Category: Review

Bancroft: season one

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★★★½
“The thin grey line.”

When young detective Katherine Stevens (Marsay) gets assigned a batch of cold cases by her boss, Clifford Walker (Edmondson), it seems a task of little interest. The batch includes the brutal stabbing murder of a young woman, 27 years previously – coincidentally, the first cop on the scene, Elizabeth Bancroft (Parish), is now a senior officer. Indeed, she’s competing with Walker for the job of soon-to-retire Detective Chief Superintendent, and bringing down local crime boss Athif Kamara would all but guarantee her the job. So, nothing will be allowed to stand in Bancroft’s way. Not Walker, and certainly not a rookie detective, poking her nose into cases which should stay closed. Because three decades of forensic advances mean that the murder Stevens has re-opened may no longer be quite as insoluble as it was…

The fact that the show’s title is Bancroft, and not “Stevens”, tells you where the focus is here, on the villainess – or, you could perhaps argue, anti-heroine. Perhaps the closest comparable show I can think of is Dexter, particularly in that both shows have a central character who hides their true nature in the police force. In Bancroft’s case, the murderous tendencies have also been very deeply buried; however, it comes out again when her position is threatened by Stevens’s investigation. Yet there’s plenty of evidence of her generally “flexible” morality, shall we say. For instance, she brokers an agreement with Athif’s younger brother, letting him take over, in exchange for information on his sibling and a tacit agreement to co-operate with her in future. The logic is pure pragmatism: someone you know, and can control, is better than a wild-card. It makes for fascinating viewing.

Bancroft is also very manipulative, as can be seen in her relationship with the impressionable Stevens. At least initially, the younger police officer looks up to her as a role-model, and that makes it easy for Bancroft to twist Stevens to her ends, such as withholding evidence discovered from Walker. But over the arc of the four 45-minute episodes which form the first series, Stevens shows dogged persistence and determination as well, and gets a crash course in maturity. As well, perhaps, as one in striking a balance between your career and your personal life, something with which Bancroft appears always to have struggled.

The main thing preventing this from getting a higher rating, and likely our seal of approval, is the unsatisfactory final episode, which simply leaves too many loose ends dangling – not least the one resulting from the picture above. The show has been renewed for a second series: fortunate, because if it hadn’t, the inadequate conclusion offered would have caused us to join the large mob with torches, marching on the producers’ building.  To be honest, the four-part arc was likely too short to tell the story they wanted to, and it might be fairer to judge this after the next batch of episodes. But in its title character, there’s plenty to appreciate, offering the kind of woman still rarely seen on television, and is alone enough to ensure we’ll be tuning back in.

Creator: Kate Brooke
Star: Sarah Parish, Faye Marsay, Amara Karan, Adrian Edmondson

Vampariah

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★★★½
“Not half bad.”

I should start by explaining the above tagline. The main monster here is the aswang, a female vampiric creature from Philippines folklore. Its main distinguishing feature, is that after passing for human during the day, at night it splits its body in two, and the top half then flies around, killing people and eating their entrails, using a super-long tongue. There is a secret group, tasked with keeping mankind both safe and unaware of these, as well as any other creatures that go bump in the night. One of its top agents is Mahal (Dennis), who has a particular interests in aswangs (aswangii?), since she blames them for the death of her father.

When word of one operating in San Francisco reaches her organization, she begs its head, Michele Kilman (Deleon) for the chance to track down and kill it. However, when Mahal locates Bampinay (Almario), the aswang in question, she’s in for a shock, and her entire worldview is turned upside down. Mahal learns the disturbing truth, both about her own heritage and the group for whom she operates. Maybe she isn’t working for the good guys, after all, and the aswang are just… misunderstood?

To be honest, the budget here is some way short of being capable of pulling off the level of effects necessary to do the ideas justice. This is particularly obvious in the aerial battles, which would be okay, if only this were a mid-priced Xbox game and not a feature film. However, the invention and energy present make it relatively easy to set aside the frequently ropey technical aspects, and embrace the well-considered world and its characters. To build things, Abaya adopts a slew of different styles from silhouettes to mockumentary. The latter is used for one of those monster shows, in which an American goes to the Philippines in search of the aswang (he perpetually mispronounces it as “ass wang” – it’s actually more like “ah-SWANG”), only for it to find him first…

The film is continually inventive like this, with another new facet appearing every few minutes, such as the hopping vampires, familiar from Hong Kong movies of the eighties (brief pause to pour one out for the late Lam Ching-Ying, the doyen of that genre!). It is possible you might get more out of it if you are familiar with the culture already, and there are plenty of digs at the West, in particular Western men. Bampinay has no trouble feeding entirely on sleazeballs and politicians who deserve to have their guts gobbled down by a flying half-woman. If you’re so inclined, there are some interesting subtexts about cultural identity and gender to unpack as well.

Yet it remains highly accessible, with characters who are universal and fun to be with. In particular, there’s Mahal, who is probably the closest thing to a female version of Blade I’ve seen, with buckets of attitude, and them some to spare. At one point she spits at a misogynistic colleague, “Why don’t you go find yourself a chupacabra to fuck?” This was likely the moment at which I let go of my doubts and climbed on board for the ride. Do the same, and you’ll have fun.

