Tag: soldier

Trigger Warning

  By

★½
“May contain boredom, stupidity and poor action.”

There’s an old joke about bad movies: “This film wasn’t released, it escaped.” It seems disturbingly appropriate here, however, considering the shooting of this finished in October 2021, and it has been part of our annual previews for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Quite why Netflix sat on the end product close to three years, I don’t know. But having watched it, I can confidently say: it wasn’t long enough. This is the kind of movie that left me feeling actively more stupid by the end of it. Alba plays Parker, a soldier who returns to her hometown in rural New Mexico after her father is killed in a mile accident. Only, of course [and that whirring sound is my eyes rolling], it turns out not to be an accident.

From here spirals off a ludicrous plot in which local ne’er-do-well Elvis (Weary) is selling heavy armaments,  include machine guns and RPGs, to domestic terrorists. His family basically runs the town: brother, Jesse (Webber), is the town sheriff, and his father is Senator Ezekiel Swann (Hall), an obviously Republican politician running for re-election. It’s up to Parker to stop the bad guys, who are so evil, they burn down the bar which is Parker’s inheritance from her father. Named after her grandmother, he apparently built it when he wasn’t busy being a miner. Or a Green Beret. It’s all a bit vague. This is as authentic a portrayal of Hispanic culture as you’d expect, given a script written by three white people, which unironically uses the word “Latinx”.

It’s also directed by an Indonesian which, in a nod to the politics criticized by the movie, makes me want to go on a rant about foreigners coming over here and takin’ er jerbs. For, after all, there are plenty of American directors who are perfectly capable of making shitty action films with ham-handed social commentary. We do not need to be outsourcing this work. However, we maybe should look at outsourcing Jessica Alba. Possibly replacing her with a stick insect, since she is among the least convincing soldiers I’ve seen. The action is equally dumb: it’s the kind of movie where a bad guy picks up a chainsaw in a hardware store fight, and it starts, apparently being fully fuelled.

The whole thing is littered with similar elements which had me shaking my head. Parker can waltz into any location at will, such as finding the exact file she needs in the police station within ten seconds. While most recent Netflix action heroine films have been forgettably acceptable ways to pass a couple of hours, this one probably competes with Interceptor over the coveted crown of Worst Netflix Original. It’s amazing to think how far Alba has fallen from the glory days of work like Sin City. For Jessica’s sake, I hope her cosmetics company endeavour is working out. Because she seriously needs to rethink this whole acting thing.

Dir: Mouly Surya
Star: Jessica Alba, Mark Webber, Anthony Michael Hall, Jake Weary

Kobanê

  By

★★★
“It’s clearly no Nirvana…”

Yes, let’s get the obligatory Kurt Cobain joke out of the way quickly and painlessly. This is instead about the Kurdish city, located in northern Syria, which came under assault from forces belonging to the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014-15. The defenders eventually repelled the attack in what has been called the Kurdish version of the Battle of Stalingrad. Even before that, we had covered how groups such as the YPJ put Kurdish women on the front-line, in a way rarely seen in modern warfare. One such woman is the focus of the film, Zehra (Arin), who is forced into a commanding role after backup is refused, and the city is cut off by the advancing ISIS army.

What follows is basically your traditional war movie, with a small group of defenders coming under attack from a numerically superior opponent. We’ve seen this often enough, in the likes of Zulu, Saving Private Ryan, 300, etc. But making the central character female is certainly unusual, and better still, the film ignores her gender entirely. Seriously, I don’t recall a single time it was so much as mentioned. Any Hollywood film would surely make an obvious point of it, with a male character questioning her competence, or worse still, shoehorning in a cringeworthy, Avengers: Endgame,”She’s got help” moment. Here, everyone is far too busy trying to survive to indulge in that kind of nonsense, and if you want an up-close street fighting experience, this certainly delivers.

