Tag: UK

Killing Eve: Season Two

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★★★
“Sophomore slump.”

[Warning: this piece will contain significant spoilers for the show. READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK!] It was always going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the second series of Killing Eve to match the brilliance of the first. That had ended with mousy MI-5 desk jockey Eve (Oh) stabbing ruthless assassin Villanelle (Connor), as they lay on a bed – platonically, but you could cut the sexual tension with a knife. Where would things go from there? The answer, unfortunately, is nowhere particularly much, except for some thoroughly unconvincing plot twists, such as Villanelle going to work for MI-5. Hello? Did everyone forget her cold-blooded murders of agents Bill Pargrave and Frank Haleton in season one? Let’s just pretend she’s one of us, and send her off on a mission without so much as a background check, m’kay?

This is, of course, an attempt to keep the relationship Eve and Villanelle going, bringing them into a close proximity to each other, where that sexual tension can continue to boil, albeit at the cost of plausibility, Not that it was ever the show’s strong suit to begin with. This is significantly less interesting than the cat-and-mouse game between the two of the first series, and frankly, too often borders on poorly-written fan fiction. A main thread seems to be how Eve is slowly becoming more like Villanelle, drifting from thoughts of murder into an actual killing – “With an axe!”, the hitwoman gleefully recounts. [Adding a second meaning to the show’s title, moving her from object to subject. Or is it the other way round? Whatever…] But we also seem to see Villanelle becoming more human. For someone who isn’t supposed to be able to experience human feelings, she certainly appears a pretty damn emotional psychopath.

You can all but ignore the silly plots, such as a convoluted effort to bring down a high-tech entrepreneur selling an uber-Google to the highest bidder, who – wouldn’t you know it? – turns out to be a serial killer himself. Or the marital relationship of Eve and husband Niko: now that both sides have been unfaithful, it should have been buried. Or the brief introduction of another, equally talented female assassin, which is disposed of so quickly, it’s possible I may have made up the entire thing. What keeps the show going, and allows this to remain surprisingly watchable given the weak writing, are the extraordinary performances of the two leads. A contrast in acting styles, between Comer’s flamboyance and Oh’s internal anguish, it proves that both can be equally effective. And there are sequences which still work brilliantly, such as Villanelle’s dalliance with private wet work, stringing up and butchering an unfaithful husband in a window in Amsterdam’s red-light district, like some kind of twisted performance art.

After becoming an under-the-radar hit the first time, the second set of episodes seems to have left a lot of people unsatisfied, for a variety of reason. And the ratings reflect this. Having managed the almost unprecedented feat of increasing almost every week the first time round, this season saw fewer viewers for every part after the debut, than the equivalent in series one. Maybe renewing it the day after that opening episode was a mistake? The final scene of this series ends in a mirror image of its predecessor, Villanelle shooting Eve in a fit of pique after she responds to Villanelle’s declaration of love with “You don’t know what that is,” and walks away. Of course, the renewal and critical acclaim basically make it certain Eve isn’t dead. So it’s less a case of “What will happen?”, than “What cheat will the writers use to get out of the corner into which they’ve painted themselves?” I’m going with a bullet-proof vest.

It’s a shame, since the second volume in the novels went in a very different direction, put the pieces together in far superior fashion and reached the end with a genuine cliff-hanger. Hopefully the third season separates its two leads and gets back to what the show did well, letting each performance shine on its own terms, rather than trying to force oil and water together, to the benefit only of fan ‘shippers. In the penultimate scene of the last episode, Eve  and Villanelle are stumbling through a maze of underground passages below Rome, trying to find their way out of the darkness. Unfortunately, that turned out to an entirely appropriate metaphor for the problems of the second season as a whole.

Showrunner: Emerald Fennell
Star: Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Fiona Shaw, Henry Lloyd-Hughes

Fighting With My Family

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★★★½
“The fall gal.”

