Tag: teenage

After the Pandemic

  By

★★½
“As generic as its title.”

A disease sweeps the planet, killing billions. The only ones with any hope of surviving in the outside world are the young, a small number of whom appear to have a natural immunity. Five years on, and Ellie is one of the few to have endured, scraping for a life among the leftovers of civilization. But she and the other survivors are the targets for the Stalkers: roaming groups of biohazard-suit clad hunters in white vans. They seek to capture the immune, for use in a project to develop a vaccine that can allow the elite to come out of their safe havens. While trying to avoid them, she encounters Quinn (Smith), another survivor with a wealth of knowledge, and a hard-edged approach to life. Initially, Quinn wants nothing to do with Ellie, though eventually realizes two heads can sometimes be better than one, in the never ending struggle to stay alive and free.

After the opening narrative, there’s a spell of over 20 minutes which are entirely dialogue free. It’s a brave choice, yet doesn’t hurt the movie, instead reinforcing the loneliness of the situation in which Ellie finds herself. I do have questions about so much time supposedly having passed. There are some suspiciously well-preserved corpses, and the world itself seems barely different from now, save for the shortage of people, without signs of decay. I was expecting more to be made of the youth element too, perhaps along the lines of Roger Corman’s cult flick, Gas-s-s-s, with a replacement culture having arisen to replace the geriatric one. Never happens: save for the age of the main characters, it’s irrelevant. 

The biggest issue, I felt, was there just was not enough going on here to justify the movie’s existence. After Ellie meets Quinn, the next hour largely appears to consist of them avoiding or running from the Stalkers. The pair of heroines are in severe need of some kind of goal, an end-game to which they are working, rather than, as it appears, merely basic survival on a day-to-day basis. The script seems to concentrate on the relationship between them, yet never puts in the necessary work beyond the superficial level. Why are the girls so different, given their similar experiences? 

While the performances are decent enough, the same goes for them: they get the job done, and no more. The occasional brief flashback proves almost aggravating rather than enlightening in this regard. Things do escalate down the stretch, with matters between Ellie, Quinn and the Stalkers coming to a head. Though if I was in charge of the last-named, I would have a quiet word about their collection protocols. Sloppy, and they pay the price. It is not quite enough to save the scenario. While you can’t point at much here that writer-director Lowry specifically does wrong, nor does he bring anything novel to the post-apocalyptic party, and neither is this done well enough to stand out from the crowd. Forgettably competent. 

Dir: Richard Lowry
Star: Eve James, Kannon Smith

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

Go For Broke

  By

★★½
“The Seven Schoolgirl Samurai”

I have so many questions about the Japanese education system after watching this. It takes place in a high school whose student council is repeatedly being squeezed for extortion money by the Yagyu, a local biker gang. They ride up to the place, beating up and terrorizing the students, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Where, exactly, is the principal when all this is going on? Teachers? Concerned parents? There is a throwaway line about how reporting things to the police would only make the gang attack harder. But you’d think some adult might notice and want to get involved? Mind you, outside of their chosen mode of transport, the gang themselves are largely indistinguishable from pupils, except for perhaps having slightly longer hair. Apparently in Japan, collar-length hair is like wearing a jacket with a Hell’s Angels patch.

Fed up with all this, the council hire a yojimbo or bodyguard – explicitly referencing The Seven Samurai as they do so. To the council president’s surprise, this is Saeka Agawa (Usami), a bit of a delinquent herself. She recruits a number of her female friends, including a joshi pro wrestler and a stunt-woman. Under the guise of a “music club,” they train the pupils in the fine art of school self-defense, and successfully repel the Yagyu. However, the gang don’t take defeat easily, and this is where things get complicated, because it turns out that Saeka has previous history with Leopard (Ninagawa), the woman who runs them. They retaliate with a kidnapping, demanding both money and that Saeka stay out of their business, pushing the council’s resolve close to breaking point. However, Saeka insists they stay the course, setting the stage for a final battle, as both sides marshal all their resources into a winner-takes-all conflict. I should mention this includes the pupils driving around campus in a van converted to use both artillery and a flamethrower. Once again, where are the adults?