However, there are issues. At a whopping 159 minutes, it’s overlong, and there are also times it feels you need a Wikipedia crash course on the complicated situation involving the Kurds, Turks and Syrians. For instance, there’s a point at which the defenders are set up for betrayal. Perhaps the logic of this makes sense if you know the situation, but it felt like I had to take the logic on trust. It’s also worth remembering that this is, at heart, a piece of propaganda, and sometimes it’s not exactly subtle about it. The ISIS soldiers feel as if they strayed in from a Disney class in villainy, and there are times when the story resorts to equally blatant emotional cliché.

I was impressed by the technical aspects, with a sense of destruction – they found a lot of razed city blocks – and deaths where people get shot, sit down, and slowly pass away. Reportedly, a lot of the cast were genuine fighters who took part in the siege: that’s a bit of a mixed blessing, as sometimes the lack of acting experience shines through. I’m not sure if Arin is among them: her IMDb listing has no other roles. But she’s fine, with a face which simply feels as if has been through a lot. The film is helped significantly by Mehmûd Berazî’s score, and I think it does work better that similarly-themed features such as Soeurs D’Armes or Sisters Apart, feeling more grounded and “real.”

The makers have put the whole thing up on YouTube with subtitles, below – and if it’s imperfect, I’d say it remains worth a look.

Dir: Özlem Yasar,
Star: Dijle Arin, Awar Eli, Reger Azad, Nejbir Xanim

Hussar Ballad

  By

★★★
“Russian off to war…”

This is an adaptation of a Russian play A Long Time Ago by Alexander Gladkov, but was inspired by the real-life exploits of Nadezhda Durova. She was a woman who basically pulled a Mulan, concealing her gender in order to defend her homeland in the Napoleonic and other wars of the early 19th century. Durova joined the army on her 23rd birthday and served honourably for a decade, even after her true gender was discovered. Tsar Alexander I was impressed when he heard about Durova, giving her a promotion after summoning the soldier to his palace in St. Petersburg. Wounded by a cannonball at the Battle of Borodino, she eventually retired in 1816, with the rank equivalent to captain-lieutenant.

Somehow this became a light and fluffy slice of musical rom-com. 17-year-old Shura Azarova (Golubkina) is an accomplished rider and tomboy, who meets Hussar officer Dmitry Rzhevsky (Yakovlev), and is mistaken by him as a brother in arms. [As usual in these things, significant suspension of disbelief is required!] When war with France breaks out, Rzhevsky returns to his unit and Shura convinces faithful family retainer Ivan (Kryuchkov) to help her join the army in disguise. She makes a name for herself as a skilled and brave courier, though her relationship with Dmitry is more adversarial than romantic. There’s a French actress on whom he has designs, triggering her jealousy. Mistaken as rivalry, Dmitry and Shura end up having a duel, though the war keeps interfering in its execution. 

All is forgiven after Shura is captured on a spying mission, Dmitry leading his platoon to the rescue, and leading to a rather decent extended fight, running through a ransacked stately home. [While the actual swordplay is no great shakes in general, the other stunts aren’t bad, including Shura leaping down off a balcony, which looks to have been done by the actress herself] The sudden moments where people burst into song are a little jarring initially, yet I got used to them – probably, again, a point of comparison to Mulan. The production is quite large in scale: there’s an opening ball sequence that’s impressive, and the battle scenes aren’t bad, albeit not quite War and Peace [though some of the costumes from it were recycled here!]

There is the obvious, and given the era probably entirely expected, patriotic theme, with discussions about defending the motherland. The film’s premiere took place on the 150th anniversary, to the day, of the previously-mentioned Battle of Borodino, a famous and bloody encounter between Russia and Napoleon’s forces – best known for inspiring the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. However, it’s rarely heavy-handed, and for all its fluffiness, lack of substance and shortcomings in the motivation department, you do find yourself rooting for Shura. To be honest, perhaps to a greater degree than Dmitry, who comes off as a bit of an arrogant dick. Likely more genuinely progressive than anything coming out of Hollywood around the same time. 