This biopic of WWE Women’s Champion Paige, a.k.a. Saraya Knight from the English seaside town of Norwich, gets a lot of things right about professional wrestling. In particular, it strikes a good balance between the various aspects – positive and negative – of the sports entertainment business. Over the past twenty years, Chris and I have been intermittently involved with the independent end of the wrestling scene, like Knight and her family, and this captures the low-rent showbiz aspects beautifully. Yet it doesn’t shortchange the seductive – almost addictive – appeal of performance for a responsive crowd, or the potential escape from a drab life it offers someone like Saraya/Paige.

This was inspired by a documentary of the same name, which covered everything up to her successful tryout with WWE, but not much thereafter. To be honest, that’s probably the most entertaining section, being a thoroughly amusing series of escapades, populated by quirky and amusing characters, inhabiting the low-rent world at the bottom of the wrestling pyramid. Not the least of these are her parents, plaved by Frost and, surprisingly, Lena Headey. It’s… strange seeing Cersei Lannister putting people into a headlock. [Fun fact: I saw Saraya’s Mum wrestle at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, back in the late nineties – even if they mis-spelled her name on the flyer!]

Once she goes over to the United States, it becomes a rather more predictable “fish out of water” story, with the dark, somewhat sullen Paige a radical departure from the other wannabe Divas, who all align more with the three T’s required by WWE at the time: teeth, tan and tits. The highlight in this phase is Vaughn’s performance as acerbic (and fictional) coach Hutch Morgan, who pulls no punches in his quest to winnow out the chaff for the benefit of his employer. For Paige, that transition is about becoming comfortable in her own skin, and repairing the relationship with her brother (Lowden), who also wanted – arguably, even more than Saraya – to reach the WWE, but was not offered a spot. To no-one’s surprise (even if you don’t know the story, this sticks to the well-worn path of the underdog sports film), she does so, and the film ends as she makes her debut, the night after Wrestlemania in New Orleans.

In terms of happy endings, that’s probably for the best. For injury forced Paige’s eventual retirement in April 2018, at the age of just 25, after barely two years of active competition and four in total. Not mentioned by the film, it’s a salutary reminder: a pro wrestler’s career is hard, and can be short. This is certainly a story which has been dramatized for cinematic purposes, probably inevitably. Yet the basic thread is intact – and, more importantly, the spirit of the people who inspired it is honoured. Having it directed by Merchant, previously best known as Ricky Gervais’s sidekick, proves a masterstroke. In his able hands, and helped by a winning performance from Pugh, the hackneyed material proves more than tolerable.

Dir: Stephen Merchant
Star: Florence Pugh, Jack Lowden, Vince Vaughn, Nick Frost

Viking Siege

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★★★
“Tree’s company…”

This has the potential to be truly bad, and you need to be willing to look past ropey production values, a possibly deliberately shaky grasp of period (unless “Daisy” really was a popular girls’ name in early medieval times…) and uncertainty as to whether or not this is intended to be a comedy. Yet, I have to admire its “everything including the kitchen sink” approach: throwing together elements from genres as disparate as Vikings, zombies, aliens, sword ‘n’ sorcery and female vengeance shows… well, ambition, at the very least.

The story starts with a group of women, led by Atheled (McTernan), infiltrating a priory. They seek revenge on the monks, because of a sideline in human trafficking which has cost the women dearly. Their plan for vengeance is somewhat derailed by a local lord turning up, and entirely derailed by the arrival of a horde of Vikings, in turn hotly pursued by what can only be described as demonic shrubbery – not for nothing are they referred to and credited as “tree bastards.” To survive through the night is going to take an unholy alliance between the various parties, as well as some captives in the basement – fortunately, those include someone who can speak Viking (McNab). Given their radically different goals, this will present problems of its own.

