Tag: netflix

Ballerina (2023)

  By

★★★
“It is very chilly in Korea.”

I should be clear, this is not to be confused with next year’s action movie about a female killer called Ballerina. That one will be part of the John Wick universe. This South Korean film isn’t. Indeed, it’s very much its own creature – perhaps too much so. It feels like a hit-woman film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn: it’s all neon lights and understated emotions, to the point of coldness. For some reason, it feels as if everything past getting out of bed is a chore for the characters here, with almost every action feeling as it it were preceded by an imaginary sigh. The ennui is overpowering, to steal a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galazy.

The heroine is Okju (Jeon), a bodyguard whose best friend Min-hee (Park) kills herself after being abused by serial predator and sex trafficker, Choi Pro (Kim). Okju makes it her own, personal mission to take revenge on Choi. It’s a difficult job, due to the protection he’s afforded by being part of a larger criminal enterprise, run by Chief Jo (Kim). Min-hee realizes edged weapons aren’t enough, and needs a firearm – something which proves considerably more difficult to obtain locally, than in your typical action movie. On the other hand, Jo is increasingly tired of Choi’s attitude, as he becomes more trouble than he’s worth. Still, giving up a member to an outsider isn’t something any gang leader does casually.

It does feel like this is very much a case of style over substance. After an opening which sees Okju utterly unfazed when wandering through a convenience store robbery in progress, you will have quite a while to wait for the next slice of action. That takes place after she has convinced Choi to take her to a seedy motel, after she has discovered the horrific truth about his activities. The subsequent set-piece illustrates an odd tendency for the film to shift into comedy, as someone attacks Okju with a chainsaw, only for an unfortunately timed door opening to derail the attack. More successful is the later scene where she buys weapons from a travelling husband and wife, which has a quirky charm that’s endearing. I’d watch Adventures of the Gun-Running Van.

The rest is occasionally successful, and occasionally not. The action is over-sharply edited, though does stay on this side of coherence. However, there just wasn’t sufficient emotional connection for me. Admittedly, this may have partly been deliberate. It felt we were never given much reason to get on board with Okju’s guest for vengeance: her revenge seems more of a job than a passion project. She shows up, does what’s necessary, then clocks out and goes home, to stare blankly off into the distance, illuminated by a pastel glow. I’m hopeful 2024’s Ballerina – the title here refers to the best friend, incidentally, not the protagonist – will be more memorable than than this well-crafted piece of neon fluff.

Dir: Lee Chung-hyun
Star: Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Ji-hoon, Park Yu-rim, Mu-Yeol Kim

Against the Ropes

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★★½
“More soap than opera.”

In one of the odder remakes I’ve seen in a while, this is a repurposing of the French 2013 film, Les reines du ring, which translates as “Queens of the Ring”. The core concept is retained, but the location is changed from France to Mexico, and the idea is expanded to a ten-part series. These changes make for a bit of a mixed blessing. Pro wrestling is certainly a more well-established part of the cultural landscape in Mexico, where lucha libre is extremely popular. On the other hand, the multiplication of the running time a factor of about four, leads to the necessary injection of superfluous storylines, which definitely reduced the entertainment value as far as I was concerned. It’s less a wrestling soap-opera, than a soap-opera with wrestling in it.

It begins with Ángela (Sánchez) getting out of jail, after a largely unwarranted six-year sentence for drug possession. While she’s been in jail, daughter Rocío (Santiago) has been living with her grandmother, but has been spending increasing time with her father, Lalo (Jimenez). He runs a local wrestling arena, and his girlfriend is the woman’s champion, Candy Caramelo (Gruber). Rocio has no interest in re-connecting with her mother, and Ángela ends up breaking out the old family business; her long-gone father was a star. She secretly becomes masked wrestler Novia Negra – the Bride in Black – to win back Rocio’s affection. But Candy is not impressed by this new rival, in either the ring or her family life.