Dir: Eldar Ryazanov
Star: Larisa Golubkina, Yuriy Yakovlev, Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolay Kryuchkov

Fool Me Once

  By

★★★½
“An elegant exercise in plate-spinning.”

Maya Stern (Keegan) is having a rough patch. A former helicopter pilot in the military, she was sent home and discharged under murky circumstances. While she was away, her sister was killed in what looks like a botched burglary, and not long after her return, husband Joe is also shot and killed in front of Maya, when they are walking in the park. But is everything what it seems? Because when checking the nanny-cam monitoring her young daughter, Maya sees a shocking site: her supposedly dead husband visiting the house. This kicks Maya into an unrelenting search for the truth, which will send her down a rabbit-hole and uncover a lot of sordid secrets, dating back decades.

I have to admire the script here, which takes an entire loom-ful of plot threads, and manages adeptly to keep them functioning, instead of collapsing into a Gordian knot. As well as all of Maya’s difficulties, there’s [deep breath]: the ongoing health issues of investigating officer, DC Marty McGreggor (Fetscher), who might or might not be corrupt; her nephew and niece discovering they have a half-brother; the supposed suicide of Joe’s brother decades previously; mysterious phone-calls from a video arcade; a dead body in a freezer; and the business shenanigans of Joe’s family, who run a pharmaceutical company under the watchful gaze of matriarch Judith Burkett (Lumley). I was genuinely impressed it all tied together by the end of the eighth episode.

Admittedly, the twists might prove to be excessive for some tastes, and I did spot the big one at the end before it arrived (it’s something I’ve seen in various forms a number of times elsewhere). But I enjoy the almost melodramatic approach, even if the relocation of the story from the United States to Britain required some twistiness around the topic of firearms. Keegan delivers a committed performance as Maya, who is far from perfect, yet relentless in pursuit of “justice” – and quotes used very advisedly there. I also loved seeing Lumley, who was my first celeb crush – longer ago than I like to think, back in her New Avengers days. Now 77 and still awesome, someone needs to make her a Dame, alongside Judi and Helen.

I was uncertain about whether or not this qualified here, but I think the final episode delivered the necessary amount of bad-assery from Maya. It does suffer from an unnecessary coda, set eighteen years (!) after the plot basically finished, and therefore presumably at some point in the future. Still no flying cars, unfortunately. I’ve not read the book on which this is based, but this is certainly much more engaging than the turgid Hulu mystery, Murder at the End of the World. I’d definitely not be averse to watching other adaptations of Harlan Coben work. Turns out this is the eighth made by Netflix, though the others are presumably Maya free, because… well, let’s just say “reasons”, and leave it at that!

Creator: Danny Brocklehurst
Star:  Michelle Keegan, Dino Fetscher, Joanna Lumley. Dänya Griver

Allies and Enemies: Fallen by Amy J. Murphy

  By

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

It’s a little hard to explain the universe in which this takes place. Humanity existed. However, their encounter with other races proved problematic for a variety of reasons, and led to them being exterminated, a genocide that was partly collateral damage in a war between the human-adjacent Eugenes and the definitely not Sceeloids. The former have a severely class-based society, where the lower-tiers are bred specifically to be soldiers, for example. One such “breeder” is Sela “Ty” Tyron, though she differs from the rest of her platoon in a couple of important ways. Firstly, her son is part of her group – though he doesn’t know it, having been removed from her care on his birth. His death (at the very beginning of the book, so not much of a spoiler) causes Ty to question everything she has believed about society, and her place in it.