Wisely, for budgetary reasons, action is largely constrained to the main hall of the priory, with occasional forays outside. This set-up is very Night of the Living Dead, and the tree bastards are also infectious, albeit not quite in the traditional zombie sense. However, it’s in the creatures that the film’s limited resources are most painfully obvious, with them being little more than obviously blokes in masks. Although the boss shrub does occasionally look impressive, when shot from the right angle, it feels a bit much, and is a case where less might well have been more. Just make them nameless berserkers, you’d have much the same impact and save yourself a lot of time, money and effort.

The chief saving grace are the performances. McTernan has the inner steel to go with her crossbow bolts; her colleagues, Seren (Hoult) and Rosalind (Schnitzler) in particular, are very easy to root for; and the nameless translator has perhaps the most interesting character. It’s these that kept me watching, such as in the atmospheric scene when the backstory of the tree bastards is explained. Though told rather than shown, it’s delivered with enough energy to prove more effective than some other elements (martial arts? gunpowder?), which had me sighing in irritation.

To be perfectly clear, it’s a case where you need to go in with your expectations suitably managed, i.e. keep ’em on the low-down. Based on the blandly generic DVD sleeve and title, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered, and certainly would not have expected any action heroines. As such, this was a pleasant surprise, and it kept me more entertained than I feared it might. My advice is, treat it as a loving tribute to a whole slew of B-movie genres, no more and no less.

Dir: Jack Burton
Star: Michelle McTernan, Rosanna Hoult, Samantha Schnitzler, Adam McNab

Zombies Have Fallen

  By

★★
“Cheap at half the price.”

It’s not often that a film cost less to make, than the television set on which I watched it. But it appears this was the case here, with the budget reportedly coming in at five hundred pounds. No, there’s not a “thousand” missing from that. £500. What you get is probably not too far from what you would expect for that – some of the aerial photography and locations do appear to represent good value for money. Budget isn’t the real issue here though. This British film’s main problem is the drastic shift in story for the final third, when it suddenly morphs, for no reason, from a SF/thriller, into a full-on zombie apocalypse which the makers have neither the budget nor the talent to depict.

The heroine is Kyra (Parkinson), who was captured while a toddler by Raven Health, who are intent on developing and exploiting her latent psychic abilities. Probably close to 20 years later, she is broken out of their facility with the help of an activist bounty-hunter, who sends her into the care of one of his proteges, John Northwood (Heath Hampson). But the company head, Raven (Richardson) won’t let his asset escape easily, and dispatches a hunter of his own, Max (Gardner), to bring Kyra back. After about an hour of the chase, Kyra shows up at a wedding just over the Scottish border in Gretna Green and turns the entire congregation into zombies with her talents. 

What? Yeah, it was as abrupt as that, and the remainder of the film is your typical zombie bashing action. I do have to award a bonus half-star for the semi-automatic bagpipes, which double as a flamethrower. Laughed like a drain at that, and it’s the kind of dumb invention at which low-budget films can excel [see the early works of Peter Jackson for good examples] Unfortunately, the zombie effects and actors are awful; while the depiction of Kyra’s telekinetic powers is not exactly top-shelf, it’s somewhat hidden by the editing. If the randomly selected locals, pretending to be undead (or bad mimes, it’s hard to tell), had been also better concealed – such as behind a mountain – we’d all have been better off.

I substantially preferred the earlier sections. Parkinson is not unsympathetic, as the heroine struggling to come to terms with her powers (though if she has been kept locked up all the time, how did she apparently learn how to drive?), and Hampson comes over like a low-rent version of Liam Neeson. If the film had kept down that route, it would likely still not have been “great”, by any reasonable standard, but could certainly have been adequate. Instead, we’ve got something which looks almost as if it was slapped together from two entirely different films. Any redeeming qualities are largely trapped behind a severely questionable title (really, if you’re going to ape another movie, you can pick a far better one than London Has Fallen) and even more dubious cover artwork.

Dir: Sam Hampson
Star: Tansy Parkinson, Heath Hampson, Tony Gardner, Ken Richardson

Terminal

  By

★★★½
“Style wars.”