Dir: Matthew Abaya
Star: Kelly Lou Dennis, Aureen Almario, Arlene Joie Deleon, Roberto Divina.

Dark Iris

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★★½
“Two into one will go.”

The Hyde Project was a secret government experiment to create artificially-enhanced super-soldiers. Due to difficulty controlling their aggressive tendencies, it shut up shop, but not before 13 of them escaped. They are now being hunted down by a pair of MI-6 agents, Damion Crow (Kyle Hotz) and Lina Petrov (Jensen). Connected to this, somehow, is Iris Black (Newberry). She’s a put-upon barista, with a cheating boyfriend, sleazy boss, alleged stalker – and an increasing body-count of the people around her, the corpses being tagged with religious symbols, in line with the work of an active serial killer. This quickly brings her to the attention of the FBI, in particular Agent Fry (Osborne) and her partner, who have been hunting the killer. They’re not exactly prepared for what they will discover.

I have… questions. Mostly, what the hell is actually going on, since the plot never does a very good job of explaining itself. Why are two (supposedly) MI-6 agents hunting down the renegades? Why is one of them sporting a very obvious Russian accent? [Though in outrageousness, Jensen hardcore Natasha-ing is surpassed by Hotz’s spectacularly fake Britishness] Where does the religious iconography fit in? Are the renegades unable to suppress their violent urges, or are they not? Because there’s no consistency there. They don’t appear to be particularly enhanced either: I’d have expected considerably more strength, speed or general bad-assery for my black budget tax dollars.

Mind you, maybe they are. It’s hard to tell, because the action here is borderline terrible: poorly-lit and even less well edited, reducing it all to an incomprehensible jumble of images. The film’s salvaging grace is the characters, who are rather more fun to watch than the plot. Fry has a super-snarky streak, Osborne coming over as a low-rent version of Melissa McCarthy, which is by no means a bad thing, and while I may have sniped at Jensen’s accent, her portrayal of Petrov is an engaging one. Tack this pair on to Black, who may or may not be a super-soldier, and the film certainly has no shortage of adequately action-oriented female characters.

Unfortunate that the mis-steps outnumber the positives. For example, a character gets a lengthy, heroic scene of self-sacrifice. Which might have worked better, if the audience had been given any significant reason to care about them up until that point. The film also tries to divide its attentions over several different areas of focus: Black, the FBI investigation and the MI-6 agents. This ends up diluting each, leaving them all feeling considerably under-developed and falling short of generating real interest. It’s just about an acceptable way to pass the time: I can imagine it turning up on the SyFy channel on some Saturday afternoon down the road, and they’ve certainly screened worse. But I’d certainly recommend recording it, so you can fast forward through the commercial breaks. And perhaps parts of the film, too.

Dir: Derek Talib
Star: KateLynn E. Newberry, Marylee Osborne, Rebekah Hart Franklin, Jesi Jensen

Infinite Waste by Dean F. Wilson

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

This initially seemed like a borderline entry, which I kept reading purely for entertainment. It’s about an exploratory star-ship, the Gemini, out on the very edge of known space, which comes across a giant barge, packed with nuclear waste and populated by a race of rat-humanoids, the Raetuumak. The Gemini is an appropriate name for the craft, as it’s effectively two separate ships, each with their own captain and very different approaches. Maggie Antwa, commander of Gemini Right, is a cautious scientist who abhors violence in any form, and was compelled to take on this mission after being involved in a environmentalist rebellion against the ruling Empire. Over in Gemini Left, on the other hand, Skip Sutridge is a square-jawed believer in shooting first and asking questions… well, never, to be honest. He has been sent to the fringes, probably to try and keep him out of trouble.

It doesn’t work. Skip finds himself captured by the Raetuumak, leaving Maggie to strap on the battle armour and rescue her co-captain. That’s not the end of the matter though, as they discover the barge is an interstellar weapon, aimed at the heart of the Empire. Worse still, is the creature made of pure shadow that stalks the corridor of the ship, absorbing the energy of anyone it touches: this is one of the Umbra, long since considered to be no more than the bogeymen of fairy tales. Not only is this belief incorrect, they’re now apparently returning from their exile to take on the Empire. Maggie and Skip will have to put aside their deep philosophical differences to deal with both this massive dirty bomb, and the Umbra.

It’s Maggie’s character arc which eventually qualifies this for here: she and Skip are complete opposites, who initially share only mutual loathing. Yet they eventually realize that neither one of their approaches will be sufficient to defeat this threat. As the book states, “He was sword and she was shield. Separately, they were vulnerable. Together, if they could ever find a way to really work with each other, they would be powerful beyond measure.” That’s really the core of the book here: the convergence on a middle ground which is able to make use of both their undoubted talents. It’s Maggie who drives this, with the solo rescue of Skip proving her courage and audacity, and forcing him to admit her abilities. Yet, she also finds that her long, deep-held pacifism has limits: after realizing the need to deal with the Umbra, “Perhaps for the first time in her life, the thought of killing something didn’t upset her at all.”