Sadly, it’s not nearly as much fun as the above scenario may sound. It’s the kind of thing which echoes the classic pinky violence scenarios. Yet despite what the poster may suggest, instead of being uncompromisingly for mature viewers, there’s hardly anything in here which would push it above a PG rating. That’s when you can see anything at all, with Nakamura being far too fond of backlighting and smoke for the film’s good, though he does manage a number of stylish shots. Also of note, both the dialogue and a canonically eighties pop song on the soundtrack echo the poster by saying “Go for break”, which annoyed me much more than it realistically should. At north of 105 minutes, it definitely drags at point, and few of the “samurai” beyond Saeka are given even the slightest bit of development. It’s the kind of film I’d love to see remade by someone like Takashi Miike or Sion Sono, who could bring out the undeniable potential, which this version mostly leaves on the table.

Dir: Genji Nakamura
Star: Yukari Usami, Kozue Saito, Yuki Ninagawa, Rikako Murakami
a.k.a. V Madonna: War

A Resistance

  By

★★★
“Not your usual women-in-prison film…”

This takes place in 1919-20, when Korea was under occupation by the Japanese [there seems to be quite a lot of this about; I’ve seen a bunch of Chinese movies set when that country was occupied by Japan as well]. Even demonstrating against the Japanese, or in favour of Korean independence, was sternly forbidden, with those taking part likely to be arrested and thrown in prison for months. If they were lucky, that is: an opening caption tells us 7,500 were killed in the protests or died in jail subsequently. Even for those merely arrested, this was not a “nice” prison, to put it mildly, with horrendously over-crowded conditions (24 to a cell!), freezing temperatures and meagre rations.

Once such prisoner was Yu Gwan Sun (Go), 16 years old at the time of her imprisonment: her sentence was three years, due to contempt of court being added on to the normal charge. However, she would not be cowed by the punishment, and refused to bow to the will of her captors – for example, refusing to speak to them in Japanese, even though she could. Such disrespect, and her “defiant face”, inevitably brought Yu into conflict with the authorities, including the warden, and Korean collaborator Jung Chun-young, who acts as a translator. They try to break her will, but her refusal to accept even her status as a prisoner, never mind their authority, remains defiant.

The historical Yu does seem to have been an unrepentant, patriotic bad-ass, sometimes referred to as Korea’s Joan of Arc, and with at least half a dozen films based on her life story. While in prison, she wrote: “Even if my fingernails are torn out, my nose and ears are ripped apart, and my legs and arms are crushed, this physical pain does not compare to the pain of losing my nation… My only remorse is not being able to do more than dedicating my life to my country.” Joe films almost the whole movie in stark black-and-white, save for occasional coloured flashbacks, and music is also used sparingly. This certainly gives a realism to proceedings, though I did feel the portrayal here was a bit too good to be true – putting the “Saint” in “Saint Joan”, if you wish.

It may also be a little restrained, with the tortures inflicted on her coming across as little more than an inconvenience. Perhaps the little things here are most effective, such as the prisoners sharing body warmth, to try and protect a new-born baby. It builds to Yu’s carefully crafted act of defiance, leading a cheer for Korean independence which flows through the prison and to the outside world, triggering further anti-Japanese protests. Even after her fellow inmates are released, she is kept in jail: the final lines of dialogue are an exchange that sums up her obstinate refusal to give up. Asked “Why must you do this?,” Yu almost shrugs: “Then who will?” [She died at age 17, still in jail, a few days before her scheduled release date.] This shines a light onto an area of history I knew nothing about, though I’m hard pushed to say it illuminated much more than the heroine.