Oozing with a unique visual style that’s like a brutalist cross between Blade Runner and Alice in Wonderland, this focuses on a battle for business between assassins. Annie (Robbie) – or, maybe, she’s called Bonnie – wants to take over the murderous commissions of the mysterious Mr. Franklin. He agrees, only if she takes out the current incumbents, Vince (Fletcher) and his apprentice, Alfred (Irons). Simultaneously, while working as a waitress in an all-night diner at a railway station, she meets Bill (Pegg), a terminally-ill English teacher, who enters her establishment while waiting for a train in front of which to throw himself.

This was ferociously slagged off by many critics, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone calling it, “one of the worst movies ever made.” [Mind you, as the man after whom eFilmCritic named their Quote Whore of the Year award, all his opinions should be taken accordingly…] It’s certainly not that bad, though having stumbled across it on Hulu, our investment in it was strictly limited to 96 minutes. I do admit, the two strands which run through much of the film, never truly mesh. Each works well enough individually – they are just so different in tone and content, you wonder if the script would have been better off sticking to one or the other, and figured out a way to avoid the rather large lump of expository backstory delivered at the end.

However, Annie/Bonnie acts as a binding element to the storylines, manipulating the other three participants with the practiced ease of the expert sociopath. Robbie, who was also a producer, is a hell of a lot of fun to watch, channeling the spirit of Billie Piper, all blonde hair and perkiness; Pegg is also good value, going significantly against his usual type. Fletcher, best known for his roles under director Guy Ritchie, still seems to think he’s in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, yet it’s not ineffective. The only performance with which I had a problem was the stunt casting of Mike Myers, in a fairly pivotal role as the station-master. I’ve never exactly been a fan of his approach to (over-)acting, and this film reminded me why.

When it comes to cinematic style, I’ve also been a believer in “go big or go home,” and you won’t be surprised for which direction Stein opts. As a result, this feels not dissimilar to Sucker Punch in its approach, both in terms of the hyper-stylized picture it paints, and also in treading the line between exploiting the male gaze and undermining it [there’s no doubt who the sharpest tool in the box is here, and it’s not even close]. I’d like to have seen the film go a bit more full-bore with the Wonderland theme; the potential there is ignored, and largely limited to a few quotes and nods. Still, we were certainly never bored, the visuals proving capable of tiding us over both the weaker moments in the script, and Mike Myers.

Dir: Vaughn Stein
Star: Margot Robbie, Dexter Fletcher, Simon Pegg, Max Irons

Black Site (2018)

  By

★★★
“Border control”

This Lovecraftian-inspired action/horror mix is full of good – or, at least, interesting – ideas. It plays almost like a Call of Cthulhu scenario, with the players having to defend the top-secret government facility of the title from a group of cultists who are attacking the base. They are aiming to liberate one of the Elder Gods, Erebus, who in the form of the human he has possessed (Johnson), is about to be deported back into the infinite darkness. This is the latest incident in an ongoing covert battle by humanity, which has been going on since the twenties, though with decreasing intensity. At least until now.

The central character is Ren Reid (Schnitzler), an operative of Artemis, the group running the site. She has dreams of becoming a field agent, but psychological instability – which just possibly, might be connected to Erebus and his role in the death of her parents – has always prevented her. She has to get the deportation specialist, Sam Levi (Buckingham) into the heart of the base, so he can sent Erebus on his way. However, the cultists, under their leader, Ker (Robinson-Galvin), are intent on stopping this from happening, by any means necessary. Meaning Ren, and to a (much!) lesser extent, Sam, have to fight every inch of the way.

There’s a lot of potential here, and when it’s realized, this is an enjoyable flick, spearheaded by Reid in a no-nonsense role. The fight choreography is well done, though almost inevitably, the facility appears largely lit by 40-watt bulbs – whether to “add atmosphere” or cover up the stunt doubling is probably a matter of opinion. The problems are more the bits between the fights, and in particular the lengthy sequences of Erebus sitting in the middle of his occult holding cell, jawing away to the two agents keeping an eye on him. Johnson simply doesn’t have one-tenth of the screen presence necessary to pull off portraying what is supposedly the fifth-oldest creature in the universe. He’s woefully unconvincing, unless you can see how said creature’s aeons of life experience would result in a somewhat douchey gym bro with bad hair.