If this had been it, I feel things would have been entertaining, though I admit it would have been tough to stretch that plot-line out over eight episodes. The makers prefer to throw in a slew of additional storylines, of varying effectiveness. Ángela seeking for the truth behind the knapsack which got her sent to prison. Rocio’s trouble at school, with bullies and a boy she likes. Hell, even Ángela’s mother gets a subplot in which she finds romance with the owner of the bridal store for whom her daughter works. There are times when it feels like there’s barely a mention of lucha libre over an entire episode. GLOW did a much better job of striking a balance between character development and sports entertainment.

This is a shame, since there are some interesting quirks here. GLOW never pretended wrestling was anything but predetermined. This show firmly keeps “kayfabe” – the illusion that what goes on in the ring is real. I don’t mean that Candy and Ángela are pretending to dislike each other: that’s genuine enough. But the battles between Candy and Novia are not carefully choreographed spectacles of athleticism, they’re presented as “real fights”. I’d love to have seen more exploration of this, and considerably less of Rocio’s pre-teen angst. To be frank, who cares if she has had her first period? I know I didn’t. Wrestling has been described as “soap-opera on steroids.” This show feels in need of an injection of PEDs.

Showrunner: Fernando Sariñana
Star: Caraly Sánchez, Scarlet Gruber, Alisson Santiago, Cuauhtli Jimenez
a.k.a. Contra las cuerdas

Who Is Erin Carter?

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★★★★
“Discipline isn’t an issue in Ms. Carter’s class.”

Okay, I will admit that this strained credibility on a number of occasions, to the point that buttons were popping off its shirt. But I don’t think the makers were exactly going for gritty realism, and the bottom line is: I enjoyed this a lot. Certainly, more so than Special Ops: Lioness, another limited series which we were watching concurrently. To at least partially address the question posed by the title, Eric Carter (Ahmad) is a supply teacher working in a Spanish school. She lives with her partner, Jordi (Teale), and their somewhat disabled daughter, Harper (Watson). But at the supermarket, Erin foils a robbery in order to save Harper, and it becomes very clear that her skills are not limited to the arena of education.

Turns out, Erin has a past, and the publicity resulting from her impromptu heroism brings it to visit. She finds herself embroiled in murder, organized crime and police corruption, as well as more normal familial drama, such as neighbourhood jealousy and whiny pre-teen nonsense. One of the seven 45-minute episodes is entirely in flashback (unexpected Jamie Bamber!), explaining the reason she changed her identity and moved to Spain, as well as why those from her history are keen to catch up with her. Even the spectacularly unobservant Jordi begins to realize that his other half is not quite as claimed. Her original explanation of a relapse into alcoholism doesn’t exactly explain all the sudden absences, injuries and unusual behaviour Erin is now exhibiting, as she tries to manage the escalating situation.

As you can see, you will need to suspend your disbelief, not least in the reveal of the big bad, who turns out to be a remarkably coincidental person, already in Erin’s life. But there’s a lot to enjoy here, such as the sardonic comparison between “Mommy life” and Erin’s violent and deceptive past. She can go from swapping bitchy comments with a school colleague, to punching throats, in what feels like the blink of an eye. I was also impressed with the combat scenes, which tend to have Erin using anything she can find around her, and possess an impact considerably greater than most TV series. Ahmad, who was in Les Filles du Soleil, possesses a terse fighting style that’s effective.

I admit to largely hating Harper, who is almost a cliche of the bratty, narcissistic and somewhat precocious little girl – admittedly, that may be the point. There are hints she has violent tendencies of her own, albeit this angle is never developed in the first series. The show escalates nicely, until a final episode where Erin and an unexpected ally end up going on the offensive, and things are wrapped up in a reasonable manner. The show did well, topping Netflix’s English-language chart in its week of release, and is still #3 at the time of writing. I’d certainly like to see another series, with this unexpectedly having become my favourite new show of 2023 to date. Though I’m still not sure of the answer to the title’s question.