Dir: Joe Min-ho
Star: Go Ah-sung, Ryu Kyung-soo, Kim Sae-byuk, Kim Ye-eun

Crimson, by Arthur Slade

  By

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

The world of Illium has enjoyed a millennium of peace under its powerful queen Servilia. Though “enjoyed” might be the wrong word, since it has come at the cost of freedom, and harsh justice. A victim of the latter is 15-year old Fen, who four years previously, had her hand lopped off for stealing a trinket from a merchant’s stall. Worse follows, as she wakes up to find her hair has turned red, the sign of a “wildmage” – someone who has magical powers, an ability Servilia seeks to extinguish before it can pose a threat to her rule.

Fen is forced to leave her family, and seek sanctuary in the forest of Helwood which provides the only area outside the queen’s control. She meets another wildmage, Ithak, with the talent of invisibility, who brings her to the legendary Mansren, who lives in the centre of Helwood. History had told her he was evil incarnate, overthrown by the queen after a violent war, a thousand years earlier. But how accurate is that version? For he offers to help Fen free her sister from Servilia’s dungeon, if she helps him become whole again. But is the reward worth the cost – both personally to Fen, and for Illium?

This is a well-written page-turner, which I found myself looking forward to reading each night. It poses some interesting more dilemmas, without ever getting bogged down in them, such as the limits of personal responsibility, the veracity of the past (as Ithak says, “Those who win wars write the histories”) and the balancing of evils against each other. Fen is initially prepared to do anything to rescue her sibling; however, she gradually realizes that by doing so, she may have unleashed a more destructive force on the entire world. For Mansren’s mind has been imprisoned by Servilia in the middle of a lava lake for centuries, which hasn’t exactly improved his state of sanity, charming and eloquent as he may be.

I will say that the means by which the dilemma is resolved is perhaps a little bit of a stretch. Perhaps a greater emphasis on the powers locked within Helwood, and how Fen taps into them, might have been better. The setting also appears to be Chinese, though I’m not sure why; I was quite surprised when this suddenly cropped up. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed this from the cover, and it’s little more than window-dressing. However, the story does a lot of things right, bringing us along with Fen on her heroic arc, as she grows into her powers and learns that everything she has been told may not necessarily be the truth. Though she’s “just” a teenager, there are few of the obvious trappings of YA fiction, and it’s the better for it.

It is a little restrained on the action front, with Fen largely refusing to use her abilities against others, and in the final act, being more an observer up until the very end. However, these moral restraints help her character from becoming over-powering, and on several occasions, there’s a genuine sense of threat. With this being a stand-alone book, it is entirely possible it could end in her being forced to make a heroic sacrifice, and Slade handles that aspect particularly well. I was actually quite sad there are no further volumes, but it’s also nice to have a story which is entirely wrapped up in a fully satisfactory way. I’ll have to make do with perhaps checking out some of Slade’s other works.

Author: Arthur Slade
Publisher: Dava Enterprises, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Justice High

  By

★★★
“Be cruel to your school.”

This is as much about the philosophical underpinnings of karate, and how it can be used for personal growth. The instigator in this case is Chae-yeong (Jung), a teenage girl who has just transferred to a new school after issues at her previous educational establishment. Her long-suffering father, a karate master has barely registered her there, when trouble finds Chae-yeong. She uses her skills to rescue a student, Jong-goo (Oh), who is refusing to help some bullies cheat in an upcoming exam. This turns out to get her an unwanted high profile, as the school is basically a gangsters’ paradise.

Protection rackets and other schemes are being run under the control of student president Jin-hyeok (Kim), who is eyeing a postgraduate career in the local mob, and needs to fund the necessary initiation fee. But his pal, Hae-seong (Son) has had enough of the bully lifestyle and is seeking a new direction for his life. He and Jong-goo convince Chae-yeong to let them sign on at her father’s dojo. There, they learn both the physical and mental skills that are part of karate, the latter embodied in pithy aphorisms such as “Justice without power is hollow. But power without justice is merely violence.” Hae-seong’s quest for independence, Jong-goo’s growing ability to fight back, and Chae-yeong’s refusal to bow down, put them all on an increasingly direct collision course with Jin-hyeok and his minions. 