I have to say, the way in which it is eventually dealt with, was more than a little weak: if they’re so easily defeated, it’s hard to see how the Umbra could be any kind of threat to the galaxy. Yet, except for that moment, this was a strong page-turner. As mentioned at the start, kept me interested even in the early going, when its action heroine credentials were in doubt. Both Skip and Maggie are capable of carrying the story on their own, and the pairing of them is an effective combination. I’m intrigued to see where they go from here.

Author: Dean F. Wilson
Publisher: Currently only available as part of the Dominion Rising collection for Kindle.
Book 1 in the Infinite Worlds series.

Pink Heat

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★½
“Die Hard in a saloon.”

You know you’re deep into one-man, to put it mildly, film-making territory, when the same name gets 7½ of the first 10 credits (one is shared). That’s spreading your talents thin, even if you are Steven Spielberg. And Sean LaFollette definitely isn’t Spielberg. The story is told in flashback, with the heroine Elizabeth (Burgess) the proud recipient of two pink-handled revolvers for her birthday. While she’s off getting her gun-belt, the family saloon is invaded by a group of out of town criminals, who take the rest of her family hostage, and shoot her grandfather dead. Fortunately, Elizabeth takes after her late mother, who was a crack-shot, and is therefore in a good position to pick apart the perpetrators.

Die Hard? More like Die Limp. For there’s almost nothing here that reaches the level of competent, from the ill-conceived structure through to the ridiculous and pointless voice-over. This includes such gems as, after Elizabeth rescues her boyfriend, “I ran to Mark. I was relieved to know that he was alive.” That should be a script direction, not a voice-over: “Elizabeth runs to Mark, clearly relieved to know he is alive.” Then there’s the heroine’s style of gun-fighting, which would be better suited to a primary school playground than taking on hardened criminals. A gun in each hand, she thrusts her arms forward alternately while firing, a hardly credible approach extremely unlikely to generate accuracy, and with the unfortunate effect of making her resemble a train engine in motion. And we are provided with absolutely no explanation for the criminals’ actions: what exactly are they trying to achieve by the taking of hostages?

Probably the most aggravating part of the entire production, however, was the music – a LaFollette composition, naturally. He seems to be going for a minimalist, John Carpenter vibe. It doesn’t work, and sounds simply as if he was only able to afford half the notes on a musical scale. Because the soundtrack consists of a series of pieces, in which four notes are repeated in strict succession, for however long is necessary for the scene in question. Even in a film of low standards like this, it’s quite outstandingly bad, and if it hadn’t been LaFollette the director giving an approving nod to LaFollette the composer’s work, would surely have rapidly resulting in a replacement being sought.

Positives are not easy to find. I did quite like the opening, which feels like a pastiche of Western movie cliches… because that’s exactly what it’s intended to be, since it’s a show put on for tourists. Burgess does at least look the part – albeit rather more so when attired in her mother’s long coat and Stetson, rather than wandering the house in some fairly gratuitous underwear! However, you’ll be hard pushed to remain interested through to a climactic battle which includes the bad guy pausing in the middle of a fight for his life to take a swig of whisky, before a final resolution which literally had me rolling my eyes in my head.

Dir: Sean LaFollette
Star: Jordan Burgess, Adam Joseph Lopez, Joey Catalano

Killing Eve: Season One

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★★★★
“You should never call a psychopath a psychopath. It upsets them.”

A genuinely organic hit on BBC America, this generated so much word of mouth that the ratings for this show behaved in an unexpected fashion. Including those who DVR’d the show, viewership increased for each episode over its 8-week run. That’s a rare feat these days, and is testament to the show’s unique qualities. So confident were the station in the show, that is was renewed for a second season before it had even premiered – another unusual achievement. But then, this show is arguably unlike anything else on television.

The heroine is Eve Polastri (Oh), an officer in the British intelligence service, MI-5, who believes there’s a connection between a string of assassinations across Europe. She’s right: they were all carried out be Oksana Astankova (Comer), codename “Villanelle”. Oksana is a pure, undiluted psychopath, working for a shadowy Russian organization known as “The Twelve”, under handler Konstantin Vasiliev (Bodnia). Polastri’s career is apparently ended when a witness to one of Oksana’s hits is killed in her care, and she’s fired from MI-5. However, this allows her to be recruited by Carolyn Martens (Shaw) for a off-book investigation into Villanelle.

Eve is therefore able to continue digging into Oksana’s history and activities, but the target becomes aware of the interest – signalling that knowledge by using “Eve Polastri” for her identity during a job. From here, it’s a spiral of increasingly intense cat-and-mouse, with Eve and her team tracking the assassin, while also being hunted by her. It all grows deeply personal for both Eve and Oksana, the two women developing a perverse long-distance relationship that’s more of a fixation, on both sides. Note: I’m not using “perverse” in relation to the homoerotic elements. It’s just… really bizarre. As in, “Villanelle breaking into Eve’s house, in order to have dinner with her” strange.

The show is defiantly messy in terms of its characters, who manage both to embody the stereotypes of the dogged law-enforcement official and the slick, femme fatale, while also subverting them. From the viewpoint of this site, Oksana is likely the more interesting. As a high concept, imagine a female version of Dexter: charming and affable on the surface, yet extraordinary lethal – and capable of flicking that switch in a moment. The difference is, Villanelle has chosen not to control and direct her “dark passenger” so much as embrace them fully, and is given the chance to do so by the profession into which she is recruited. It also allows her to indulge her fondness for haute couture.