Creator: Jack Lothian
Star: Evin Ahmad, Sean Teale, Douglas Henshall, Indica Watson

Heart of Stone

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★★
“Entertainment: Impossible”

The Great 2023 Void of Action Heroines continues on. The closest thing we’ve seen to one as a mainstream hit in the cinemas is… um, Barbie. Yeah. Not going there. I was looking at the box-office chart for the year, and excluding movies which were actually released in 2022 e.g. Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is only one single film in the top two hundred we have covered here. Polite Society sits outside the top hundred, at $1,.5m [We will get round to The Wrath of Becky in a bit. It’s #181, with a gross of $168,109.] Last year, we had Everything and The Woman King in the top thirty. 2021 gave us Black Widow; 2020, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984. The complete lack of tentpole heroines this year is disconcerting.

There has been no shortage of female supporting characters who have kicked butt. We already wrote about the The Women of Mission: Impossible, while John Wick 4 also delivered in this category, among quite a few other successful movies. But if you want to see a GWG take centre-stage, you will not find it in the movies. In some ways, it’s more convenient, to be able to sit at home, in your own comfy chair, with a choice of reasonably-priced snacks, and simply push a button on your remote control. But, it has to be said: quality wise, there’s often a good reason most of these films have gone straight to a streaming service. We’ve already covered a number here. The Mother. Furies. Mercy Falls. True Spirit. Some were decent. Yet none have achieved a seal of approval.

This one certainly won’t, barely reaching the level of acceptable entertainment, and sadly, continuing Gal Gadot’s streak of swings and misses. She blazed onto the scene in Wonder Woman back in 2017, and seemed set to take over the mantle as one of the top action actresses in Hollywood. But she has singularly failed to build on that foundation. She lost a lot of public goodwill for her tone-deaf Imagine video in the pandemic. WW84 was a flop, Red Notice was a quickly-forgotten Netflix Original, and her turn in Death on the Nile was widely-panned, becoming a meme. This, however, was a chance to correct course, putting her front and centre in a movie which, it was clearly hoped, would kick-start a franchise and become the female version of Mission: Impossible.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Two minutes in, Chris turned to me and said, “Is this a movie or a TV series?” and I can see her point. Having watched this just a couple of weeks after the undeniably cinematic Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the difference is obvious. Harper directed The Aeronauts, which was decent enough, but it seems he is incapable of scaling things up from a balloon basket, to the much larger scope needed here. Part of the problem with the action sequences in particular, is the VR enhancement gimmick the heroine wears, allowing her to get real-time updates from her handler. This too often leaves everything looking like it’s a video-game, and it rubs off on other sequences, such as her parachute jump, which feels thoroughly unconvincing.

The plot is perhaps an even greater weakness, a confusing and unengaging mess. Rachel Stone (Gadot) works for a group called Charter, who use hi-tech surveillance for good (yeah… about that…). She’s embedded as an agent in MI-5, for reasons that are never made clear. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the people on her team, Parker (Dornan), turns out to be plotting to steal The Heart, the super-computer on which Charter relies for their surveillance – and use it, presumably, not for good. He has teamed up with talented young hacker Keya Dhawan (Bhatt) to this end, and only Stone can stop them, recover The Heart, and save her colleagues at Charter, including Stone’s boss Nomad (Okenedo).

Dear god, I almost lost consciousness merely typing the previous paragraph. Reviewing the previous work of writers Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder, what stands out is an almost complete lack of action movies. Rucka has worked mostly in comics (including the one which became The Old Guard), while Schroeder did, um, Christopher Robin and Hidden Figures. The lack of experience shows. Never mind not having written an action movie, it feels as if neither of them had seen an action movie. If so, they might have realized Stone’s handler flicking VR screen around by gesture, was done twenty years ago in Minority Report. The good ideas here are all like that, things you’ve seen elsewhere, and done better, while the ones the movie can call its own are uninspired in concept and/or execution.

It doesn’t help that the supporting cast are mostly bland. If Gadot does still have reasonable charisma, Dornan is completely forgettable. Bhatt is a thoroughly unconvincing hacker – I might trust her to reset my account password, and apologize for the inconvenience. That’s about it. The most irritating character though, is probably her handler. I get what they were going for, but almost every time he’s involved, it leaves the heroine feeling not much more than a meat-puppet, removing a significant degree of agency from her. I will say, some of the action set-pieces aren’t too bad. There’s a good car-chase through Lisbon, for example. But any secret organization which fills its airship with hydrogen, is certainly not going to remain secret for very long. That’s the level of idiocy we are dealing with in the writing here.