Then there’s her commanding officer, Captain Jonvenlish Veradin. While her absolute loyalty to him is one thing, Ty’s feelings go past that, even if she won’t allow herself to admit it. Veradin is suddenly accused of treason; while he refuses to do anything except trust in the process, she spirits him away from execution, to life as a fugitive on the run. The cause of the accusation turns out to be related to his sister, Erelah. She’s a scientist who has just made a discovery which will revolutionize faster-than-light travel. She and Jonvenlish share a secret, which brought them to the attention of Ravstar, the regime’s infamous black operations group, and its even more notorious commander, Defensor Tristic. She’s half-Sceeloid (which raises questions in itself) and has plans to use Erelah as a vessel,  whether or not the target consents. But doing so awakens some long-dormant talents in Erelah. Between those and Ty’s rogue military abilities, Tristic won’t find things going all her own way. On the other hand, Erelah and Ty have their own issues to work through, not least their conflicting ideas of what’s best for Captain Veradin.

This is… okay. The split focus is a bit rough, in that the switch from focusing on Ty to Erelah, is sudden and perhaps too long to work. The two stories don’t come together at all in the first third, and the unclear previous history turns out to be quite significant, to the point I wished it had been better explained. If the plotting is generally too murky for its own good, the characterization is well enough handled to balance things, or thereabouts. Ty, in particular, is a genuine bad-ass, whose loyalty is exemplary. If the action is limited in quantity, it’s partly because she’s so competent, the fights in which she’s involved tend not to last long. While it is enough to salvage this as a read, it’s not sufficient to get me more than slightly interested in reading further entries.

Author: Amy J. Murphy
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, as an e-book only (unless you fancy paying $59.99 for the paperback!).
Book 1 of 5 in the Allies and Enemies series.

Air Force One Down

  By

★★★
“Presidential immunity.”

As we head towards the 2024 election, I’m forced to conclude that the most implausible element here is not terrorists hijacking Air Force One, or a lone Secret Service agent taking out scores of bad guys. No, it’s having a President under fifty: someone who can string coherent sentences together, parachute out of a plane without breaking his hips, and personally gun down an enemy or two as well. Yeah, that’s not happening anytime soon. Otherwise, this teeters on the edge of being as generic as its title. But it passes muster due to decent performances, especially from McNamara as agent Allison Miles, and well-managed action from Bamford, who has 30+ years experience in stunt work.

The plot unfolds after Miles is assigned to the plane on which President Edwards (Bohen) is flying to Astovia to sign an oil treaty. There are people, both here and in Astovia, who are very much opposed to the deal. In particular, General Rodinov (Serbedzija, whom I recognized as Boris the Blade from Snatch) has a plan to hijack Air Force One, and make the President change his mind. He reckons without Miles, and after a spell of “Die Hard on a plane”, she and Edwards parachute out. That isn’t the end of it, Rodinov capturing them, with the intention of using her as leverage against the President. Once again: he reckons without Miles. You would think the General would have learned by now.

Indeed, the whole “leverage” thing is dubious; if I was an evil overlord, I’d put a bullet in Allison’s head the moment I captured her. Maybe that’s just me. The plot hits all the obvious notes e.g. the scene where the President and his agent bond, with a little light sexual tension [an apparently unmarried President?] But Bohen and McNamara make their characters entertaining to be around. I’d vote for him, put it that way, while she has a laudably no-nonsense approach to her work, and life in general. She may have picked it up from her uncle (Hall), also a Secret Service agent, and a long way from The Breakfast Club.

The action certainly elevates things above the humdrum. Sometimes the camerawork is a little frenetic, yet the shots are surprisingly long, and tend to make it clear McNamara is doing much of her own work. The highlight is an extended “one take” (it’s not, but done well enough to pass muster) in which she breaks out of captivity, and makes her way through the complex, eliminating enemies in a variety of interesting ways. It will stick in your mind considerably longer than most of the plot-based shenanigans, albeit slightly diminished by Miles then having to be saved by the President. I’d love to have seen more of that style, because it’s genuinely innovative stuff. If nothing else reaches this level, the movie remains a decent piece of entertainment overall, where the positive elements counterbalance an uninspired storyline. 