She enjoys her work, to an almost scary degree, disdaining the simplest and most directly effective methods, too. That’d be boring, especially for such a free spirit. Why shoot, when you can kill your target by stabbing them in the eye with a hatpin instead? On the other hand, she is also incredibly manipulative. Oksana may not be able to feel any genuine emotions of her own, yet she’s supremely good at faking them, and will happily say what you want to hear, if she thinks it’ll let her use you for her own advantage. Her handler doesn’t so much control the incredibly self-confident Villanelle as unleash her in the direction of the intended target. Who inevitably ends up dead… just not necessarily quite as he would prefer.

The contrast to Eve could hardly be greater, and that perhaps goes some way to explaining the agent’s obsession: Oksana is everything Eve wants to be. Okay, except for the “psychopathic killer” bit. But that’s just a detail, right? For Eve is stuck in a rather tedious relationship, and works a job where her talents are under-used and even less appreciated. The more she learns about her target, the greater the appeal seems to be, and it works both ways: Villanelle wants “someone to watch movies with”. Or says she does anyway: this could just be another manipulative ploy, it’s impossible to be sure. Espionage, counter-espionage and assassination is a murky world at the best of times. Here? You can’t see the murk for the deceit, and at times the lies become a bit overwhelming.

After a long career expressing earnest concern on medical soap Grey’s Anatomy, Oh’s career has undergone a spectacular sea-change of late. First, there was the awesome Catfight, and now this, little if any less successful, which allows Oh to show her remarkable range of expressive… er, expressions [Seriously: you could spend an entire episode just watching her face, to the exclusion of everything else, and still be entranced]. Comer is nowhere near as well-known, but I doubt we’ll see a more memorable female character on television this year than Oksana, combining childish innocence, girlish glee and savage psychopathy. When it comes to Emmy time, it will be a travesty if at least one of them is not nominated – and ideally both. The supporting cast are no slouches either.

I will confess to being less than whelmed by the final episode which, rather than ramping up, petered out into something approaching a slumber party. Admittedly, it’s a very weird one, befitting the show, and sees Eve violate Oksana’s personal bubble of living space, partly in retaliation for the same thing happening to her earlier. But it offers no sense at all of closure: this may be a side-effect of the show having been pre-renewed. I guess there’s no point making any effort to wrap things up, when you know you’re going to be back.

Still, for 7½ episodes, this was far and away the best thing on American TV at the moment. To get one of these amazing characters in a show would have been more than acceptable. Having both in the same series provides a one-two punch of heroine and anti-heroine that’s almost unsurpassed in television history. Buffy and Faith, or Xena and Callisto, perhaps come close – although they were only story arcs. Here, Eve and Oksana are a pure, undiluted focus, and it’s glorious. The second season can’t get here soon enough.

Creator: Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Star: Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw, Kim Bodnia

Red Sparrow: review face-off

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Below, you’ll find Jim and Dieter’s reviews of Red Sparrow, the spy thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence. They were originally written separately and without reference to each other, but are both presented here – for their similarities as much as their differences. I thought it was interesting that there were areas where we both came to the same conclusions independently. But we also diverged in other aspects of the film and our reactions to it – not least that Dieter doesn’t feel it necessarily qualifies for inclusion here! While I can see his point, my church of the action heroine has a somewhat broader congregation, and so you’ll get not one, but two opinions on this. We’ll hopefully do the same for other “tentpole” action heroine films as they come out.

Red Sparrow

By Jim McLennan

★★★
“The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!”

There was a while there, where Russia dropped out of the top spot as far as being cinematic villains were concerned. No longer the “Evil Empire” of the Reagan era, they had largely been replaced, in the post 9/11 landscape, by Islamic fundamentalism. But now, those pesky Russkies are back as the bad guys once again, following their interference in the sacrosanct and solemn process of Americans electing a president. [I really must figure out a sarcasm font for this site] While this is supposedly set in the present day – I say that, because at one point, cutting-edge computer software is delivered on a set of floppy disks! – this feels more like something born out of Peak Cold War.

Ballerina Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) suffers an accident on stage that ends her career. Living in a Bolshoi-provided apartment and with a sick mother, things look bleak until her uncle Ivan Egorov (Schoenaerts) steps in. He offers her a job as a “sparrow”, honey-potting foreigners in order to obtain intelligence from them. After some qualms, Dominika accepts, and undergoes training designed to remove all her inhibitions. Her first target is Nate Nash (Edgerton), a CIA operative now in Budapest. He had to leave Moscow after an incident involving him and a high-level Russian agent; that agent’s identity is what Dominika has to discover, in her guise as an embassy translator.

The most obvious recent touchstone is Atomic Blonde, which I found considerably more entertaining – even if it is, I would venture, considerably less realistic. This is dour stuff by comparison, almost unremittingly grim in the dehumanizing way the Russians use Dominika, Dominika uses Nate, and Nate uses Dominika. For it’s clear from the start that he is not taken in by her facade and sees the honey-pot for what it is – yet thinks she can still be a useful asset, who can be recruited and turned. Or is that actually part of Dominika’s game-plan, to appear as a potential defector? It’s only right at the end, by the time many wheels have turned, that we discover whose side she’s really on: not much of a spoiler to reveal that it’s her own.