Long before the end, I had mentally checked out, as the film globe-trotted manically from [checks notes] the Alps to London to Portugal to Senegal to Iceland. There’s no denying there was a significant amount of resources expended on this production, though Netflix is notoriously tight-lipped on specific budgets. However, the film doesn’t so much jump the shark, as use it for a 3000-metre steeplechase, when the MI-5 spies have a dance break. Read the sentence again. Roll it around your brain. That it’s to a Lizzo song – unfortunate timing, that – makes it considerably worse. Everything thereafter feels like a waste of those resources, as well as the variable talents of those involved.

Dir: Tom Harper
Star: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Alia Bhatt, Sophie Okonedo

Furies

  By

★★★½
“If you don’t want men to push you around, be stronger than them.”

This is a prequel of sorts to Furie, partly telling the story of how its villainess, Thanh Soi (Toc) came to be (also: not to be confused with The Furies). However, it’s more the saga of Bi (Quynh), the daughter of a rural prostitute who makes her way to the city seeking her fortune.  There, she joins Thanh and Hong (Rima) under the protection of the Svengali-like Jacqueline (Ngô), who trains and indoctrinates them towards their eventual mission. This involves bringing down the leader of the city’s underworld, who has been exploiting women for years, in addition to other unsavoury activities. 

He goes by the descriptive and fairly accurate name of Mad Dog Hai, and his underlings are little more sane. When the trio of women make their presence felt by sabotaging a drug deal, Hai is not happy, and from there, it’s an escalating series of tit-for-tat attacks. We also discover that Jacqueline’s motives are not purely altruistic, being considerably more personal then she originally admits. There’s an argument, which the movie does not explicitly address, that she’s exploiting the three young women herself, albeit in a different way from Mad Dog. Rather than physical abuse (of which the film is certainly not short), hers is a psychological approach, taking their anger against men and focusing it against Hai, as well as sharpening it to a particularly fine point.

At 109 minutes, it’s arguably a little too long, and the film generally works better in action, then when pushing the more melodramatic elements. The makeover montage of Bi, for example, is superfluous and too obvious. If the editing during the fights is perhaps slightly too frenetic, it isn’t too much of a problem. This is more than made up for by the high-impact nature of the combat, with all three characters (and Jacqueline, by the end), going full force into an endless slew of faceless minions, thrown at them by Hai. There’s also a motorcycle chase/fight, apparently inspired by John Wick 3, though the execution is painfully green-screen. Would it have hurt the makers at least to get a wind machine, and create the illusion of movement?

When sticking to the purely physical stuff though, it’s mostly effective stuff. Nothing ground-breaking, admittedly, yet there are times when sticking to the basics and keeping things simple is probably for the best. It’s not exactly an advertisement for Vietnam: Chris turned to me when it finished, and firmly crossed the country off her holiday destination list. The city does seem a bit of a sewer, to put it mildly, though I must say the cinematography here is all pastel neon colours, and nicely executed. It at least helps lightly paper over the wholesale unpleasantness which is going on. I’m fairly sure this cost a fraction of bigger Netflix originals like Extraction II, yet for entertainment value, it’s not so far behind.

Dir: Ngô Thanh Vân
Star: Dong Anh Quynh, Toc Tien, Rima Thanh Vy, Ngô Thanh Vân

Kill Boksoon

  By

★★★½
“Joan Wick”

There’s a lot to admire about this South Korean film, though a couple of fumbles stop it from achieving the heights it threatens to do. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a knock-off of Kill Bill going by the title. But it’s as much a pun on the name of the heroine, Gil Bok-soon (Jeon). She has been an assassin since she was 17, and has worked her way up to be the top employee of the MK. ENT corporation, run by Cha Min-kyu (Sol). They are one of a number of competing companies offering killers for hire, but to ensure standards, certain common rules have been agreed, e.g. no kids, and are adhered to by all. Well… Kinda…