If stretched a little beyond the material at 112 mins, I was generally kept occupied. There’s less action than I would have wanted, but what there is, isn’t bad. Chae-yeong has a particularly terse and efficient approach, which fits her character’s lone-wolf attitude. The narrative is largely driven by the friendship between the three young leads. There were points I felt things were about to topple over into a romantic love triangle; fortunately, it largely avoided this. Instead, about the peak level of emotion is reached in a rather touching scene where Hae-seong explains how he ended up as the second in command to a gangster schoolmate. That criminal angle is a bit startling. I’ve seen many films and shows set in Japanese schools where education appears… a lower priority, shall we say, e.g. Sukeban Deka. This is the first Korean entry with such rampant lawlessness in a contemporary setting, and where adult guardians are notable by their absence, save for Chae-yeong’s father. 

A tighter hand on the script would have been helpful, with a few threads that could have used more detail. There’s also an odd subplot where Chae-yeong’s Dad has stomach troubles. We never get any payoff for this, though I was kinda glad, dreading what the punchline could have ended up being. To be honest, I did have some difficulty telling certain male characters apart, largely due to them sporting Korean Haircut #3. However, the main story is an acceptably entertaining work, helped by decent performances from the trio of leads.

Dir: Johnny Chae
Star: Jung Da-Eun, Oh Seung-Hoon, Son Woo-Hyun, Kim Tae-yoon

Resilience and the Lost Gems

  By

★★
“Lost and found”

I certainly admire the aim here; there’s aren’t enough action-heroine films which are aimed at a family audience, especially with a young protagonist. We’ve had The Golden Compass, Enola Holmes and Abigail, but they are pretty rare. This is a considerably lower-budget entry than those, though make no mistake, it still certainly qualifies here. Its 11-year-old heroine, Resilience O’Neil (Finn) – known for obvious reasons as Rizzie – has no apparent fear, whizzing around the Utah desert on her mini-bike, until a flash flood separates her from her parents and younger brother. She then has to survive on her own, fending off wolves, haboobs and a pair of predatory creeps, while making her way back to civilization to get help for her family.

What’s weird is, the titular gems are all but irrelevant. In the opening twenty minutes, there’s a lot of talk about them, and their loss 150 or so years ago. But apres le deluge, they are almost entirely forgotten, and what we have instead is a straightforward wilderness survival story. To be honest, this is a considerable improvement over the thoroughly unconvincing historical re-enactments in the beginning, complete with sepia tinting and fake film scratches. The flood is staged surprisingly well, to the point I was convinced everyone concerned was sure to be dead. Finn seems to do a lot of her own stunts too, and not just on the bike. There’s a sequence of her clambering down a rockface which had me looking up the number for Child Protective Services. Decent dronework and the pleasant Utah scenery also stopped me from turning this off entirely.

For much, much worse are both the script and the performances. There’s hardly a line here which doesn’t seem forced and/or unnatural, and as noted above, the lost treasure thread is set up at painful length, before being abandoned for an hour. Then there’s the stuffed chicken carried around by one of the villains, who in addition are so incompetent as to pose no credible threat at all. I will give Kiara a pass; it’s her debut, and few actresses her age would be able adequately to put over the emotions necessary here, after the apparent loss of her family. [Natalie Portman in Leon remains the gold standard]

However, none of the adults are any better, either engaging in wild over-acting or resorting to a dull monotone when delivering their dialogue. It doesn’t help that there are issues with some of the audio, which varies wildly in quality, and is occasionally indecipherable. As a result, you’ll find yourself gritting your teeth just about every time anyone opens their mouth. This is probably the first time I’ve felt that a movie would have been better off, filmed as a throwback to the silent era – just pit Rizzie against the natural world, without chit-chat. I admit it would have been considerably more challenging as a project. Yet even if unsuccessful, I think I’d have preferred that approach.