One thing which is clear. is how the film has been misunderstood, reading reviews which say things like, “Red Sparrow is intended to be a sexy thriller.” No, it’s not, any more than Showgirls was. Both are often about sex; yet that doesn’t make them “sexy”, especially when the director depicts the ugly aspects as much as (if not more often than) the erotic. Here, the sexual encounters are weaponized, and are as much about power as anything. Nothing illustrates that better than Lawrence’s nude scene, during a very public training session as what she herself calls “whore school” A classmate who had previously tried to rape Dominika is ordered to have sex with her. But, partly in response to her taunting, he’s unable to perform. If you think it’s supposed to be “sexy”, you’re the problem, not the film.

The trailers may have somewhat betrayed it, making it look like a modern version of Atomic Blonde (or even an origin story for Black Widow!). It isn’t, and you should not expect anything with such gleeful abandon, or such a defiant sense of era and location. Sparrow could easily take place in any Eastern bloc city, at any time since the end of World War II. It’s no less brutal than Blonde, deserving its adult rating for violence and torture as much as the sexual content. The heroine is certainly not as active a participant, though it’s creepy as hell to see Dominika energetically wielding a tool usually reserved for carrying out skin grafts. But it is considerably more serious in intent, though the case could be made (and has been), that it’s ultimately less empowering and more exploitative.

Not sure I’d go that far: I know it’s a great deal less fun, and also which of the two is the only film I’ll have in my collection. This doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie; especially if you can get past Lawrence’s accent, her performance is worth a look, and as an ice-cold tale of deep-frozen international intrigue, the 140 minutes go past quicker than I initially thought they might. The actress is re-teamed here with Hunger Games director (who is no relation), and I’m not sure he’s the best person for the task, seeming to rely heavily on trotting out tropes of the genre we’ve seen too often before. However, a bigger problem is likely Edgerton as the male lead, who has close to zero charisma, and even less chemistry with his co-star. That, however, may be intentional, since they’re both playing the other as a patsy, with the “real” emotions involved being questionable.

The rest of the supporting cast aren’t bad. Having recently seen Jeremy Irons being criminally wasted in Assassin’s Creed, I was much more pleased with his performance here, though both he and Charlotte Rampling (as a Nikita-esque head of the school for sparrows) have something of the same accent issue as Lawrence. It always seems odd: we are supposed to be able to accept the conceit of non-natives playing foreigners who speak English to each other… only if a fake local accent is applied on top? It’s about as necessary and convincing as the glasses on Clark Kent. Mary Louise Parker also shows up, as a US senator with a taste for booze, whom Dominika opportunistically swipes from another agent.

The makers deserve some credit for making a feature film that is clearly intended for a mature audience, something which we don’t see enough of out of Hollywood these days [why bother, when you can churn out sequels and comic-book movies to greater profit?]. But the result here, while well-crafted, is almost entirely cheerless. It’s hard to engage with a heroine whose initial action are altruistic, yet appears to become, by the end, amost as soulless and propelled by self-interest as the state who recruited her.

Dir: Francis Lawrence
Star: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons

 

Red Sparrow (alternate review)

By Dieter

★★★½
“From Russia without love.”

So, I saw “Red Sparrow”. But I was hesitant. So hesitant, I actually pressed the button to get off the bus when I was still not so far away from my flat. But the door didn’t open; I interpreted that as force majeure and stayed until I reached the cinema.

First of all, this movie is not what it seems to be – or is marketed as. Which you could already sense; I mean, if you see a trailer for a 140 minute-movie and there is not the slightest indication of action, it could perhaps be guessed that it’s not really an action movie. And indeed, it’s not. If someone goes into the movie expecting a movie like Atomic Blonde, Unlocked, Salt or Haywire, he/she will likely be disappointed. The action early on is only with Joel Edgerton, not with Lawrence. And despite beating up a treacherous couple responsible for the end of her ballerina career, and an extended torture scene at the end that ends with a stabbing, Dominika is usually not involved.

This movie reminded me most of all of the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: long and drawn-out, but without the suspense. You have to have what we call in Germany “good seating-flesh” – you’re sitting a long time in the cinema! When the film ended, an old woman behind me who was there with her son and his wife whispered, “Schwere Kost, nicht wahr?”. That translates as “A heavy meal, wasn’t it?”, meaning it’s not easily digestible. I was also reminded of John LeCarré movies, where everything is all talk and no action at all. So it’s not an action-adventure, or a “girls with guns” movie. But I think that fans of Jennifer Lawrence (mainly in the USA, not really in Germany) and feminists won’t likely embrace or love this movie. It’s not really an “enjoyable” movie, that can serve a quasi-feminist agenda in the way Wonder Woman did.