Similarly, the flashback sequences involving Ren are both too frequent and not well enough carried out to add anything of value to the narrative, coming over as empty padding. While this is a universe I’d like to hear more about, if the film really wanted to be a Lovecraftian take on The Raid, as it seems, it should have stripped away all the back-story, since we’re given inadequate reason to care. Stick to the basics of Ren trying to get Sam to the spot where he can carry out extraordinary rendition on his target, and we’d be better off. Though I’m still trying to figure out the apparent political commentary built into the concept here. It seems to be suggesting, given a sufficient level of threat, it’s fine to abolish normal standards of justice, bypassing a trial and proceeding straight to the punishment. That’s an almost refreshingly anti-liberal point of view.

Dir: Tom Paton
Star: Samantha Schnitzler, Mike Buckingham, Kris Johnson, Jennifer Wilkinson
[This review originally appeared on Film Blitz, as part of a “31 Days of Horror” feature]

Battlespace

  By

★½
“In space, no-one can hear you snore…”

This dates back to 2006, and was somewhat groundbreaking at the time, due to the very high volume of digital effects and CGI background work – it came out was three years before Avatar, as a yardstick. The key word here, however, is “volume”. For the effects make up for in quantity what they largely lack in quality, although you have to be impressed at the sheer ambition on view, especially when you don’t have a fraction of the resources which were available to James Cameron. More problematically, also missing is the skill necessary to handle a narrative, where there is simultaneously too much and not enough going on. The former is apparent in entire universe building which has to be accomplished in hard to digest expository chunks, and the latter makes itself known, courtesy of long stretches which are as devoid of interesting features as the Arizona landscapes in which they were shot.

I could spend a thousand words or more laying out the background here. Except, why bother, because it’s virtually irrelevant to what follows: it says a lot when a film is apparently so bored by its own mythology, it all but abandons it. There are instead, two basic chunks, with the first told mostly in voice-over flashback, Iva T. Stryyke recounting an adventure experienced by her mother, Colonel Mara Shrykke (both generations played by Connelly), centuries before, when she was trying to stop a weapon of mass destruction being readied for use in an ongoing inter-stellar conflict. At least, I think that’s what was going on. My will to live had largely been sucked out, by the endless scenes of her roaming a desert, followed by an enemy agent. It appears those were shot here in Arizona: I never knew we were located in America’s most boring state.

This fondness for using a gravel pit as a stand-in for an alien landscape will be recognized by anyone familiar with Doctor Who, and the second part of the story feels like it might have fitted in there too. Eventually, the daughter is stuck on a spaceship at the end of the universe – as in, its actual heat death. She’s the only thing standing between it, and a new Big Bang, which will start the cycle over again. Only, she has qualms about going into the void. It’s a very Whovian concept, and the debt clearly owed to BBC science-fiction extends to the voice of her computer, played by Paul Darrow, who was one of the stars in the iconic series, Blake’s 7. This is… not so iconic, though in Connelly’s defense, she does a half-decent job of looking the part (or parts), and there’s only so much anyone can do with lines like, “Never mess with a thirty-third century girl.” As a technical exercise, this has its moments, considering the era from which it dates. In virtually every other way, however, it’s a poor substitute for even eighties television.

Dir: Neil Johnson
Star: Eve Connelly, Blake Edgerton, Paul Darrow, Iva Franks Singer

No Man Shall Protect Us

Video

  By ,

★★★½
“Well-manicured fists of fury.”