Bok-soon has a teenage daughter, Jae-yeong (Kim), from whom she has kept her career secret. But Bok-soon is still concerned Jae-yeong might follow in her footsteps, especially after she stabs a schoolmate in the neck. Bok-soon also breaks one of those corporate rules when she refuses to kill a politician’s son. This kicks off an escalating series of problems, largely driven by Min-kyu’s sister, Min-hee (Esom), a director of MK ENT, who had long resented Bok-soon’s special relationship with her brother. Bok-soon eventually finds herself on the receiving end of a contract, despite Min-kyu’s best efforts to avoid such a scenario, while also having to handle the teenage drama of Jae-yeong, and keep her personal and work lives separate. 

I enjoyed the world building here. It feels a little like John Wick in its creation of a shadow society of assassins, operating by its own rules just beneath the surface. There is a peculiarly corporate feel to this one, perhaps a reflection of South Korean culture. For example, Bok-soon hangs out at a restaurant with some employees of “rival” companies, shooting the business breeze. The place is run by a former assassin, and it’s all very convivial – at least until the contract on her comes out. What follows is likely the action highlight of the film (not least the fate of the poor, unfortunate owner). I also loved Bok-soon’s way of foreseeing how fights will go, like a chess master thinking moves ahead. A similar skill was seen in Zhang Yimou’s Hero; this ramps it up.

Less successful is the family drama. I’ve a low tolerance for whiny teenagers (I’ve lived through it!), and this all felt too soap-opera for my tastes. I get that the daughter’s secret is intended as a parallel for her mother’s, but it’s too obvious and generated more eye-rolling than emotional connection. With an extended running-time of 137 minutes, it certainly feels like unnecessary padding. I’d rather have learned more about the world of the assassins, rather than Jae-yeong’s (largely self-inflicted) schoolyard angst. But even discarding that, there’s still plenty to appreciate here, with Jeon’s strong performance at its core. If this were to follow John Wick in becoming a franchise, I certainly would not complain. 

Dir: Byun Sung-hyun
Star: Jeon Do-yeon, Sol Kyung-gu, Kim Si-a, Esom

True Spirit

  By

★★½
“Plain sailing.”

This blandly inspirational tale from Australia is based on real events. In 2009, sixteen-year-old Jessica Watson (Croft) set sail out of Sydney Harbour, intending to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world solo and unassisted. 210 days later, she returned to Sydney safely. There: I’ve spoiled it for you. Oh, alright: in between departure and arrival, stuff happens. There is also some stuff which happens before she leaves, with certain parties questioning whether she is fit to carry out such a dangerous voyage, citing her lack of age and ocean-going experience. A close encounter between Jessica’s boat the Pink Lady and a freighter, while on a test sailing trip, only seemed to confirm there was good reason for concern.

Still, with the backing of her mom (Paquin) and dad (Lawson), as well as her sailing coach Ben Bryant (Curtis), she intends to prove them wrong. Ben is on a bit of a quest for redemption himself, his reputation as a sailor having been damaged by the death of a crew member on his watch. Just to confuse matters, no such person existed: he’s a composite of various people who helped out, and exaggerated for dramatic purposes. Speaking of facts, while Jessica did go around the world, her journey was not long enough to qualify for the official record (the closer to the poles you go, the less distance is needed). This is something the film effortlessly ignores. I guess being the youngest person to kinda do something is less interesting.

I think my main complaint is how mundane much of the 210-day journey was. A couple of storms, including one on the final leg, along the South of Australia, is about as dramatic as it gets. Otherwise, Jessica gets a bit whiny after the Pink Lady is stuck in the doldrums for a week, and has some encounters with dolphins (though I suspect these might have been digital!). That’s really about it. It’s all reasonably well-handled from a technical perspective (except for some ropey storm CGI), and Croft’s portrayal of the young heroine is decent. She’s not depicted as some kind of saint, and is given a good deal of personality, so you will find yourself rooting for her to succeed.