No, the main theme of the movie is the constantly shifting sands underfoot, which could easily open up at any moment and swallow the main protagonist. Some characters die during the course of the story, and it’s not necessarily the guilty ones who catch a bullet. But it’s a problem that there are hardly any sympathetic characters in the movie. Even Dominika is a big question mark, as the Russian secret service tactics force her to play a game of deception and manipulation, exactly as she was trained for. It leaves you, even at the end, guessing on which side she is/was/may have been on, in shades of Atomic Blonde. Things constantly change…

It also reminded me of Child 44 with Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace and – hey! – Joel Edgerton.  This was a serial killer story set in Stalin-era Soviet Union, in which you could constantly lose your head or fall victim to intrigue. The feeling of constant threat and danger was stronger there. But I note, “Soviet Union,” because confusingly, this movie seems to play in contemporary Russia. Which is…. quite strange: the “red sparrow” program did exist in the 1960s but may not even have survived that decade, never mind existing today. The movie adapts the first book in a trilogy by a former American agent so he presumably knows what he wrote about; it all appears very realistic.

But with modern Russia as the background? I find that a bit hard to believe. German reviewers tended to complain about old clichés, thicker than in classic James Bond movies. They may be partly right. When I saw Charlotte Rampling standing and explaining to Lawrence what her duty is, in front of the “school for whores”, I was very much reminded of Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb, setting Daniela Bianchini up to attract James Bond. And the Secret Service of Russia appears to come right out of the 50s/60s, not today. Much has also been made, mainly by American reviewers, about the sex/nude/violent scenes. While they are all part of the story, if you are looking at the whole of the movie – once again, 140 long minutes – it doesn’t feel as spectacular or scandalous as the articles made it. Strangely, even Lawrence seemed to play up the sex angle in interviews (also causing a minor outcry by puritans when she appeared at a premiere of the movie, showing some cleavage…). Yes, you see her nude in the movie but I can’t personally say a 3-second shot of one breast and 10 seconds on her butt would be worth the admission!

I mean. Jennifer, you know there exists something called internet pornography? You really think we men are so hormone-driven that a glimpse of your almost-naked body for a few seconds would make us buy a (not really that cheap) ticket for a 140 minute movie? Reeaalllllyyy? ;-) But then this may also be testament to a certain kind of desperation on the part of the studio: how else to sell this clunky piece of espionage fiction. What do you do when you have no big action scenes or robots from space?

There is a nasty but quick rape scene, but we saw worse in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies. It has to be said, this scene seemed stolen almost 1:1 from Stoker, with Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman. There are some ugly torture scenes but they are similarly brief, except for the last one. And as I hardly sympathized or identified with any of the characters, they also failed to make an emotional impact on me. I really have to say: After having explored the “Giallo” genre, I can say these kinds of movies – done almost 50 years ago – were much more terrifying when it came to violence, and more daring with regard to nudity or sex. So, I have a problem when some articles seem to celebrate Jennifer Lawrence’ dedication for “revealing so much” and “daring”. Maybe it’s shocking for today’s (female?) American cinema-goers, I don’t know. By my standards and in my opinion, it’s quite tame in all aspects.

I do give credit to Lawrence, who never saw an acting school from the inside, and has matured – yes, even by my standards! – into a “real actress”. I personally find it very positive that a studio is willing to make a movie almost entirely focused on its story with a nice budget ($69 million) instead of the next action-SFX-extravaganza. But I have seen better. That said, for those willing to invest the time and money, the movie may actually provide something. The actors are all good – I have not mentioned Mary Louise Parker in surprise cameo in the middle of the movie), the production design is impressive (even if Film-Russia seems to have a preference for 1970’s interior design) and the James Newton Howard (Salt, btw.) score is solid as always, even though it mainly plays in the background.

The studio’s idea behind the green light for the movie may have been to create another successful franchise. The formula? Actress Jennifer Lawrence + director Francis Lawrence + adapt a successful bestseller. It worked with the Hunger Games movies – Lawrence directed the last three – but I fear won’t be the case here. While I can imagine that the book may have been a great read for those who love a good spy story, that alone does not necessarily recommend it to become a blockbuster movie, despite some admirable achievements by the team in front and behind the camera.

For fans of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Russia House, it may be worth the admission. Everyone else, can wait for the movie to become available as a rental or on TV. Honestly, I would prefer a sequel to Atomic Blonde or The Man From U.N.C.L.E. [The latter should have been so much more successful, but didn’t get the same advertising push as this new J-Law vehicle] While it’s no bad movie at all, people may be lured in based on wrong assumptions, such as thinking this is some kind of Black Widow origin story. They’ll leave disappointed, and I predict another flop in Lawrence’s career.

Dir: Francis Lawrence
Star: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons

The Five

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★★★½
“Live organ donor.”

A chance encounter in a convenience store destroys the life of Go Eun-ah (Kim). For her young daughter accidentally sees serial killer Oh Jae-wook (On) abducting his next victim. Realizing he has been spotted, Jae-wook carries out a brutal home invasion, killing both the daughter and Eun-ah’s husband, and leaving her permanently paralyzed. But he has reckoned without Eun-ah’s fortitude. She devotes the rest of her life to tracking down her attacker, and puts together a team of four to help her. All need transplants, for them or their family. So Eun-ah has promised that once Jae-wook has been captured, delivered to her and killed, she will give them her organs. Damn. That’s what I call “fully committed”… But when Jae-Wook realizes he is being hunted, he turns his attentions on the hunters.

