly stealth operation in Saudi Arabia becomes not-so-stealthy, Duke’s protege, Simon (Farrell), takes matters into his own hands, bypassing Duke to put out a kill order on Ava. She’s none too pleased by this, obviously, and seeks to turn the tables on him.

The above paragraph is lean, mean and would have made for a perfectly decent movie. However, the script apparently decides it’s not enough – perhaps Chastain wanted something into which she could sink her dramatic teeth. For we get a whole slew of subplots and conflicts thrown on top. These include, but are not limited, to the following. Ava is a recovering alcoholic. Ava is estranged from her sister (Weixler). Ava had a previous relationship with her sister’s boyfriend, and there are still feelings there. He has a gambling problem. Ava caught her father having an affair, which led to her leaving home. It also caused Ava to break ties with her mother, played by Geena Davis.

It’s all too much, dragging down the plot. Say what you like about Haywire, you never cared that Mallory Kane didn’t have a compelling history, for the film was too busy moving forward to look back. This one spends too much time creating, and then having to tidy up, all these loose ends from Ava’s past. I just wasn’t interested. Though those scenes did give me time to imagine ways this could have worked better.  It would have been way cool if, at the end, Davis had thrown off her motherly trappings, revealed she also used to be a government assassin [perhaps actually being Samantha Caine, Geena’s character from The Long Kiss Goodnight], and teamed up with Ava to take down Simon.

This movie writing thing is a piece of cake.

Anyway, no such luck. The stuff between the drama is not bad, though I have some… questions about seeing the 66-year-old Malkovich going toe-to-toe with Farrell [ditto the 59-year-old Joan Chen and Chastain, actually] Or Farrell’s choice of facial hair and black turtleneck, which give him an unfortunate resemblance to 1930’s fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley. Or Simon’s decisions, including calling up Ava, apparently purely for taunting purposes, then going after her by himself, rather than first sending an escalating series of minions. If the movie hadn’t spent so much time dwelling on all of Ava’s drama, maybe we would have had time for such things.

Despite the relentless slagging delivered over the previous few paragraphs, this wasn’t actually too bad. The lead actress is the main reason why. If the film feels like a cinematic opposite of Anna, where the heroine was little more than a gun-carrying clothes-horse, Chastain is able to carry the weight of all those subplots, and deliver a complex character. She has played her share of action roles previously, perhaps most notably as far as we are concerned, in The Huntsman: Winter’s War, where we said she “kicks surprising amounts of butt.” Here, this aspect is front and centre, and she acquits herself well, even if her hand-to-hand combat against considerably larger opponents could have used a force equalizer or two more, for the sake of credibility.

Two scenes likely stand out. The first (and only!) attempt on her life by Simon’s minion, in a Paris park. And the final battle against him in her hotel bedroom [again, echoes of the similarly-located fight in Haywire between Gina Carano and Michael Fassbender]. Equal credit for those probably has to go to the ever-reliable Amy Johnston, star of Lady Bloodfight, who was Chastain’s stunt double for this. I should also mention Simon’s daughter, Camille, played by Diana Silvers. The ending, though somewhat conclusive, sets up a potential future Camille vs. Ava scenario, which I must confess, I would not mind seeing at all.

Overall, it is worth a look, though its insistence on trying to insert dramatic conflicts into a vehicle that doesn’t need them, becomes increasingly annoying as the movie progresses. When it’s not doing so, however, it is a slick, Bourne-like entity, providing a decent vehicle for Chastain to show off her action credentials. as well as her already-known acting skills. On that basis, it’s a shame I suspect it’s going to end up not being seen by too many people – thanks, Coronavirus! I hope that won’t put her off further exploration of our genre, as it can always use some more high-powered leads.

Dir: Tate Taylor
Star:  Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Colin Farrell, Jess Weixler