In the years leading up to the Great War, the suffragette movement in Great Britain was one of the great social causes. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) engaged in a campaign of protest and civil disobedience, intended to draw attention to their demand to give women the vote. Their actions were not without reaction by the authorities, however, with the activists frequently being harassed and arrested. To combat this, the WPSU established the “Bodyguard Society”, a group of women trained in self-defense, who could give as good as they got.

The preferred style was jiu-jitsu – or “Suffrajitsu” as it was nicknamed – which had arrived in Britain in the eighteen nineties, and the woman who taught it to the WPSU volunteers was Edith Garrud, who ran a school with her husband in London. Her role, and the talents of her pupils were clearly well-known by 1910, when the cartoon below appeared in satirical magazine Punch. As the struggle for votes increased in intensity over the coming year, the role of the Bodyguards in protecting the WPSU leaders increased. This reached a head in the infamous “Battle of Glasgow”, when a meeting in the Scottish city descended into violent disorder when local police tried to arrest Pankhurst.

This documentary tells the story of the Bodyguards, a facet of the movement somewhat overlooked in the historical record. It uses the standard documentary approach involving archival footage and a narrator (Bourne), but also contains re-enactments, both of interviews with actresses portraying Pankhurst (Miller), Garrud (Baker), etc. and some of the incidents described. The former generally prove rather more successful than the latter, because the film doesn’t have the budget to stage them credibly. For example, as depicted here, the Battle of Glasgow appears to have involved no more than half a dozen people, rather than 30 Bodyguards taking on 50 policemen (on a stage where the flower garlands were booby-trapped with barbed wire!).

On the other hand, the archival footage is fascinating and well-integrated, while the character interviews do a really good job of capturing the atmosphere of the time, and the passion of the suffragettes. [Though quite where the man playing the Glasgow Chief Constable gets his accent from, I’m less sure. It sounds like it was dredged from the bottom of the the Irish Sea, somewhere between Dublin and Scotland!] At 50 minutes, it’s a brisk watch, and I was left wanting to find out more about the topic, which is always a good indicator a documentary has done its job.

Credit goes to the makers for releasing the finished version online: you can check it out below. If you find your interest too has been piqued, Wolf has a website where you can satisfy that craving, including information on the graphic novel he authored, covering the same subject. While the suffragette movement largely took a back seat once the Great War started – proving women’s capabilities in ways protest marches could never hope to achieve – this shines an admirable light on an aspect which deserves to be better remembered.

Dir: Tony Wolf
Star: Debra Ann Miller, Lynne Baker, Lizzie Bourne, David Skvarla

Double Date

  By

★★★½
“They’re just girls, man. What’s there to be afraid of?”

Oh, be afraid… Be very afraid. For Lulu (Wenham) and Kitty (Groome) are not your average twenty-somethings. They are sisters, on a mission. A Satanic mission, to resurrect their dead father. All it needs is a series of human sacrifices, culminating in a ritual involving the death of a virgin. And wouldn’t you know it, they’ve found Jim (Morgan), who is about to turn 30 and has been looking for love in all the wrong places. That’s despite the best efforts of pal Alex (Socha) to help, until they encounter Lulu + Kitty, ladies who seem almost too good to be true. As should be clear, that’s exactly what they are. But a wrinkle occurs, when Kitty realizes Jim is a nice chap, and begins to have second thoughts.

If an unashamed B-movie, this has enough fun with the concepts to justify itself, not least gender-reversing the whole “sacrificial virgin” trope. That has been the territory of innocent damsels in distress for a century, so making it a gormless “bloke in distress” instead is a lovely idea. There’s a hint of Shaun of the Dead here as well, in that you have two friends who find themselves trapped in a lethal scenario, almost without noticing it. It helps that everyone here is likeable, in their own ways, not least in their loyalty to friends or relatives, and the women mirror the men, in there being a leader and a follower.