Dir: James Bamford
Star: Katherine McNamara, Ian Bohen, Rade Serbedzija, Anthony Michael Hall
The film is released in cinemas today, and on digital from February 13.

Nowhere Girl

  By

★★½
“Slow, slow, slow-slow, quick…”

For the first hour, you may be forgiven for wondering if there has been some kind of mistake, because the poster bears almost no resemblance to what happens in the film. Oh, it’s the same actress, to be sure, and she is a schoolgirl. But it appears, rather than the war story promised, you have strayed into a teenage drama. In it, Ai (Seino) is a talented but troubled student, who seems to be suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. The special treatment she receives at school brings her enmity as a result, both from her class-mates and the er homeroom teacher (Kaneko). Though she finds solace in art, including a mysterious major project on which she is working, housed in the school auditorium.

It’s all very subdued. There’s a lot of scenes of people standing around talking. Or, for variety, sitting around talking. The camera is considerably more mobile than the characters, engaging in stately pans and tracking shots around the dialogue, accompanied by classical music that’s positively soporific. Yet, it’s clear there’s something “off” about the whole situation. The school is frequently shaken by earthquakes, and it’s apparent that Ai has a tendency to outbursts of violence, which is bubbling just below the surface. The staff and other students don’t pay attention to the warning signs, and continue to push Ai’s buttons. You’ll understand where I thought this was potentially going to end up, delivering on the image with her going postal on the school.

Not quite.

Trust Oshii to make something which confounds expectations, while still somehow managing to disappoint. See  Avalon or Assault Girls, both films with massive potential, that fall short of realizing it. Here, you have a film which would potentially be a classic, if it started at the hour mark, then built on what follows, for another hour after the credits actually roll. Because what kicks off – at the 67-minute mark if you’re interested in fast-forwarding to that point – is beautifully staged. There’s a spectacular sequence of kung- and gun-fu, whose highlight for me was Ai taking the term “human shield” to a whole new level. Then a revelation to set up a whole new scenario, one that looks very interesting, and… The End.

I do have to mark this down for the film trying to pull off the most clichéd of clichéd twists which, to a significant degree, renders everything previous to that point a waste of everybody’s time. You need to be a supremely confident film-maker to pull it off; while it’s clear Oshii doesn’t lack in confidence, pulling the carpet out from under the viewer really needs to have happened 10-15 minutes in. The longer the conceit is sustained, the more likely the audience’s reaction will be “You’ve got to be kidding me” – and there might well be an epithet dropped in before “kidding”, too. Some day Oshii will deliver on his undeniable talent and imagination. Just not today.

Dir: Mamoru Oshii
Star: Nana Seino, Nobuaki Kaneko, Lily, Hirotaro Honda

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

Mercy

  By

★★
“Die Hard in a hospital.”

I’m almost tempted to leave it at that, because there are points where it feels like writer Alex Wright left it at that as well. Heroine Michele (Gibson) gets down to her vest? Check. Takes a walkie-talkie off a bad guy? Check. At one point, she even lost a shoe. If she’d gone crawling through an air-duct, I’d have flipped a table. Anyway, Michele is a former military doctor, now working in a civilian hospital. Rushing in one day is an FBI agent with Ryan Quinn, son of an Irish crime family, who was shot in an ambush after agreeing to flip on his relatives. Not far behind is family boss Patrick (Voight) and Ryan’s brother, Sean (Meyers), the latter intent on finishing the job.

The resulting hostage situation unfolds more or less as you’d expect, especially after you’re introduced to Michele’s son, Bobby (Bolognese) – and wouldn’t you know it, today is his birthday! That’s one of a few moments where your eyes will be forgiven for rolling enthusiastically. I think we reached peak ocular orbital velocity when Michele heads across the hospital roof, and the cops below pause to salute her. No, really. Quite why she’s on the roof at all, escapes me, and it’s very much a case that for every step the script takes forward, it tends to take two back. The film is a bit better when simply engaging in crunchy violence, and reaches adequate levels in this department now and again.