There just isn’t very much sense of danger here. Part of it may be the factual nature of the store: we know she survives, even subconsciously, negating any genuine feeling of peril on the high seas. But it hardly seems like she was “solo”, being in almost perpetual contact with Ben and her family through a sat-phone, and even posting regular entries to a vlog online of her trip. Obviously, having her sitting around on a yacht by herself might have been more challenging from the film’s perspective, but as is, this feels more like a slight challenge, akin to going on holiday by yourself for the first time, rather than the life-threatening endeavour it actually was.

Dir: Sarah Spillane
Star: Teagan Croft, Cliff Curtis, Anna Paquin, Josh Lawson

The Mother

  By

★★★
“Jenny from the Glock.”

It has been a very quiet year for big-budget action heroine movies so far. Here we are, more than one-third of the way through 2023, and this Netflix Original is likely the highest profile entry to date. There is a certain pedigree here, albeit of the direct-to-streaming variety, with director Caro having also helmed the (considerably more expensive) live-action remake of Mulan, which went straight to Disney+. Lopez has dabbled in the action field before, including the likes of Anaconda and Enough, but this is certainly her first full-on entry into our field. The results are workmanlike, and occasionally reasonably impressive, but there’s nothing outstanding or original enough here to make much impression.

Lopez plays an unnamed former soldier – “The Mother” is all even the credits call her – who gets involved with a pair of arms dealers, then betrays them to authorities. In revenge, one of them, Adrian Lovell (Fiennes) finds her and stabs her heavily pregnant belly. The resulting baby daughter survives, but the mother is convinced to give her child up for adoption, and vanishes off the grid herself. 12 years later, she’s told by FBI agent William Cruise (Hardwick), whose life she previously saved, of am impending kidnap attempt on her daughter, Zoe (Paez). The mother comes out of hiding to protect Zoe, though re-establishing any kind of relationship proves difficult. Not least, because Lovell is still intent on getting his revenge. Still, bonding over wilderness survival training salves all emotional wounds, apparently.

It’s all fairly straightforward, and you can likely predict where the film is going to head, at any given point. At 117 minutes, it feels somewhat too long, and there’s a split in focus as far as the antagonist goes, with Gael García Bernal playing arms dealer Héctor Álvarez. I wonder if merging his character with Lovell would have made more sense. There’s also too much time spent on the relationship between Zoe and her mother, along with a painfully obvious metaphor in the shape of a wolf bitch and her offspring, which teeters perilously close to dead horse territory much of the time. It doesn’t help that Paez has a severe case of Resting Teenager Face, and I found it almost impossible to care about her.

The film is considerably better when the characters stop speaking and begin chasing, stabbing and shooting each other instead. Even if the action sequences are sometimes over-edited, they are decently staged, I particularly enjoyed a chase, involving the Mother using her feet, a motor-cycle and a car, through the streets of “Havana” (actually Las Palmas in the Canaries). Now and again I could believe that Lopez was not just sitting in her trailer, letting her stunt double do all the work. Like most Netflix Originals e.g. The Old Guard, this will pass muster as entertainment, before vanishing off the front page of the streaming service, and heading into long-term obscurity, forgotten by most who saw it.

Dir: Niki Caro
Star: Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes

Enola Holmes 2

  By

★★★½
“The fair sex is your department.”

I had forgotten how much I really did not like the original movie. It’s particularly hard to believe, because this sequel is a significant improvement in just about every way. Most of my criticisms from the review seem to have been addressed. For example, the most annoying character, Enola’s mother, played by Helena Bonham-Carter, is all but absent, and the second most useless role, aristocrat Lord Tewkesbury (Partridge), is considerably less irritating, serving an actual purpose. Sherlock Holmes (Cavill) is shown to be the great detective, familiar from Conan Doyle’s stories. Last but not least, Enola (Brown) is a more mature, less precocious character, and even her fourth-wall breaking seems more natural and less an affectation. 

The story is better too. It begins with Enola, now trying to make her own way as a detective, is engaged to look for a missing young woman, who has vanished from her match factory job, after purloining some documents from the owner’s office. Digging into this brings Enola into a web of corruption extending high up in the government, and eventually overlaps with Sherlock’s investigation into financial irregularities in the Treasury department. Enola finds herself framed for murder by the shadowy Superintendent Grail (Thewlis) of Scotland Yard, and has to avoid the authorities’ grasp, while working with her brother to untangle the web of intrigue. It doesn’t quite all work – the overlap with Sherlock’s case is never well explained – yet it is almost always interesting and entertaining. 