Even Lulu’s slaughter is born out of a familial bond, and the lengths to which she will go are almost touching. Kitty, meanwhile, gets the biggest arc; it’s during an unexpected birthday party at Jim’s house (where he’s off his face on pharmaceuticals!) where you can see a change come over her character. Credit the script, written by Morgan as well, since it hits most of its targets, though the aforementioned drugging feels a bit of a rapey misstep, to be honest. Otherwise, it’s a good balance of the emotional and the comic. In the latter department, I particularly loved the scene where an incredibly nervous Jim is trying to chat up the two not-so-ugly sisters, from a script sent through text message by Alex, only to be betrayed by the vagaries of auto-correct.

Save for that humour, it reminds me somewhat of 1974’s Vampyres, which also had a pair of women abduct people and take them back to their country manor house. Except here, in Wenham, we may potentially have a new British action star, too: if they’re looking to reboot the Underworld franchise and replace Kate Beckinsale, she would seem a viable candidate. Her early “kills” are brutal to the max, but things reach their peak near the end. She has an amazing brawl against Alex, which is one of the best inter-gender battles I’ve seen of late. His raw strength is balanced by her technique, and the results are both impressive and highly destructive of property in the area. Like the film in general, it was a pleasant and unexpected surprise.

Dir: Benjamin Barfoot
Star: ‎Kelly Wenham, Danny Morgan, ‎Michael Socha, Georgia Groome

The Last Dragonslayer

  By

★★★½
“Here be dragons. Well, a dragon, anyway…”

This slice of British televisual fantasy was offered up on Christmas Day, and provides a pleasant, warm and unchallenging slice of family fare. It takes place in a world where magic has ruled, but is gradually fading from consciousness and being replaced by technology. The magic appears connected to the dragons with which humanity shared the planet, uneasily. After previous battles, a kind of apartheid was set up, with the world divided into dragon and human areas. Overseeing the peace is the Dragonslayer, who is charged with killing any dragons who violate the treaty and attack humans or their territory. But some members of mankind are casting envious eyes on the unspoiled territory of the dragons, and would love an excuse to take it over.

Into this comes Jennifer Strange (Chappell), an orphan who was adopted as an apprentice by the magician Zambini (Buchan). A decade or so later, he vanishes suddenly, and while Jennifer is still coming to terms with that, a bigger shock occurs. Fate has decreed she is to become the Dragonslayer, the one prophesied to kill the final dragon. Having grown to love magic in all its forms, she’s extremely reluctant to do so. But how is a teenage girl supposed to escape what the apparently immutable finger of fate has written? And never mind, having to cope with all the other unwanted attention, from interview requests to merchandising deals, that comes to Jennifer along with the unexpected position.

It’s a nicely constructed alternate world, part steampunk, part modern and a declining part magical – wizards, for example, are now reduced to doing rewiring work for employment, such is the low demand for their skills. This offers scope for satirical elements, such as the Dragonslayer having to do adverts for a soft drink to pay off an unexpected tax debt. There are also any number of faces you’ll recognize if you watch much British TV: Buchan is familiar from Broadchurch; Bradley, who plays Jennifer’s sidekick Gordon, is best-known as Jon Snow’s wingman Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones; and King Snodd is Matt Berry, who played a similarly mad boss in The I.T. Crowd. Richard E. Grant voices the final fire-breather, though is largely wasted in the role.

Chappell makes for a good, plucky heroine, even if her willingness to accept the hand dealt to her is a little fatalistic. Why not just walk away? Can’t kill the last dragon if you don’t pick up the sword – even if it does have your name engraved on it. While light in tone, this does have its action beats, not least when Jennifer has to fend off an assassination attempt, and an occasional moment of surprising poignancy. The finale perhaps asks more questions than it answers, and it’s clear the aim is an ongoing saga of films to follow the books (there are three volumes in the series by Jasper Fforde with a fourth in preparation). Yet if this does become a Christmas Day media tradition in Britain, it’s one to which I’d not object at all,

Dir: Jamie Magnus Stone
Star: Ellise Chappell, Anna Chancellor, Andrew Buchan, John Bradley