What probably stops things from collapsing are a decent cast, who are mostly much better than the script deserves. Voight and Meyers in particular, have a very good dynamic, their relationship gradually becoming more fractured, especially after Patrick realizes it was Sean who shot Ryan. The pair are fun to watch, and in Sean we have a particularly nasty villain, with absolutely no qualms about cold-blooded murder. Even here though, the story manages to screw things up, with a ludicrous brawl between father and son. Jon Voight is eighty-four years old, people. When I reach that age, I’ll be satisfied simply to be walking without assistance, and will not be fighting anyone. Trust me.

There might be a bit less of Gibson in this than I expected, with the movie occasionally appearing to forget about her. The army background does give a solid base to explain her hand-to-hand skills: she wasn’t “just” a medic, shall we say. There’s a largely unnecessary prelude which throws in a dead husband and apparently gives Michele bomb-disposal skills, courtesy of the ghost of her husband. Ok, while I made the last bit up, it probably makes as much sense as what the finale provides. It’s the kind of film where I feel a bit sorry for the leads; I can’t help feeling they deserve better material.

Dir: Tony Dean Smith
Star: Leah Gibson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jon Voight, Anthony Bolognese
The film is released in select theatres on May 12, on digital May 19, and is available On Demand from June 2.

No Honor in Death, by Eric Thomson

  By

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

This SF novel takes place in the future where the human Commonwealth is engaged in a brutal space war against the militaristic Shrehari Empire – imagine Klingons on krack, perhaps. They have superior technology, but humanity’s ability to think outside the box and improvise has helped level the playing field. Siobhan Dunmoore has just survived  – emphasis on “just” – a battle against the Imperial cruiser Tol Vakash of Captain Brakal, forcing him to retreat by attempting a kamikaze crash of her badly-damaged craft into his. As a “reward”, she is assigned command of the Stingray, a craft with a bad reputation. Its previous captain is now facing a Disciplinary Board, and the crew are barely even trying. It seems Dunmoore has been set up to fail, and she’ll need to overcome resistance from enemies both domestic and alien, as well as overt and covert, before she can even think about going another round with Captain Brakal.

I felt the most interesting section of this was following Dunmoore as she attempted to lick her crew and the Stingray back into a shape, where they could survive an encounter with the Shrehari. Both of them are in need of a lot of work. The former are utterly demoralized after events under the previous captain (including a number of suspicious deaths), and the latter has been short-changed on supplies and resources, to the point it’s largely held together with sticks and wire. Fixing them require their new captain to use a lot of psychology, both in order to get the crew to trust her, and extract the necessary materials from the Commonwealth and its bureaucracy. It works almost as a “how-to” manual for aspiring leaders, and even if that’s not exactly me, still makes for an engaging read. I also liked the very final face-off between Dunmoore and Brakal, their two ships edging round the perilous environment of an asteroid field, where Stingray‘s manoeuvrability gives it an edge. 

However, in between the Stingray taking off and the last battle, the book struggles with its descriptive passages. There is a large chunk taking place in hyperspace, and Thomson never manages to make clear the rules which apply here, resulting in the discussion of “jumps” and “bubbles” failing to make sense. Worse, this brings the pace of the book to a halt, with entire pages you find yourself barely skim-reading. There’s also rather too extended of a coda after the battle, as the book tries to tie up a lot of loose ends – mostly ones we never particularly cared about to begin with. On the other hand, I did appreciate the effort put into making Brakal an interesting adversary, with his own set of motivations. He and Dunmoore represent the book’s greatest strengths, and it’s at its best when concentrating on them. If subsequent volumes do that, I’d be tempted to try them.

Author: Eric Thomson
Publisher: Sanddiver Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 7 in the Siobhan Dunmoore series.