The biggest step up is likely Brown’s portrayal of the heroine. Two years is a long time for a teenager: we saw our own daughter go from a problematic 16-year-old to an 18-year-old human being, and much the same transformation has occurred here. Similarly, Enola now seems like an actual person, not the artificial character created for a book. Her relationships – especially with her brother, though also with Tewkesbury – reflect this, and seem like the kind real people would have. The near-absence of showboating feminist Eudoria Holmes helps, though there are still moments that may provoke slight to moderate eye-rolling. I’d say the finale at the match factory falls into this category, and is certainly unnecessary. 

The action feels at a slightly lower, or at least, less frenetic level. The main set-piece is Enola’s breakout from prison (this is also where her mum shows up, along with her martial arts teacher sidekick). It’s not bad, though does feel more like a duty, and an add-on instead of an organic part of the movie. The incorporation into the plot of an actual event, the matchgirl strike of 1888, is a nice idea, grounding the plot, though does become a vehicle for some obvious soap-boxing. “Radical” maybe isn’t quite the compliment the film thinks. In the main, however, this was a very pleasant and unexpected surprise, whose 130 minutes seemed considerably shorter. Bring on a third installment, and hopefully sooner rather than later. 

Dir: Harry Bradbeer
Star: Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, Louis Partridge, David Thewlis

Borrego

  By

★½
“Borrego? BORE-rego, more like…”

Sorry, couldn’t resist it. For the recent string of suboptimal Netflix movies continues with this tedious bit of work, which feels like the first journey across the South Californian desert filmed in real time. It begins with Ellie (Hale), a botanist carrying out a survey near the Mexican border. She meets a teenage girl, Alex (Trujillo), who is skipping school and the two have an awkward conversation. I initially thought its stilted nature was intended to tell us something about the two characters, but nope. All the conversations here are awkward. Writer-director Harris just has no ear for dialogue, which may explain why so much of this is people wandering about instead.

Anyway, the plot proper kicks off when Ellie witnesses a plane crash nearby. Rushing to the scene, without any attempt to call for help, she finds the pilot, Tomas (Gomez) crawling from the wreckage with his cargo of drugs. At gunpoint, she is coerced into helping him carry what remains of the merchandise to its delivery point, where the intended recipient is growing increasingly antsy. Meanwhile, the only local cop (Gonzalez) is on the hunt, both for the missing botanist, and Alex, who is his daughter. All these plot threads lead to the copious trudging across the terrain mentioned above. Though people also bump into each other with the frequency required by the plot, so that the desert appears to be the size of your local convenience store.

Things unfold with the predictability of the sun in this arid corner of the country. Tomas and Ellie bond over their campfire, Tomas’s grasp of English waxing and waning as necessary. Turns out he was only involved in this sordid business to help his family, a casual excuse used by criminals since time immemorial, which cuts no ice with me. Hell, even antsy intended recipient says the same thing. We can clearly end the War On Drugs, by killing every drug dealer’s family, to remove their motivation! The movie opens and closes with po-faced captions about the societal problem of drug abuse, both prescribed and otherwise. I think if you need a Netflix original movie to tell you, “Drugs are bad, m’kay?”, there are bigger problems.

You will get an hour and a half of the various parties, showcasing some rather pretty locations, in lieu of anything approaching genuine tension or action: a car hitting a cactus is as close as we get. The photography is easily the best thing about this, with some excellent aerial footage that brings home the scope of where the participants roam. However, I did not sign up to watch “Drones Above the South-West”, and any goodwill generated falls into a canyon, as a result of the poor excuse for a climax. I’d not blame you for tuning out well before that point, however. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s all almost enough to make me wish for the ludicrous stupidity of Interceptor. 

Almost…

Dir: Jesse Harris
Star: Lucy Hale, Nicholas Gonzalez, Leynar Gomez, Olivia Trujillo