Revenge seems to have been a strong theme in the Korean cinema we’ve covered here – Lady Vengeance, Princess Aurora and perhaps most closely, Monster. This perhaps falls a little short of the best of those, but is by no means a bad movie: it’s executed with plenty of style, and the twists and turns keep coming from beginning to end. This was Jeong’s first feature, not that you’d know it, and is based on his own web-comic. This has a very strong concept, and though it may seem implausible, the set-up is done with great care, putting together the elements in a way that it all seems credible. And even though confined to a wheel-chair, Eyn-Ah’s place here is secure, from the scene where she believes she spots Jae-Wook in the street, and wheels herself after him frantically, a long knife in her hand.

The first half is particularly good, explaining why Eyn-Ah came to such a desperate place, and how she linked up with others who are equally desperate in a different direction. It’s certainly consistent in tone, and if you’re looking for some frothy entertainment, you should stay well away: there isn’t much light to be found in this darkness [though I did laugh at the guy Eyn-Ah captures during her investigation who protests, dead-pan, “Madame, two Tasers in one day!” Ok, you probably had to be there…]. This is especially true of the ending, which I must admit, I found the weakest part of the film. It could have been considerably more satisfying, both in the consummation of Eyn-Ah’s revenge and her eventual fate.  At one point it feels as if her old skills – early on, we see her creating a wonderful Rube Goldberg machine for her daughter’s birthday – are going to prove gloriously relevant, and it’s a shame they aren’t.

However, perhaps this is the point. As Eyn-Ah is told by the (very Christian) caregiver, who initially takes care of her on release from hospital, “Revenge may feel sweet before you do it, but he’ll haunt you forever.” Maybe Eyn-Ah’s entire scheme is a way of avoiding this guilt. If so, I can’t deny its ultimate success.

Dir: Jeong Yeon-shik
Star: Kim Sun-ah, On Joo-wan, Ma Dong-seok, Shin Jung-geun

Revenge

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★★★★½
“Women always have to put up a fucking fight.”

This French rape-revenge movie is the most blood-drenched GWG film I’ve seen since Kill Bill, Volume 1, and is not for the faint of heart. However, the good news is, it’s not the rape part of the equation which is hard to watch: this is depicted with admirable restraint, occurring mostly off-camera. The director has stressed that the story isn’t about the rape, and I’m delighted with that: it has always struck me as the least interesting element. It’s a plot device, to kick-off what matters. Focusing on it, as some films have done, seems to me like focusing on turning the ignition key, instead of driving the car. This, instead, offers a road-trip to remember.

The victim is Jen (Lutz), a young girl having a weekend in the Moroccan desert with her rich, married boyfriend, Richard (Janssens). He’s also there to do a spot of hunting with his pals, Stan and Dimitri (Colombe and Bouchède). They four have a night drinking and dancing, but the next morning, when Richard heads off to make travel arrangements, Stan rapes Jen. On Richard’s return, he tries to smooth things over. Jen is having none of it, and storms off. Knowing that any legal complaint would destroy his marriage, Richard fakes calling for transport out, then pushes Jen off a cliff. Her landing is… not a soft one. Convinced the problem is solved, the men leave disposing of the body until later. Except, Jen isn’t dead, and when the trio go back, she’s not there. Helped by some impressively strong peyote – in this case, the drugs clearly do work – she patches herself up, and turns the hunters into the hunted.

First, let me address the improbably-resilient elephant in the room. Yes, her survival and pursuit is implausible, with a couple of large holes. Literally: one of the film’s two highly cringe-inducing pieces of self-surgery shows Jen patching up a hole in her stomach. Yet there must, of necessity, be an even larger one in her back. What happened to that? To be honest, they didn’t need this aspect at all: simply surviving the fall would have been hardcore enough. She also goes barefoot through the entire film, without a whimper. In the Arizona summer, I can’t take the garbage out barefoot without leaving singed skin on the drive. One shot of her pulling the shoes off her first victim would have fixed that.

It’s a shame, albeit a minor one, because virtually everything else is perfect. The transition of Jen, from the stuff of Richard’s fantasies, to that of his nightmares – he’s the one who delivers the tagline above – is impeccably handled. Even her good looks transform. At the beginning, it’s a shallow and utterly conventional prettiness – which she has exploited into a weekend getaway to a luxury location. By the end, she has paid a terrible price for this. Yet even as she’s missing minor body parts, disfigured, drenched in blood (both hers and others) and covered in desert grime… she’s glowing. Her inner beauty shines through, increasingly illuminating the bad-ass bitch she has become over the course of proceedings.

For a film lauded for its supposed up-ending of the male gaze, this feels a bit odd, since it could be read as the sexual assault triggering Jen’s blossoming: rape as psychological therapy. She should thank her attackers! [The image of a rising phoenix branded into her skin, due to her impromptu first-aid, is not exactly subtle in its imagery. Then again, the entire film is not exactly subtle, and proudly defiant as such] If that reading is on shaky ground, it’s also amusing to note Revenge utterly fails the dreaded Bechdel Test, despite being brutally empowering, to a degree rarely seen. More evidence – as if it were really needed – of how shitty the Bechdel Test is at evaluating films.