Dir: Brian Finn
Star: Kiara Finn, Don Shanks, Adam Johnson, Gisi Hong
a.k.a. Resilience and the Last Spike

Shadow Corps, by Justin Sloan

  By

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

After a brisk start, this fades into mediocrity, half space opera (that would include the “space dragon”) and half LitRPG. The latter was particularly unexpected, and poorly integrated into the rest of the story. I mean, you’re supposed to be fighting with the fate of the galaxy at stake. Why do you need to level up in order to get abilities? It’s like recruiting the best fighters from across the universe, then sending them into battle unarmed, because they don’t have the necessary experience points yet. No. You should give them all the best tools, right from the get-go, simply because it will help them survive. It just doesn’t make sense.

Anyway, this begins in better shape, with an alien invasion of Earth already well under way, and it largely under the heel of The Syndicate. The LRR – Last Remaining Resistance – are trying to fight back, and among their members is Samantha, a sixteen-year-old girl who can barely remember a time when she wasn’t fighting from her life. However, she is snatched off Earth by Hadrian, to become part of an elite team, comprised of multiple different intergalactic races. For The Syndicate are basically small fry compared to the true Big Bad, who have already destroyed many worlds and races, including Hadrian’s. Earth is among the planets now coming up on their “to do” list.

It kinda reads like a more serious version of Guardians of the Galaxy, with Samantha in the Star-Lord role. She ends up becoming appointed leader of the group, despite her lack of age and experience, and has to meld the disparate personalities into a cohesive whole. Though, to be honest, she doesn’t really do much “leading.” and everyone more or less just does their thing. Indeed, I’d be hard pushed to point out much in the way of Samantha’s development as a character over the course of the book. Well, apart from the obvious levelling-up that occupies a chunk in the middle. If my teenage self had been vacuumed up off Earth and dropped in the middle of an interstellar conflict, I suspect it would likely have changed me, just a bit.

I can’t argue about the action here, and Sloan does have a better handle on this than the characters. Despite my slightly mocking tone above, the space dragon actually sounds pretty bad-ass, though you only get to read about it in full effect, at the end. It perhaps should have been more like the Death Star: destroy a planet or two, to establish its credentials. Despite the copious amount of firefights and hand-to-hand battles, I never felt particularly concerned about the safety of Samantha, or any of the team. Maybe one or two minor characters could have been killed off to give a sense of danger which seemed oddly lacking, given the copious amounts of collateral damage? But the lack of emotional investment would still likely have capped any connection.

Author: Justin Sloan
Publisher: Elder Tree Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 4 in the Shadow Corps series.

Wilderness Survival for Girls

  By

★★★
“Just because we’re girls, why do we have to be afraid all the time?”

Three teenage girls, Ruth (Brox), Deborah (Henning) and Kate (Humiston) head off to the remote mountain cabin owned by Kate’s parents for a weekend away. Initially, it’s an overdose of teenage drama bullshit in various flavours, as they drink, smoke weed, talk about sex and so on. But their soap-opera idyll is interrupted by the unexpected return of Ed (Morrison), who has been squatting in the cabin. The girls capture him, using the gun he left behind, with the intent of taking him down the mountain to the police the next day. But as the night goes on, the tensions between the three young women begin to fracture their friendship. There’s also the question of Ed: is he the innocent drifter he claims to be, or is there a connection to a long-buried trauma in Kate’s history?

If you’re hoping for definitive answers to at least some of the questions asked by the film, you’re going to come away disappointed. Ed is almost a MacGuffin in human form. He exists largely to propel the rest of the film forward, and act as a force which will cause the girls to reveal their true nature over the course of events. They are three very distinct personalities, to the point that I wondered if (and not for the first time) they were intended to represent the three aspects of the psyche: id, ego and super-ego. While my recent knowledge of teenage girls is strictly limited to parental experience – and thus not that recent – if there’s one thing I know, it’s that they tend to congregate with those like them. The disparate trio we get here wouldn’t last 10 minutes in high school before tearing themselves apart. Though I guess that is what happens for a good chunk of proceedings here.