The good thing is that the feature’s entertainment value in no way relies on any kind of Identity Politics 1.0.1. to work. It functions perfectly well as a stripped-down pursuit, which neither asks for, no offers, any kind of quarter on behalf of the participants – for their genders or any other reason. There’s a steady, relentless escalation to proceedings from the moment Jen takes flight, to a final confrontation which redefines “paint the walls blood-red”. That’s a jaw-dropping pursuit round the house where things began, and includes proof that cling film, like duct tape, has a thousand and one uses.

The director says the only previous example of the rape-revenge genre she watched was Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Though if true, the proximity of names for the heroine here and in the genre’s most infamous entry, I Spit On Your Grave, is a striking coincidence. That aside, it’s interesting to note that the only other female-directed entry, Baise-moi, was also from France. And in tone, this has almost as much in common with À l’interieur (Inside), which was just as blood-drenched, and similarly gave absolutely no fucks. Much credit to Fargeat for this “take no prisoners” attitude, and delivering a thoroughly uncompromising piece of cinema; kudos for all of her cast as well, in particular Lutz, who go all-in to no less a degree.

I’ve been watching extreme films for thirty years or so, and let’s be honest, you get a bit desensitized to it all. We went to see this one at a local art cinema, and from their reactions, it was clear that most of the audience were, let’s say, not as “experienced” in the ways of savage cinema as Chris and I. Their responses merely added to the fun: I’d kinda forgotten how audience reaction can enhance a film (their goddamn rustling of snacks… not so much, but let’s move rapidly on). At the end, after all was said and done, one of the other attendees blurted out loud, “Best ten bucks I’ve ever spent.” I’m not inclined to disagree. Despite its flaws – which I acknowledge and embrace – if 2018 offers a film which packs a bigger punch, I can’t wait to see it.

Dir: Coralie Fargeat
Star: Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchède

Girl Fights Back, by Jacques Antoine

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

I’ve come to the conclusion I prefer bad films to bad books. A bad film can be appreciated and offer entertainment in unexpected ways. I’ve rarely found that to be the case with literature, which just… lies there, dully. If a movie sucks, then you can at least allow it to drift into the background, while you check your phone, play with the cat, or do household chores. A bad book, on the other hand, requires every bit as much effort as a good one: the return on that investment is just a great deal less.

Not that Girl Fights Back is truly bad. There are few books that are the publishing equivalent, say, of Plan 9 From Outer Space. But it is strikingly mediocre, with a heroine whose name might as well be “Mary Sue” rather than “Emily Kane”, since she’s so idealized. I mean, five minutes in the company of this teenage girl, and a hardened professional espionage agent melts like butter: “He must have glimpsed in her eyes just then the immense wellspring of compassion and forgiveness that made its home there, and sighed as his shoulders visibly sagged, perhaps under the weight of the knowledge that she could indeed forgive him.” Damn. That’s a sentence and a half. He’s not the only one: Everybody Loves Emily, it appears, whether it’s her school-friends or lethal ex-CIA operatives.

She is the daughter of George Kane, a man with a murky past, who works as a chauffeur/bodyguard for a former government executive, who also appears to have been involved in his share of previous shenanigans. To cut a long story short, their past comes back to haunt them: the estate where they live is attacked one night, by a group seeking information about a research project into “super soldiers” with which both George and his employer were involved. The attackers think Emily is part of it; fortunately, she is out in the woods that evening, and is able to return later and rescue her father, who clues her in to the situation. So, what does she do, after overcoming the shock of all these traumatic events, to foil those hunting her?

If you guessed, “Return to school, as if nothing had happened,” you are the author of this book.

Seriously. I know she’s a martial arts wizard, and there’s such a thing as “hiding in plain sight.” Still, this ranks as among the most baffling of decisions I can remember a character making. She could have hidden out with the rest of her family, or gone on the run independently. Nope. Back to class and hanging out at the dojo it is. There’s also the striking way in which a major character is suddenly disposed of: “____ died that night, having never regained consciousness.” Well, that’s a shocker, especially since they had been quite chatty over the preceding hours.

The martial arts heavy nature of the action is also somewhat problematic, since this kind of things is hard to describe: reading about kung fu, tends to be a bit like reading about juggling. It’s nowhere near as exciting as seeing it, unless the writer is particularly good. Antoine is not, and we get sentences such as, “Emily slid one hand along her arm, until it became a ridge-hand strike to the side of her headgear, and in the ensuing confusion jabbed to the center of her chest.” Not exactly painting a thrilling word-picture, is it?

The book does possess a philosophical tone, which occasionally hits on some nuggets of interest. I particularly liked this one, on gender differences: “Boys fight for dominance, she thought, which means that at some level they understand they must preserve their defeated enemy. Otherwise dominance will not have been achieved. But girls fight to injure or eradicate. They have no use for a defeated enemy, which makes them much more malevolent than boys, she concluded.” Overall, however, that’s the exception rather than the rule, and I reached the end with absolutely no interest in seeing what happened next.

Author: Jacques Antoine
Publisher: Amaterasu Press, available through Amazon, both as an e-book and a paperback.
Book 1 of 7 in the Emily Kane Adventure series.