You should probably be forgiven for having strong reactions to them: my instant dislike of Kate, turns out to be not unjustified, considering the ease with which she embraces her inner psychopath. Deborah, meanwhile, is a little too one-dimensional and obvious for my tastes, so it’s left to Ruth to do a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting. Brox does well enough in that task to keep the movie interesting; at least, once it gets past a rocky opening 20 minutes, and the thriller aspects come into play, more than the “teen angst” ones. I will confess to being somewhat disappointed by the ending, which seems contrived in such a way as to achieve closure, without any of the participants having to take personal responsibility for their actions. There are also any number of poor choices made by the trio, in order to reach that point. Though, against speaking from my parental experience, that’s probably about par for the teenage girl course. There was just about enough here to sustain its brisk 78 minute running-time, and going much longer would likely have been a mistake.

Dir: Eli B. Despres, Kim Roberts
Star: Jeanette Brox, Megan Henning, Ali Humiston, James Morrison

Abigail (2019)

  By

★★½
“In Soviet Russia, sorcerers stone you…”

There’s a battle in the middle of this, where the rebels and the authorities engage in a street-fight, and its absolutely beautiful to watch. Their weapons leave black smoke-trails criss-crossing, and the camera swoops and dives through the mayhem in truly lyrical fashion. Sadly, it’s over too soon, and when the characters open their mouths, it’s all ruined, thanks to clichéd lines like, “We can only win if we believe in what we’re fighting for.”

This Russian movie’s setting is dark steampunk, a walled city living in perpetual fear of an lethal, incurable disease. Inspectors monitor the population and at the first symptoms, the infected are spirited away and humanely euthanized. Ten years ago, the father of Abigail Foster (Dalakishvili) was one such victim. But she stumbles across evidence he may still be alive, which brings her into contact with the resistance and, eventually, the truth about the disease. She wants to find out what happened to her father. However, they, under leader and romantic interest Bale (Bochkov) are only interested in pushing forward with their previously scheduled rebellion.

The story is particularly poor, feeling like a hodgepodge of elements from a slew of YA fiction, most obviously Mortal Engines and Harry Potter. It feels very rushed, too, with Abigail going from outsider to at the core of the rebellion in about five minutes. I suspect a TV series might have been a better way to go, giving the ideas here – of which, admittedly, there are no shortage – room to breathe and be explored. Though, in general, the whole “chosen one” trope, in which the central character discovers their hidden gift, and it then blossoms to world-changing effect, is little more than a cinematic dead horse these days.

Not helping matters is the puzzling decision by the makers apparently to shoot in English, yet still post-sync most of the dialogue. This gives all the problems of a dubbed film, with no apparent benefit. It’s no surprise that the only non-synced actor, Eddie Marsan as Abigail’s father, easily comes off best among the performances. Yet even he pales beside the quite wonderful visuals, running from the first frame to the last. These are certainly comparable with the best Hollywood can produce, both in imagination and execution. Throw this on in the background when you’ve something else to do, and it’s near-perfect.

Dalakishvili is…okay as the heroine. She initially seems very resourceful and courageous, yet these traits seem to get submerged after she joins up with the resistance, with Bale doing more of the actual battling than I wanted to see. We do get resolution as to the question of her father, and I have to say, it was probably the film’s most effective moment emotionally, with some genuine poignancy. Coming as it does, with about five minutes left, it was the very definition of too little, too late, and this can only be filed in the box marked “Meaningless eye-candy.”

Dir: Aleksandr Boguslavsky
Star: Tinatin Dalakishvili, Gleb Bochkov, Rinal Mukhametov, Artyom Tkachenko,